By this the sweep 90387, the Imperial Execution has become less of an institution and more of a form of governance. Originally a government agency with explicit authorities and duties, in neglect of the Empress's direct oversight it has grown to become the sole apparatus of state. A troll is born at a spawnworld under the jurisdiction of an agency that itself is under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Execution, that individual is later employed at a planet or vessel under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Execution, they may serve in an armed conflict by the order of the Imperial Execution, and will then have their corpse carted off and cremated at a morguestation run by an agency under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Execution. There is no entity that isn't, in some regard, a part of the Imperial Execution; in other terms, it is for all intents and purposes the Empire.

The Imperial Execution is, on a formal level, still an agency, but one with an immeasurable number of sub-agencies. New agencies and offices within those are formed night in night out, and likewise are pre-existing agencies liquidated, forcibly or no. There is, no such thing as a monolithic agency within this system: there exists no centralized “armed forces” branch of government, rather agencies within this system may have their own military sub-agencies. Those agencies may themselves be sub-agencies of other higher-order agencies. It's as confusing as it is itself confused, and agencies often have difficulty negotiating between one another to commit to any cooperative efforts. Some agencies are more akin to provinces or even nations in their own right, particularly ones which are “landed”, having jurisdiction over defined sectors of the galaxy.

Disputes between agencies can and have happened over less than food regulation or work schedules; when language fails, trolldom speaks through blood. Laws vary greatly from one jurisdiction to the next, and it's never quite clear which ones apply to whom, where, and when, much less why. Despite the absurdity of a decentralized authoritarian bureaucracy, cooperation is essential since few agencies have all the resources they require. Manpower is at a particularly high premium, thus delegation and acquisition of labor is what most interagency communication deals with.

Every living troll is acutely aware of the current farcical arrangement the Empire finds itself in, yet is conditioned to accept life as is. Law and punishment is understood to be arbitrary, discriminatory, and commonplace, with little vision for an alternative. It is properly unclear how one could go about instituting reform beyond their local agency on account of sheer scale. To kill a monarch is a goal even a rock could comprehend, but how does one plot to remake an entire civilization?