Hypercorporations

Source: Swimming with Laser Sharks

Hypercorps are the super-predator grandchildren of the old lumbering megacorporations. They originally evolved to exploit cracks in their ecosystem or to fragment monopolies like laserguided missiles. Short-lived, overclocked, unregulated, all edge. They are the teeth of the new transhumanism — survival requires only that they adapt faster than their opponents. With the destruction of the legal and social protections of pre-Fall civilization, they have reproduced to fill every niche, establishing Capitalism 2.0, for as long as it doesn’t choke on its own effluence.

The Modern Hypercorp

Hypercorps are fundamentally different than the corporations of old. The multinational megacorps of Earth were sprawling bureaucracies, engaged in multiple industries, some with economies larger than small countries. Their goals was to control supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution channels in order to monopolize a market. By contrast, the ideal hypercorp is designed to be small, focused, virtual, and automated. The best are created for a particular purpose and then cease to exist upon completion. The classic example is the hypercorp that is little more than a smart-contract ALI, spun up to manage a specific opportunity, such as auctioning licenses for a new proprietary nanofab blueprint. Once it stores all of the transactions on distributed, tamper-proof, holochain crypto-ledgers, it dissolves.

The defining characteristic of hypercorps is their eagerness to adopt and exploit new technologies. Before the Fall, this was particularly effective in disrupting old business models and standards. Older corporations simply could not compete against the new dynamics. In the early days of XP, for example, StayK pioneered a streaming platform for viewers to subscribe to their favorite X-casters and ride along on vacations, monetizing the travel experience while putting a dent in the travel industry.

The hypercorps have a reputation for opportunism and ruthlessnes, in part because they are keen to circumvent legal restrictions. This first manifested as they exploited industries where legal regulations had not yet caught up with technological innovation. It then evolved into actively avoiding oversight by moving operations off-world, free from government interference. This enabled uninhibited research that moved them years ahead of their Earthbound competitors. This desire to bypass accountability also led to a number of shady business practices, from fly-by-night corporations that fleeced customers and investors to more active efforts to sabotage competitors.

The pre-Fall hypercorp Recall made a killing when it brought the first accesible backup procedures to the consumer market, only to sell off their holdings and shut down their servers a year later, leaving backups inaccessible due to their proprietary DRM scheme. At the more extreme end, the pre-Fall orbital-power hypercorp Solas funded and directed dissidents to bomb oil refineries. Before the conspiracy could be proven, it dissolved its assets through non-terrestrial ownership channels that could not be brought to court. Bigelow Holdings coordinated with competitors to institute artificial supply controls to sustain mineral prices, while simultaneously sabotaging asteroid mining facilities. All at once they stopped both, causing an abrupt flood of mineral wealth that bottomed out the market overnight. Chaos followed, forcing at least one small nation to mortgage itself to remain solvent. Though most hypercorps are not this openly hostile, there is a low-level environment of corporate espionage, hacking, and interference among hypercorps that keep security and intel services in high demand.

Hypercorps benefit from being small and focused. A single hypercorp of a dozen people can form and scatter within hours in response to opportunities. A hypercorp workforce may be as small as a single AGI, but personnel can use forking or ALIs as force-multipliers. The most successful have negligible inventory, maintain only a small physical or digital presence near markets, and transfer or create resources instantly in response to changing conditions. Rare is the hypercorp larger than a dozen employees, but they may hire hundreds of contractors who can be added or dropped fluidly.

Given their specialization, hypercorps find it essential to partner with other hypercorps for assets and services they lack. Each exists within a fluctuating web of contract relationships. As the need arises, they will also form conglomerates with other hypercorps, replicating the powers of conventional corporations. Large conglomerates play a major role in hypercorporate affairs, often defining the lines of competition in specific markets. A number of major conglomerates hold positions on the Hypercorp Council, though their constituent components are subject to change.

The hypercorps have been so successful that the term “hypercorporation” is now applied to every for-profit organization, whether they use the hypercorp business model or not. The market still has its share of traditional corporate structures, even co-ops and mutualist organizations. A number of keiretsus and megacorporations survived the Fall and still beat off extinction. Some of the more successful hypercorps have grown and taken on orthodox corporate elements and assets, though they remain hypercorp in outlook and spirit. This was especially necessary in the wake of the Fall, when many hypercorps took authority over private habitats.

Agritech and Pharma

Everyone needs food, and you'd be surprised how much comes from members of the Prosperity Group conglomerate. They are involved in agriculture, aquaculture, hydroponics, vat foods, and pharmaceuticals, and are considered the primary source of cheap but “real” (non-fabricated) foods. Other notable food and drug hypercorps include XenoPharma (developing new products from xenoflora and -fauna), Finosa Labs (linked to drug cartels), and Gingko Biosciences (micrograv agripods and faux meats of every persuasion).

Banking and Finance

Banks lie close to the hearts of the oligarchs, and they in turn use their holdings to influence (or straight-out own) other hypercorps and habitat governments, making them dangerous to interfere with. They are highly protective of their investments, defending them with legal and military force. Smaller banks focus on resource management, while larger banks offer portfolio management, predictive and information services, property leasing, and indenture contracts.

Lunar-Lagrange banks have a reputation for stability and longevity and are intimately intertwined with the LLA’s economy. They invest heavily in indenture markets, offer unprecedented levels of anonymity, and ask few questions about where your credits came from. Big names include Chan-Davis Trust, Amelia Assets, Cardison Limited, and Ganguli-Bhattacharya-Corbett Investments (GBCI).

Among the newcomers, Progress Bank manages investments in Consortium holdings, making it very popular in the credit markets for those with enough money to qualify for their favorable rates. It also finances Pathfinder gatecrashing ops and Mars’s ambitious Red Eden terraforming initiative. Mutual Credit is the largest mutualist bank, with a significant involvement in financing intelligence services. Smaller banks and market services include Banco de Nova York (BdNY), Khalsa Cooperative, and Cranium Intelligence Trust.

Of special note is Solaris, which works with select Consortium customers. Leveraging its own holdings of stock, derivatives, and blackmail material, it adjusts rates for specific industries and corporations to encourage market stability. Solaris owns a significant 17 percent share in the Hypercorp Council, the largest of any member, which it uses as both carrot and stick against disruption. Solaris field agents are a common sight everywhere, aggregating data and managing local accounts in virtual offices. Solaris has an expansive black R&D budget and is suspected of funding research in everything from swarm intelligence to TITAN artifact retrieval to detecting space-time distortions.

While there are dozens of smaller stock exchanges, the largest is the Planetary Stock Exchange (PEX). PEX maintains an independent communications network with high-speed and QE nodes, enabling system-wide interactions (whereas other exchanges are limited due to light-speed lags). PEX offers generous bounties on a list of known hackers.

Cognitive Sciences & Uplift

The dominant force in neuroscience is Cognite, who research mental augmentations, psychosurgery, AI, and nootropics. They also feed the Consortium’s dark TITAN defense programs. Their marketing team is aggressive and their sell sheets include cognitive filters and mandatory psychosurgery for regimes looking to limit political dissent in their habitats. They do not release numbers on how many customers subscribe.

ExoTech is known for pioneering uploading and infomorph technologies. Though its main business is now high-end electronics and meshware, its charismatic figurehead Morgan Sterling continues to lead the field in AI development, to some controversy.

Somatek is the big name in uplift research, including forced breeding and uplift programs for both sapient and non-sapient animals. Because of the public backlash, Somatek avoids appearing in the media and their habitats are locked-down. Somatek also sells pharmaceuticals (for animals and transhumans) and uplift morphs, all through resellers.

Other notable hypercorps in this industry include Mentat (bioware and cybernetics), Cerebrex (psychosurgical research), Rangarajan Metrics (psychometrics and education), Provolve (uplift), and New Day (the first to uplift neanderthals).

Data Management

For forecasting and intel needs, Consortium clients prefer Stellar Intelligence, descendant of the UN Terran Intelligence Cooperative. Stellar Intelligence deploys embedded infomorph agents and digital red teams to infiltrate specific targets. Data is mapped and analyzed in their massive quantum-computing clusters. Stellar Intelligence provides non-state political management, memetic defense and offense, espionage, and retro-quantification (recovering old secured data). Stellar Intelligence has a particular loyalty to the Consortium and favors Consortium members, despite an ongoing rivalry with Oversight. Their most significant rival is the Extropian hypercorp Scrye. Rumored to use recovered TITAN processors on a black site in tandem with overeager hacker teams, Scrye provides predictive intel and data extraction services at reasonable prices.

Energy

Though many smaller hypercorps handle solar power, energy cells, wireless power distribution, and alternative fuels, the energy industry is eclipsed by large corporations. Security concerns are a major issue with fusion power and antimatter production, given their destructive capabilities.

Omnicor is the industry giant, providing reactors to vetted clients all around the system. Their corporate culture is very strict and security-oriented, given their products and an ongoing corporate war with Starware (both companies being descendants of the pre-Fall megacorp Monolith Industries and disputing ownership of assets). Omnicor handles the largest and most well-known particle accelerators for making antimatter in orbit over Mercury.

Gammax is one of the few other hypercorps in the Solar System known to produce antimatter. The energy corp Ultrapar-Scorpio has a strong presence in the outer system, willing to deal with brinkers and autonomists alike.

Gatecrashing

Four of the five known pandora gates in the Solar System are held and operated by hypercorps (the exception being the Fissure Gate, operated by the Love and Rage autonomist collective). These corps set the access and price tags for the gate, making them invaluable to their allied polity.

The Consortium-owned Pathfinder Corporation oversees the faction’s intensive colonization, resource extraction, and research efforts via the Martian Gate. It avoids playing favorites with the gate projects of other Consortium hypercorps but it does give preference to the Pathfinder Colonization Initiative and any directives from the Ministry or Hypercorp Council itself. Its inner-system rival is TerraGenesis, a terraforming-cum-exploration worker cooperative operating the Vulcanoid Gate. TerraGen’s alliance with the Morningstar Constellation and refusal to join the Consortium has put it at odds with many of its neighbors.

In the outer system, the Gatekeeper Corporation operates the original Pandora Gate. Formerly a Titanian microcorp before becoming a joint-faction public-interest venture, Gatekeeper focuses on accessibility and has grants and lottery programs for prospective gatecrashers. The keiretsu Go-nin Group holds the Discord Gate on Eris, though its remoteness and exhuman troubles have impacted its profitability.

Habitats and Ships

Anyone with time and an army of bots can build a small habitat, so much of the market is in designs, such as those from Blue Flower or Kosmostroit. For larger habitat construction, Azahara Engineering and Acumenic have solid reputations, with the latter being a driving force behind construction of the Hamilton cylinder Bright, in the Saturn system, which it recently siezed control of amid some controversy.

Starware, a surviving megacorp, is the system’s largest habitat and ship-builder, owning the massive Korolev Shipyards around Luna and smaller ones at Vesta (Main Belt) and Mars. Only the Jovian Republican Shipyards compete for size. Starware is fully automated and also produces propulsion sources. Starware actively courts the Factors and has funded its own share of gatecrashing expeditions. An ongoing feud with Omnicor sometimes disrupts its operations.

Habitat operations remains a major business, with thousands of smaller corps fighting for contracts. Ecologene is a favorite for designing complex biospheres and running environmental systems. They have a strong side-business in genetics, particularly smart animals and wildlife stock. Livewire technicians and bots are ubiquitous throughout the inner system with their distinctive safety clothing and lightning AR graphics. Nimbus continues to dominate the communications market, running farcasting and egocasting operations on almost every major habitat.

Manufacturing & Nanofab

The Lucky Star Group is a conglomerate of consumer-focused hypercorps, providing everything from personal electronics and smart clothing to sensor motes and small drones. Lucky Star has a reputation for affordable but shoddily-made products.

There are over ten thousand registered hypercorps providing blueprints for nanofabrication. Many of them sell through the conglomerate Nanosys, a blueprint marketplace and DRM-enforcement agency. While Nanosys’s reputation is from its front-end, its entire profit structure is based around enforcing their proprietary standards and cracking down on piracy. They've been accused of targeting pirates and even open-source ventures with malicious code, sabotage, and assaults. On the other side, Privateer Print’s marketplace exclusively sells DRM-cracked blueprints, with subscription fees going to the cost of security contractors and regular service provider changes.

The megacorp Fujizo dominates the market in synthmorphs and robotics, though they remain in an innovation race with rivals such as Tetsuo, Nachi-Denso, Li-Lau Automation, and other giants like Starware and the Go-nin Group.

Media

Most people get their news via social media or curated personal feeds. While conventional mass media is available, the primary role of the media corporations is meme creation, culture/politics jamming, trend-setting, public relations, and memetic defense. There are hundreds of corporations with minor influence competing on the market place, including Boba, Traumwerken, Savage, Red Five, Arnault-Kieselhurst-Patrick, AngelGirl, and PieEater.

Experia is the Consortium’s dominant media company, holding 10 percent of the Hypercorp Council. It outsources media content and feeds it through their proprietary methods to produce a packaged product (with embedded marketing and sponsored memes), that is pushed via its ecosystem of media feeds. Its largest competitor is Counterpoint Media out of Extropia. Neither takes a strong position on fact-checking, but Counterpoint cooperates a bit more with independent news-rep systems. Counterpoint is very popular throughout the system for dirt on how poorly various polities are run, though it remains secondary in the outer system to the comedy and bizarreness of Titan’s Monster Raging Goblin Cock News Network.

Medical Sciences & Biomorphs

Much of the healthcare industry has been replaced with independent facilities renting healing vat time. The measure of quality is the frequency of vat maintenance and the breadth and age of their morph-repair codices.

Skinaesthesia is the cutting edge of biomorphs and pods, followed by the Extropian knock-off brand, Skinthetic, and the pod-design conglomerate Invatch. Smaller brands include Telos, BioDream, StarGen, and Dick’s Big Bodies. Skinaethesia is also the go-to vendor for corporations sleeving indentured workers, or who want morphs that enforce restraints and controls on the ego. The popular bodyshop service Squick offers upgrades of every variety.

Mining/Resources

Resource harvesting is one of a few industries dominated by the old megas; sprawling corporate structures built on asset ownership, where size gives a particular advantage. The largest of these is Fa Jing, which owns a notable 15 percent stake in the Hypercorp Council. Fa Jing maintains mining operations throughout the Solar System and on many exoplanets. Though it maintains one of the largest hypercorp presences in the outer system and has business ties on both Titan and Extropia, it remains hostile to the autonomist project. In fact, Fa Jing views all non-Consortium factions as rivals, and sponsors piracy and habitat takeovers to disrupt them.

Zrbny Group was a widespread asteroid-mining operation prior to the Fall. Nine years ago, there was a brief loss of power and communications in their Main Belt Central Processing and Routing Headquarters. Shortly afterwards, all transhuman employees were fired (or disappeared) with the exception of the corporate spokesAGI, Ash. Zrbny does not engage in politics of any sort, does not permit visitors or inspections even by stockholders, and does not announce its ongoing construction. In fact, Zrbny as a rule does not respond to communications in any medium, including some routine navigational traffic. Why does Zrbny appear on this list? Because they continue to provide rock-bottom prices on feedstock and basic manufactured goods throughout the outer system. Unlike most other hypercorps, Zrbny does not work through any intermediaries. The Zrbny orange corporate logo is a common sight, especially in industrial corners of the system.

Other major mining and resource ventures include Jaehon Offworld and the Vyasa Workers' Cooperative (rivals on Mercury), Trojan Metals (who has had several mining claims jumped by squatters and anarchists), GazPro (chemical refining), and Digz (specializing in extrasolar rare-element ops). Many moons and asteroids have a private corporation or co-op to handle the resource extraction, at which point it is sold to a middle agent for shipping. Frequently this organization is also a de facto governing body. The Cthylla Workers' Commune is a pseudo-corporate organization enforcing mining rights and social order on Pluto and Charon. The Cerean Transcrustal Authority sells Cerean water and volatiles and is also a discreet appendage of the Hidden Concern cartel.

Security

Defense contractors necessarily tie in both physical and information security. Many include biohazard, TITAN, and memetic defenses as well. Inner-system habitats predominantly prefer the extra legitimacy provided by an external contractor over a local militia.

Physical security is dominated by two hypercorps. Direct Action is a descendant of pre-Fall military contractors. They provide shock troops, military, and police services at a reasonable price. They market an image of dependable, irresistible law applied aggressively to the heads of miscreants across the inner system. Gorgon Defense Systems sells weapons and military tech to anyone and everyone. One of the biggest Extropian corps, they are especially popular in the outer system, though rumors of them installing secret backdoors in their security products have hit their market share. Their Medusan Shield subsidiary handles security contracts with their distinctive fury morph tiger teams. Medusan Shield’s focus is on aggressively finding and removing potential causes of customer disruption, and they have no issue with either body counts or violating local law (as long as the customer doesn’t).

Pai Gow is a major second-tier company, focusing on neighborhoods with less on-hand cash. However its triad ties make it undesirable in places expecting adherence to law. Eng/Dilworth focuses on habitat automation and surveillance mote installation, but has also branched into automated security, from recon drones up to AI-guided missiles. In addition to programming and wiring their customers’ security hardware, they provide digital oversight and anti-hacker support. Eng/Dilworth engineers have a reputation for being cheerful and customer-focused, if a little callous about the privacy and physical cohesion of habitat residents.

On the pure information-security side, Silver Shield, Castle, and Lei all provide low- to high-grade logical protection and offense, including automated exploit patching, penetration testing, and dedicated blue and red teams. InSec and 0wnz both develop and sell exploits, making them corporation-non-grata everywhere outside Extropia and the dark mesh.

Academi is one of a small circle of contractors who specialize in disrupting other hypercorps (or protecting from the same). They deploy memetic, mesh, and personal assault combined with financial leverage to kill upstart hypercorps (or their operators) and steal or bury their products before they can reach market. Academi works exclusively with banks and select political bodies.

Shipping

Electronic communications, farcasting, and nanofabrication have made most shipping obsolete. Habitats use drones to provide free door-to-door shipping, but when a package needs to cross the gap to a distant location, private couriers are required. There is a large market of freelance courier companies who will deliver to any location in the system (even if passage takes years to complete). This is the preferred method for specialty and illegal items, or when speed matters more than price. To keep costs down, freelancers post planned and available routes on sites like Zooom, Point-to-Point, and Pyrate. Freelancers live by their reputations and charge accordingly.

For everyone else, there’s Comet Express. Comet Express works through hundreds of affiliates, giving it a presence on almost every named habitat. It manages an expansive network of hubs and slingshot accelerators to transport goods from and to (almost) any point at a price freelancers can’t compete with. The major exception is the Jovian Republic. Republic ships fire on Comet Express freighters on sight, and the Republic Postal Service does not accept transfers from Comet Express hubs.

Social Media and Searches

Most people rely on their muse for news curation and social networking, with outside vendors for deep searches, data mining, and heavy analysis. On the consumer side, Yuge, Znat! and Rena Weibo all compete for space, with their own spin and focus (predominantly pro-Consortium, as there are hundreds of trusted autonomist communities, and the Jovian social networks are managed under an executive mandate). In addition to providing news aggregation and hot topics lists, these services interface with the major reputation networks.