PERSONAL TERMINAL
A SMC Product
VENDOLINK
A SMC Product
Remotely connecting to Hyperion network terminal...
COPYRIGHT SMC DATA SYSTEMS
VENDOLINK
Remotely connecting to Hyperion network terminal...
COPYRIGHT SMC DATA SYSTEMS
STATION RECORDS - ARCHIVAL VOICE LOG
It is the closing decade of the 22nd century. For more than a hundred years humanity has spilled outward into the stars, and no nation led it there. The nations are dead. In their place stand the mega-corporations; vast, deathless, older than any living man; masters of dozens of systems by the might of their fleets and the weight of their contracts. They raised atmospheres over dead worlds and cities upon the ashes. Their orbital habitats circle a hundred suns; their stations burn like beacons in the deep void; their mining outposts gnaw at the ragged edge of the dark. Wonders beyond the dreams of old Earth; and every one of them owned.
This is the Corporate Sector, and no law of old Earth reaches it. Once the corporations made open war. Fleets burned in the void. Whole worlds were reduced to ash and glass, and billions perished unmourned. The armistice silenced the guns and ended nothing. The war merely changed frequency; fought on without pause through corporate espionage, a silent, grinding attrition in the dark between the stars. They call it the great game, and it has no end: each corporation hunts the same prize it has always hunted, the ultimate edge over its rivals, the one advantage from which there is no recovery.
To be born in such a time is to be one among uncounted billions, raised beneath a single creed: everything for the good of the company. It is to build marvels and never own them. It is to push the frontier outward, generation after generation, and inherit only the debt of those who pushed before you.
These are the tales of those times. Forget the dream of the open frontier, for the frontier of the Corporate Sector reaches far and wide; and all of it answers to someone. Here there is no peace, only the silence between shots. No justice, only power and the will to use it. And far beyond the last surveyed system, out in the unmapped dark, something is waiting; and the corporations are already searching for it.
