POSTED BY: DR. SPIN
Ask anyone on any street in any sprawl in any city across the globe what they think about the Horizon Group, and eight or nine times out of ten you’re going to hear only glowingly positive responses. Something Horizon did or touched either directly or indirectly helped one of these people in some tangible way: their kid got a decent education from some Horizon Project–subsi- dized school, or their aunt loves working at Horizon Subsidiary X, or they heard about some revolutionary charity that the corp is sponsoring. These people will be chock full of stories like that. If you manage to find someone who worked for the corp and got their walk- ing papers for whatever reason, odds are they’re still going to have nothing but good things to say about the corp: fun anecdotes about coworkers they miss seeing, personal projects they were incredibly proud of, the ex- perience in their field they’re glad to have gained—all kinds of positive, sick-to-your-stomach drek like that.
According to most straw polls you see for which
AAA mega is the most accepting, friendly, progressive, or best to work for, Horizon would regularly tie with or outright trump Evo. However, since rumors now abound that Evo was responsible—or at least partially party to—the creation and/or outbreak of cognitive fragmen- tation disorder, Horizon has since gained a leg up in those polls. So far as the general populace is concerned, Horizon, the youngest member of the Big Ten, can do no wrong. And even when it does do wrong, a heart- felt we-couldn’t-predict-the-consequences apology or quick blame reassignment goes a long way toward eras- ing Horizon’s culpability in the court of public opinion.
Of course, look at any trid preacher for long enough, no matter how squeaky clean they appear, and you’re going to find some dirt somewhere. Horizon might look pristine on the outside, but like the trid preachers asking for your donation, the Horizon Group has got some dirt of its own to hide. And the amazing thing about it is, they’ve been so frighteningly good at hiding and obfus- cating that dirt that even the Big A can even take lessons from Horizon. This corp is who the spin doctors go for medical advice, so to speak. Their marketing and media departments are absolute masters of revisionist history, the kind of redactionists and re-framers that George Or-
Corporate Status: AAA, private corporation
World Headquarters: Los Angeles, PCC
President & CEO: Gary Cline
Major Shareholders: Undisclosed
Dominant Business Language: English
Secondary Business Languages: All
MAJOR DIVISIONS
Horizon Africa, Horizon Americas, Horizon Asia, Horizon Europe, Horizon Southeast Asia
Bathotech (energy), Bio-Fine (biotech), Cantor-Kurosawa (media production), Charisma Associates (marketing/PR), Checkpoint Software (business software), Colbert Group (finance/legal), Columbia Industries (simsense), Common Denominator (fashion/consumer electronics), Cunard Entertainment (alternative entertainment), The Horizon Project (social works), Horizon Transglobal (space), KaleidoScape (software/sim), Olympus Designs (architecture/ design), Pathfinder Multimedia (media/entertainment), Singularity (Matrix), Spectrum Holofix Entertainment Systems (electronics), Synergestic (ARE software), Truman Distribution Network (media/ entertainment), Wanderlust (tourism)
well would’ve had wet dreams about. Were they so in- clined, they could probably make the Night of Rage look like it was a fun, Metahumanity Ablaze–style affair and make people clamor for another one (thank Ghu that Humanis doesn’t have deep enough pockets to afford Horizon). If you think that’s hyperbole, it’s not. No one, no matter how much they claim to be all about social re- sponsibility and karma capitalism, should wield that kind of power or control over someone. No one. And that’s what it’s all about: control.
All corps want your money—hell, they’ll outright steal it from you if they can get away with it—and Horizon is no exception. But while most megas will try to wheedle you out of your hard-earned nuyen any way they can, Hori- zon takes a different approach. Your average marketing campaign targets the innate greed and desire for imme- diate gratification of metahumanity: “You must have this
now.” More sophisticated campaigns try to sell based
on intangible concepts like feeling better about yourself (“This will make you a better person”) or being included in an exclusive clique (“Be one of the cool kids!”). But a
Horizon ad campaign, by comparison? They go some- thing along the lines of: “You must have this because it will make you one of the cool kids and make you feel better about yourself … but why buy from our competi- tors when x-ty percent of the proceeds from this prod- uct will go toward building new homes and schools for underprivileged children in war-torn parts of Africa, Asia, and South America?” After that kind of spiel, after the sappy music, then you’re probably already in tears and whipping our your commlink to hit up the website for said product.
>
So what you’re saying is, I probably shouldn’t adoptthat Amazonian orphan who was displaced by the Azt- Am War?
>
Slamm-0!Horizon doesn’t try to steal your money—at least, not like the others. Instead they build a solid brand, tie it with social responsibility, put a nice, shiny bow on the package, and ask you to choose between a com-
petitor’s product and “doing the right thing.” When given a choice between Corp A, the corp known for, say, industrial polluting, and Corp B, known for its en- vironmental-cleanup and conservation efforts, the de- cision for most folks is pretty easy. The scary thing is, everything Horizon puts in its marketing campaigns is legitimate. There are few actual lies to be found, if you can overlook the standard marketing hyperbole. Instead, Horizon just uses the right bait, makes you a Horizon-ophile, and convinces you to convert others if possible. This lack of overt lies might seem to indi- cate that Horizon is the real deal: a “good” corp that doesn’t buy into the ubiquitous corporate values of greed and focusing on the bottom line no matter who gets hurt. The problem isn’t that Horizon lies. What’s more alarming is what Horizon chooses not to say— prevarication via omission. This is how the corp preys on the goodness of metahumanity under the guise of social responsibility. And social responsibility is how they get you, how they draw you in. They wallpaper beauty over the ugliness so that you forget about the black mold, about the roaches and rats living between the walls. So don’t be surprised when the house col- lapses with you inside.
>
Maybe I’m just obtuse, but how is social responsibilityever a bad thing? I’d like to help every single injured civilian I see in war zones, but I can’t fight and render aid at the same time. And I don’t really want the planet to become one giant drekhole, but I certainly can’t fix the environment myself.
>
Picador>
It’s all a front. If Horizon says it’s “helping [insert bleeding-heart cause] in [insert trendy national hot spot],” then you know they’re (a) doing whatever it is they claim they are, and (b) doing something else shady on the side that relates to their cause du jour. So if they’re feeding starving children in Amazonia, for example, they’re probably also helping another corp test-market some new semi-toxic foodstuffs without having to worry about factoring in “acceptable losses,” since no one’s going to notice when a few starving people in a war-torn country shuffle off their mortal coils.
If they’re subsidizing a school in one of the poorer parts of the PCC, everything in that school is probably saturated with Horizon-related material. That means the curriculum, mascots, and extracurricular activities are designed in such a way that it makes the kids badger their parents for Horizon-branded products, or they’ll be influenced in such a way that they’ll want to work for Horizon when they get old enough.
If Horizon is sponsoring the cleanup of industrial pollution, they’re probably subcontracting the cleanup teams to do industrial espionage on behalf of some other
company. One of the best ways to learn about someone is to sift through their garbage.
And those are just top-of-the-head examples.
>
Dr. Spin>
Surely not everything Horizon does is completely selfserving.
>
Sounder>
True altruism is a myth. Everyone gets something out ofhelping someone else (even if it’s just the warm fuzzies).
>
Haze>
Even supposedly benign causes will generally get yourname in the news—doubly so if Horizon is footing the bill of said news—and sometimes that alone is the end goal. The old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity is wrong: bad publicity is not having your name ever appear in the news. At the bare minimum, Horizon is guilty of wanting its name in as many headlines as possible.
>
SunshineHISTORY
Let’s get the 2,000-kilo behemoth out of the way: yes, Horizon is by far the youngest player in the AAA big leagues. In terms of actual founding dates, NeoNET is technically considered newer, but its execs and Fran- kensteined parts all came from megacorps with exten- sive pedigrees and long histories. Horizon, by com- parison, just about came from nowhere. Odds are you probably have a teenager that’s older than this AAA.
Horizon might be young, but bear in mind that even teenagers have the capacity to be dangerous. Remember that Pathfinder Multimedia trid series from a few years back, the one where the kid pulls a gun and geeks one of the secondary characters with no warning whatsoev- er because it turns out he was secretly a gangbanger? Yeah, Horizon’s kinda like that kid, and the recent Las Vegas incident proves that—but more on that later.
Horizon began with a noble purpose in 2061, fol- lowing the wake of Halley’s Comet. Los Angeles was an utter wreck from the ravages of earthquakes and the Deep Lacuna alchera phenomenon. Hollywood was in the utter shambles, and the whole economy of the re- gion—to say nothing of the LA-centric entertainment industry—was swirling down the toilet. To revitalize the city and get people back to focusing on fame and celeb- rity, a group of industry leaders and politicians banded together, ultimately leading to the creation of a think tank “social experiment” they called the Horizon Proj- ect. This group concentrated on improving LA, rebuild- ing the Hollywood economy, encouraging tourism, and being a generally friendly face amid a beleaguered city.
>
As an example of how effective the Horizon Group’s marketing and PR arm would ultimately become, back in those days, the Horizon Project managed to convince people to take the Deep Lacuna tour. Millions of tourists flocked to the city, and Horizon ultimately capitalized on scenes of human tragedy as though most of LA were Horizon’s own twisted, for-profit Holocaust museum. Horizon spun the tour as a way of “keeping alive the memories of those who are no longer with us,” or some such drek, but they were really catering to the disaster- porn and thrill-seeker crowds.>
Sunshine>
There’s certainly no shortage of those types of people inthe Sixth World.
>
CosmoThe Horizon Project’s success in LA led to the think tank buying up smaller companies and eventually incorporating in 2063 as the Horizon Group and appointing sim-star Gary Cline as CEO. This newly certified A-rated megacorp started expanding its market share by snagging a lucrative PR deal with the government of Tír Tairngire and securing the con- tract to implement LA’s wireless-Matrix initiative. The corp also invested venture capital in innovative and progressive startups, and acquired companies that would give them a competitive advantage against more entrenched megacor- porate players. Horizon initially focused on intangible assets and services, such as advertising, media, entertainment, in- formation services, software and Matrix development, and so on. The lack of overhead associated with the manufac- ture, storage, and distribution of physical products allowed Horizon to rake in the profits and (ostensibly) funnel a lot of those monies into public works projects, outreach pro- grams, and other social responsibility endeavors that further elevated the corp’s reputation in both the public and private sectors. With profits from its initial ventures, Horizon further diversified its markets by investing in more tangible prod- ucts, such as pharmacology, biomedical research, politics, and architecture/urban development. Any company doing innovative or revolutionary work in their field became an acquisition target.
Crash 2.0 in 2064 caught the entire corporate world with their trousers around their ankles—everyone except Horizon. The corp’s most critical Matrix nodes were of- fline for scheduled maintenance when the Winternight virus began wreaking havoc throughout the wired world. This freak coincidence—or masterfully executed plan, depending on whom you ask—let Horizon escape the ensuing chaos with very few scars. Corp operatives quickly jumped into the chum- and nuyen-filled waters and snatched up just about anything that wasn’t tied down—small companies driven bankrupt by Crash 2.0; downsized employees left without jobs; stock portfoli- os; intellectual property rights, copyrights, patents, and other virtual assets—all for bargain-basement prices.
>
In many cases, Horizon was able to make these purchasesbecause no other potential buyer knew the items had ever been put up for sale. In some cases, Horizon approached flailing businesses and made them an offer before anyone else did. In other cases, it’s believed Horizon-sponsored hackers deleted all traces of the item’s availability on the market, leaving other potential buyers completely unaware the owner was looking to sell. Horizon’s offers were often the first—and many times the only—bids the seller ever received, leading to the owner of the asset simply cutting their losses. In other instances, Horizon used social engineering to finagle assets from the estates of owners that didn’t know the true value of what was being purchased.
>
Mr. BondsIn 2065, the Horizon Project’s humble “social ex- periment” was catapulted into the ranks of the stardom when the Corporate Court announced that Horizon would replace the recently demoted remnants of Cross Applied Technologies in the ranks of AAA corporations. The pronouncement came as a shock to the other mem- bers of the Big Ten, leading to rampant discussion of how an upstart corporation like Horizon could climb from A to AAA in the span of only two years, especially since Horizon, on paper, only barely had enough assets and clout to qualify as AA-rated. To this day, no one but Gary Cline and the Corporate Court justices who presided over the decision know exactly how the decision came down. Speculation runs the gamut between things like undisclosed assets and Horizon hoarding a giant vault filled with potential blackmail for use against Corporate Court justices or bigwigs from other Big Ten members. Horizon’s AAA rating has been challenged a few times by jealous AA-rated competitors, but the CC merely logs the complaints and dismisses the cases.
CURRENT EVENTS
Given the events of the last handful of years, it appears not even Horizon is as all powerful in the PR realm as we all originally thought. We used to see the corp as pretty much bulletproof, incapable of having enough aspersions thrown at it that people would stop to take notice and actually believe said allegations. In the hal- cyon days of the Horizon Group (ah, the late ’60s …), any negative press could easily be hand-waved away as if by divine fiat. Horizon’s near monopoly of the press in many jurisdictions meant they could control all the information being released to the public, or their Charisma Associates PR gurus could put so much Hori- zon-positive spin on the story that the centrifugal force would make even the hardiest of astronauts throw up. Lately the mega has discovered the hard way that they can’t just put a shiny coating of shellac on everything,
so their current strategy is to pump as much positive press into the airwaves and fiber-optic lines as they can and create public opinion via saturation.