Trans-Oceanic Mining is one of several large players in the offshore mining business, with mining rigs deployed in the North Sea, around Southeast Asia, and in Athabaskan Council waters. The corporation has been divided among major shareholders for many years now, with Saeder-Krupp owning the largest part.
Given the hostile climate in the boardroom from the infighting owners, Trans-Oceanic has chosen to operate with two hosts. Its main mining host is separated from its financial and administration host, thus isolating operations from the politicking that can come from financial reporting.
The mining host’s virtual reality is informed by classical Scandinavian design aesthetics, featuring clean lines, minimalism, and crisp, clear colors. The host looks a little like a cottage nestled in the majestic fjords of Sweden. The space consists of a few large cubic constructs of chrome and glass, with red and orange accents. An immaculate landscape of perfectly cut grass surrounds the facility, tucked on a cliff of jagged stones overlooking rivers of cobalt.
The air feels overly oxygenated with a pleasant humidity to it, like in a cold, misty boreal forest. Visitors can walk outside between the cubic structures, almost fully respecting the laws of physics. Inside the large cubic buildings, physics get wonky. The concept of up or down becomes very Escher-esque. Visitors can turn a corridor and suddenly find themselves walking on what seemed like wall a moment ago, but is now the floor. The interior of the cubes—all white, chrome and glass—lacks borders. It all looks uniform from afar, making navigation very difficult. Doors are almost imperceptible—thin gaps delineating the frames are the only way to spot them, as they open with a gentle push.
The cubes process the data and functionality of the various mining rigs operated by Trans-Oceanic. Simpler processing occurs toward the outside of the structures. Moving toward the center reveals more and more activity, until the center of the cube is reached and a veritable maelstrom of data is discovered. As users move progressively toward the center, the air around their ears at first starts blowing gently. That gentle blow grows into a rush and then finally a deafening roar near the data processing vortex of the central processing unit.
While all personas appear as people, all security measures render as Rottweilers, chasing down intruders in the clinical hallways.
The second host, the administrative one, is modeled very differently. Perhaps inspired by the boardroom drama, the host renders in black and white. Not greyscale—pure white and pure black only, though very clever artistic use of the two manages to render a surprisingly cogent, if entirely dramatic, form to all things. The location appears to be an office building with mid-twentieth-century sensibilities mixed with modern boardrooms. The administrative staff works in these virtual cubicles, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking burnt coffee, while the bosses play their power games in the virtual meeting rooms. With everything in purely black and white, it makes for an interesting experience that leaves most visitors on edge the first few times.
Security appears as shadows, bare movements of black on black. They bend the light around them, offering only rare glimpses of human forms in trench coats and fedoras. Their faces, however, are completely shapeless, except for sunken pools of darkness for eyes. Intruders who feel the wrath of the security measures and take damage will have pleasure of seeing their icons spill virtual blood as bright, slick crimson—it’s the only color in the entire reality.
OPERATIONS HOST
Host Rating: 10
Normal Configuration: Attack 10, Sleaze 11, Data Processing 13, Firewall 12
Security Procedure: Patrol IC running at all times. Once alarmed, the host launches IC in this order: Killer, Marker, Scramble, Acid, Jammer, Blaster, Binder, Crash, Sparky, and Black IC. If one of its IC gets bricked, it will continue down the chain before rebooting anything.
If the intruder bricks a single piece of IC, or if the alert persists for 4 Combat Turns, not one but two Security Troubleshooters will log into the system to boot (or preferably kill) the intruder.
Uses: As the main control hub for all of Trans-Oceanic’s operations, this host contains information regarding core samples and other prospecting data that would be of great interest to rivals, making it a prime target for corporate espionage. Perhaps a little surprisingly, it is also this host and not the administrative one that controls physical security devices in each mining installation. Since the host’s prime function is to control mining drones and systems, it should be clear that any saboteur looking to do some damage would probably want to go through here.
ADMINISTRATIVE HOST Host Rating: 7
Normal Configuration: Attack 7, Sleaze 8, Data Processing 9, Firewall 10
Security Procedure: Patrol IC running at all times. One Standard Security Spider patrolling at all times. Once alarmed, the host launches IC in this order: Killer, Probe, Bloodhound, Marker, Blaster, Binder, and Black IC. If one of its IC gets bricked, it will use the next Combat Turn to reboot that IC rather than moving on to the next one. Two additional Security Spiders will log in after 3 Combat Turns of the alarm sounding.
The security strategy of this host makes heavy use of Tracing. Trans-Oceanic has a security dogma of physically hunting down anyone caught in their host for interrogation. Trans-Oceanic has a standing contract with Knight Errant to apprehend suspects. If tracing is not a viable option, security will attempt to dump users as quickly as possible. Any user suspected of attempting to cause serious damage to the host as a whole, or specifically targeting the supply- and-demand algorithms, will warrant the arrival of a three Security Troubleshooters. If possible, Tracing will again be attempted, but the priority will be to minimize damage. Shutting down the host is not an option, but sticking most files in the archive is. Any and all information gained about the suspect’s identity will be shared with GOD.
Uses: As a standard repository of juicy corporate paydata, there are many rewards to hacking Trans-Oceanic Mining’s administrative host. Personnel files, financial data, corporate memos … it’s all there. This host also contains the high-value predictive algorithms that dictate the output from operations—essentially, a direct control switch to how much money the corporation will make. The Corporate Court forbids interfering directly with these, so it would take a very brave Mr. Johnson to order sabotage on them, but deniable assets are, you know, deniable. In addition, it is worth noting that invaders in the administrative host can leverage access here to log into the operational host. While marks do not transfer over, exactly, they do make things a lot easier. Characters gain +2 dice per mark held on the administrative host to any Brute Force or Hack on the Fly attempts against the operations host.
mation of the processes, drones and machinery can be minutely altered to reduce harvesting output, in order to match supply with demand. As the entire global sys- tem is similarly hooked in, you might theorize (if you’re inclined to macroeconomics) that prices should be con- stant, as supply is always configured to match demand. That would be true were it not for the fact that demand and supply can be artificially manipulated to suit agen- das. As almost all primary sector activity is concentrat- ed in the hands of vastly diversified megacorporations, there are all kinds of ways in which rivals can attempt to manipulate the outlook of the market to trick the com- petition into incorrectly gauging real demand and thus over or under supplying—both of which means the other corporation just lost money.
Such price wars are the status quo of the industry, and the hosts this industry rely on are built with ever more sophisticated market analysis algorithms to differentiate pricing attacks from real demand. Much of this relies on predictive algorithms that extrapolate demand based on historical trends. These models would still be far too simplistic of course, so the algorithms are fed data from business intelligence sources. New deals being signed, businesses being acquired or going bust, political instabil- ity—all this is accounted for through different input. Thou- sands of streaming sources of socio-economical intelli- gence are fed in, all to predict the fluctuation of market prices by a few fractions of a nuyen.
One thing that the industry as a whole does not mess with is serious cyber warfare. Closely monitored and en- forced by the Corporate Court, primary sector corpora- tions are proscribed from unleashing major attacks on one another’s hosts. With the line between supply and demand kept so razor-thin, a serious attack tricking a party into major supply changes could at best cause a massive recession, and at worst destroy humanity with starvation. Lovely thought to keep you up at night: We could all die because some agricorp was trying to shave 0.0001 nuyen from the cost of a kilo of soy.
Of all the industries, mining, logging, and agriculture are the most likely to have multi-host hookups, simply because their core business hosts have such rapacious and specialized requirements that the rest of the corpor- ation does not share. However, many corps just bite the bullet and host everything at the same place, leveraging tight data integration for faster real-time decision-mak- ing across the entire company.
ENGINEERING
Engineering is another very large catchall term that basically encompasses any business that designs stuff, rather than actually manufacturing it. This can include designing physical products utilizing chemical, materi- al, or mechanical engineering, or it can involve intan- gible ones like software or even the arcane realm of social engineering (which is a little different than mar-
keting). It can also be the other arcane realm of design- ing magic formulas.
It’ll be obvious that hosts focusing on engineer- ing need hosts that reproduce physics very faithfully. Whatever it is they are designing, it has to be tested against real-world conditions. Most engineering com- panies will get around to actually prototyping their thingamajig and testing it in real conditions, but the Matrix is more than capable of generating extremely realistic conditions to test products virtually. That’s just the way things are done nowadays. Any corporation that actually tested their products would have costs far, far higher than competitors. Sure, every now and then that means you get an Ares Excalibur, a piece-of- shit product that should never have been green-lit for mass-production, but that’s the cost of modern busi- ness (and, not to digress, but the Excalibur had prob- lems far more complex than its engineering—I know, ’cause I hired teams to make sure of it).
Engineering hosts thus tend to be smaller and tighter, relying on small, highly experienced teams of engineers rather than tons of manpower. Because they are pretty much by definition working on the next big revolution in whatever, the next competitive advantage, the next game-changer, security is a big concern. Engineering data is highly steal-able: It’s all just plans, designs, test results. It’s all data you can download pretty easily. That means engineering hosts tend to have highly developed security procedures. You can expect pretty much every-
thing to be protected and to be laced with very powerful
data bombs, if it’s even outside of the archive. Rule num- ber one of hacking an engineering environment: Don’t touch anything ’til you’re good and sure you’ve properly disarmed defenses. Data bombs almost always destroy the files they were guarding. It’s probably a good idea to load up your deck with the proper programs to help you succeed here. Just a thought, you know.
DEFENSE
The world of the defense industry, including the various branches of governmental armed forces, paramilitary security corporations, mercenary outfits, and megacor- porate in-house defense teams, is a voracious and spe- cialized lover of matrix hosts. Modern warfare is ninety percent intelligence now, and (as the adage goes) ama- teurs worry about tactics but professionals worry about logistics. The militaries and security forces of the world are wholly dependent on their information networks. Close coordination between elements is critical, and inferior communications can spell death more readily than an empty clip. Hosts are frequently relied upon as nexus masters for soldiers’ gear and battle vehicles. In such setups, with all field devices slaved to them, if the host gets compromised, everything gets compromised and a massacre looms on the horizon. Outside of such directly tactical roles, militaries use hosts to get the
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