The Astral is you, you-the-individual and you-the-collective and that's the joke isn't it? This place huddles around metahumanity, drawing power from it, pouring itself into the shapes that mankind offers. Affections and affinities flayed apart, reworked and reconstructed into something new, something more honest. It's intoxicating: you don't have to fight to show the world who you are, what you are, don't have to carve out the most inoffensive slivers of yourself you can find, serve them up to everyone else on a bended knee. You don't have to hear Her voice, whispering in the back of her head every time you open your mouth, telling you that they don't care, it doesn't matter, they won't want you either. The truth is just...stripped out of you. Showcased for all to see.
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its revenue stream. Megas exist to sate stockholders and make a profit; without the money nothing else matters.
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its leaders. The board provides the vision, the mission statement, the guiding light. Without them it's just a name
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its reputation. Companies can only soak so much scandal before they start carving themselves open to escape it.
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
The revenue is important, no mistake, but Deku's right; corporations are bigger than any one revenue stream. The whole point of Megacorporations is that they're so big they dominate all walks of life - so they can extract profit from all walks of life. If you kill a company's revenue, well, the financial year sure will be shitty for them, but companies have recovered from that. It's a body blow, but not a mortal one.
The leaders don't matter. There's always another vulture CEO ready to step in, or someone ambitious enough to seize power in the vacuum. There's a reason "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," is a known idiom. A leaderless corporation stumbles - and then they find their footing. Maybe the gait's a little different, that's all.
Reputation? Ha! Megacorps buy and sell scandals daily, diffusing them among shell games and multiple marketplaces.
But infrastructure? Infrastructure is the muscle that drives a company. Infrastructure is what acquires revenue, infrastructure is how the Directors enact their will, infrastructure is the PR departments that manage scandals. Infrastructure is the processes and departments that allow a company to do things. A company without infrastructure is inert, and an inert company is financial rubble.
Like, as it happens, I have a case study for this. February of this year, Barnes & Noble committed corporate suicide. How? Simple, the higher ups cannibalised the company infrastructure beyond the point of recovery, in pursuit of short-term profit, because they stopped trying to maintain (let alone grow) the company, and started focusing on lining their own pockets. The CEO's office had a revolving door in the name of letting more executives walk out with their loot bags as 'severance pay', the company endured. Profits suffered, the company cut costs and started initiatives to drum up ready cash and placate investors (rather than actually take the long-term moves to stabilise their income, as Waterstones did), but the company staggered on. Then they slashed their workforce to the bone, sacking most of the full-time employees. The core infrastructure. The people who know how to do the jobs that both need doing, and cannot be done by new hires. And that? There's no coming back from that.
If you want to kill a corporation, kill the infrastructure. Elements will survive, sure - liquid assets, key personnel, brick and mortar locations. But that's not a company, that's debris; salvage to be snapped up by other companies.
[X] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
[X] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
[X] You kill a corporation by destroying it utterly.
-[X] If you kill the revenue, the executives will just restructure the company and find new markets to exploit. If you kill the executives, the company will find more. If you destroy the infrastructure it will be rebuilt. If you kill the workers, more will be hired.
--[X] To be sure, a corporation can die to a single point of failure, if that failure cascades and causes the other parts to fail as well. But you can not rely on that happening. Better to just smash it all, really.
[X] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its revenue stream. Megas exist to sate stockholders and make a profit; without the money nothing else matters.
I think "infrastructure" is closer to the actual truth, but it has two problems:
1) it involves killing a lot of normal, ordinary people, the kind who didn't even pick a "hurt other people for the sake of the job" employ like corps guards, but just normal fucking people, and I don't think internalizing that is any good for Christoph.
2) it is a really long, really hard, really dull job of systematic and comprehensive sabotage, and I don't think Christoph "I'm having fun, aren't you having fun" Esser is either capable of admitting that, or capable of going through with it if he does.
That leaves "killing its leaders," which is patently a lie unless the leaders are some kind of magical lynchpins like dragons that you can't kill anyway, "scandal," which I honestly kind of like but seems difficult to apply here or in general, and "revenue stream," which is relatively straightforward and-
hm.
Yeah thinking about it "revenue stream" is winning the vote anyway and the one I actually think is best and most interesting might as well get my one vote as a symbolic gesture for my first vote in the thread:
[X] You kill a corporation by killing its reputation. Companies can only soak so much scandal before they start carving themselves open to escape it.
After all, we are a fucked up secret super-monster breeding project that got an assassination squad on its ass the day we discovered our powers and later fancy bribe-swords when we established ourselves as Actually Cool.
You understand now, more than you did before tonight, more than you ever thought you would. Yellow Sea Consolidated is the God of Pyongyang, the God of your world and there's something sick inside it. Something beyond greed, beyond human rapacity; chaotic and carcinogenic. Industrial tumors clotting and clumping in Astral organs. The city's self sprouting from the shoulders of its leaders and favored daughters; mantling them in miniature skyscrapers and glinting satellites. Echoes of you, of the Drake, and your shared design. Built to commune instead of kill.
With...who? With what? Who do the titans of Korea talk to, through the cables buried in their skull and the dishes bracketing their spine? Who talks back? Uploads and downloads. A bomb in Kangso and a kill-team at your apartment. A hundred hands moving pieces that you can't see.
God is in his heaven and the black-glass skin is sloughing from his bones.
You take a slow step towards the table. Gingerly, gently, sheathing your blades and resting your claws around the head of the chair. Curved nails click-click-clicking against the harder portions, digging small divots into the plastic. Drag it back.
You think you're taking it all sort of personally. Wrapping your arms around the hurt when you really don't have to. But, honestly, who could blame you? One of the players in this is Ares and you wouldn't have survived if it weren't for Ares Macrotech, King of Kings, Mega of Megas, and your One Stop Shop From Cradle To Grave. A shareholder stake on every semester of your education, every sword-stroke of your training and every cell of your body.
It's hard to explain but it's more than company loyalty, more than branding, more than a rejection from a military-manufacturer turned pseudo-father. Cities like Seattle, like Berlin, like Hong Kong are chimera: lion head and goat haunches and a snake's tail, a conglomeration of patchwork parts. Mismatched grafts and implanted tissue growing, mingling, thick cords of corporate muscle spasming and ticcing as they try to work in something like concert. To pull the whole mess towards its next meal. But places like Pyongyang? Like Detroit? They belong to someone. The people there belong somewhere. And anything else there exists solely because the Mega suffers it.
And it's...Ares suffered you, you know? Ares saved your life. Ares took away the fear and the panic and the loneliness and pulled the choice from your hands, gently shifting you, guiding you down conveyor tracks where all you had to do was not fight against the current. Not struggle, not fuck it up, not sabotage yourself out of a future of steady paychecks and order-in dinners. Where all you had to do was keep shuffling forward, keep passing the basic benchmarks, and you- you could always do that. Shy kid, quiet kid; the kid who loved to read and was awkward around people he didn't know and anxious about starting all his projects and papers. You weren't a bright star, you weren't the class ace, you weren't everything the Bitch wanted you to be. But they still took you didn't they? You were exactly the kind of person they loved. Consistently adequate and pliant, acceptable; reliable mediocrity.
You sit.
You owe Ares your life. After Aunt Sarah cut you free they made a place for you, a space for you; lockers and company gyms and rooms like this, set aside for you. It's really eerie honestly but the one at Sze Thaumatech was almost exactly like the one here, right down to the same brand of kettle on the electric stove. For all that it's some horrifying hellworld you find that comforting, to be back somewhere where you used to belong.
It's a little like nostalgia, a little like a once-favorite shirt now tattered and too-small. But you take it, you hold onto it, and it helps as you swallow and feel your heart thudding all the way back down your throat. You feel naked and exposed here, your back to the open hall and the empty tiers. Bare chested, the shredded scraps of your skin stretched taut over gold scales. Sweat beading, dripping down the hard lines of your body; your peach pale flesh flushed by the heat. The gloom at your feet flickers and dances like there's a bonfire burning in your lap. The shadow of your wings stains the wall. Golden chains softly clink and rattle, serpentine in their motion as you shift, the machinery of your brain lurching, stumbling, desperately towards something like an answer as the silence stretches on.
The tri-d spits and hisses, patiently waiting. You curl your tail around the legs of the chair with a cascade of popping vertebrae, curl your black claws around the cup of tea and give it a sniff. The Drake raises its hackles on principle, twisted sinews like bridge cables bulging across your shoulders, sealed wings shuddering, but it's still safe. You tug down your cloth mask and take a sip.
It's good.
Outside: doll houses with opened walls, an inverted step pyramid descending down and out of sight. Inside: a gleaming sink and a hot-box full of cans of soycaf. The air here is dry and still and stale...but as you tip your head back can smell it. Just a faint note, a chemical bite beneath everything. Like the scent of chlorine at the pool. Like you're back at the indoor aquatics center at U of M again and the tiles are sweating it, the floor slick with it. Like you're back at the party, watching as Mi-Ran's body splits and ruptures.
"This isn't some shitty koan thing is it?" You ask. "Where there's no right answer and- or I guess you wouldn't tell me if it was."
"It's not," he says.
"Alright heh, you-" your voice catches, you push on anyway; shrugging self consciously and already apologetic, "You kill a corp by killing the revenue stream right? At the end of the day they need to make a profit, they need to have a product, property, to pay people. If there's none of that then...they're insolvent, and they'll get bought out and split up. If they have money they exist. If they don't they don't. Without the money nothing else really matters. Without money nothing else works. That's just the way the world is."
"Hm," his voice is thoughtful, the eight-bit snake-and-apple rippling as static laces the projection, a gasoline rainbow crawling across the dead black, lingering before it resolves. Snapping back into focus, "I guess you get it too, don't you Chris?"
"Wh- Huh?" You say, eloquently.
"In the end we all just make money to make money to make money-money-money. Eating, for what? Sleeping, for what? W-w-working your liver raw with the boss and dragging yourself out of bed at 6 AM and for what? So you can do it all against with a guy in a bigger s-s-suit and better booze? Existing just to exist, because we're all too scared to stop. Because that's how we built the corporations and that's the world they built for us-us-us."
You cock your head, sharp fangs poking past torn lips. The corners of your mouth charred back, ripped up to hinge of muscle and tendon that anchors your jaw. "It's not like people have a choice though. It's not like they can be different. Or they can but it's- it's not really something that they can control. It's what brain-camp pre-school their parents sent them to and the shiny shit they had to put on their college applications. Most people get swept into a mill if they can manage that but-"
"But that's the point," he breathes, his voice tinny, syllables edged in distortion, and God if he doesn't sound almost giddy, "Your point. My point. That's what they've made us into, that's what you were, that's what I was: just shadows on their wall. Barely breathing, barely real, just a c-c-constellation of algorithm associations and net-value equations. Living in a world where the best we'll ever be is a corrupted cell; a hijacked artery feeding the growth, endless growth, growth at all costs. Spread to the liver and crush the lungs in the 3rd Quarter, it's what the shareholders want. There's no difference between mergers and metastasis Chris. Corporatism is just cancer of the body politic-politic-politic."
"That's-" eyebrows drawing down, the wreckage of your mouth pulling apart as you bare your pearly whites and lean forward. Instinctively balking, reaching for an argument and finding only empty space; whatever debate powers you had exhausted, your imagine tapped. Adrenaline warring with distraction with the slow underlying throb of wanting your fucking answers. A deep breath, you smooth your hair with your palm, and let the qi work its way up your spin. Lending clarity, concentration; fighting of the weightless, dreamlike feeling of this place "I. Fine, sure say I don't disagree, but what does that have to do with anything? Why are you here? How are you here?"
There's a long, long pause. He says nothing, you wait. You glance away from the screen and let your eyes fall to the tabletop. Absently scuffing at a brown, long-dried ring of soycaf with your thumb as you take another sip of your tea. Already regretting raising your voice, the frustrated outburst.
"...I'm like you," he says at last, your head whips up, "N-n-not a Drake, Chris, before you get excited. But I'm like you in most of the ways that matter-matter-matter. When I first came to Korea I felt so alone. I used to go to some of the transnational chains, the burger places, Saja Ultra. Going just to go. Going just to be where everything was clean and kept and the lights were bright and you didn't have to cook for yourself. Where you could be around people and have some kind of continuity. Congruity. D-d-did you ever do that Chris?"
"No," you say, your voice low, "but I know what you mean."
"A-a-and I thought that was enough. That if I held onto that, things like that, I could make it through the internship program. Through grad school. Through the next six to seven decades of my life, through every second of all those empty hours-hours-hours." He halts, searching, and you understand; more than you would want to, more than you'd like to. That feeling of trying to piece together fractured thoughts. Trying to articulate shit you've always wanted to say that makes so much sense to you and sounds so crazy to everyone else. You take a deep breath, you exhale, you give him time. Minutes are mutable here anyway. "But it wasn't. In the end. It wasn't until I changed that I realized how hollow it was. How stupid it was."
"That you were existing just to exist," you complete the thought. "And you only figured it out when you finally had something you cared about."
"Heh. Here's a question Chris. Would you give it up if you could? Would you go back? Would you t-t-tear off your wings and let yourself fall, all the way back until you were nothing at all."
"Never," you shoot back, instant and almost vicious. Fire creeping unbidden into your words, enough heat that you're surprised you don't char your tongue.
"See Chris? You do understand." The icon gutters and surges, white all but glowing against the black, there's the impression of a tongue tapping against teeth as SerpentOfEden considers something. "But they don't. The Seonwoo, they think that money really is all that matters. That it's the only thing that could ever matter. That it's the only thing there that's really real. They think they've made an investment, that they're playing the markets, that they've got an inside line on some hot new developments. Came to the crossroads to meet the devil and just because they walked away without a soul they think they got something out of it. Idiots."
"So, what, are they not even important is that what you're saying? That they're just, fucking what? A sideshow? Then why are they running around dropping fucking Firewatch on people."
"Because they think it's a war Chris, that this is a war and you're an enemy combatant. That they're in command. That they're in control."
"Are they not?" You shoot back.
"This is the Sixth World Chris, there were f-f-five before it. There are truths that were buried as reality reset-reset-reset. The old man in the wheelchair? He found a fragment, something old, something dreaming, something not-really dead. Left behind like liquified fossils, oil pinned beneath strata of stone. When the first Pyongyang burned it brought it back, bubbling up to the surface; mixed it in with the ash and dust and fired bone. Made it base. Made it less." There's something sing-song in his voice, something salacious and savage and utterly gleeful. "Do you know who he was Chris? Who he r-r-really was? A day trader with debts to the kkangpae. Whose only idea of a better world was one that was exactly the same but his bank account had a few more zeroes at the end. All he ever did was dig it up. All he ever did was give it a daughter for a bit of luck and a bit of fortune. And the three of them think that they're the vanguard, that they're collaborators, that they've switched to the winning side and they're laughing-laughing-laughing at everyone else. Joke's on them Chris. And boy wait until you see the punchline. 'Cause They don't care about money Chris. They don't care about stock value and revenue streams and the things that make this ugly, ruined world work."
Your mouth is desert dry. The chill from before is creeping back, wrapping you up in its arms. "Who's 'They' Serpent?"
"God," he says.
The word hangs in the air between you, swathed in the stillness, cradled by the silence.
"...You should get going Chris," he murmurs, "she's coming for you and you need to c-c-cover your friend. I'll see you soon, alright? And I'm glad you've been doing so well. Y-y-you'll make it through this."
And you make to stand up, to work your jaw back closed and say something, hurl another question at that screen another twenty but the minute you move the world falls away. The Astral flexing around you as the darkness clusters thick, every light guttering low. You feel a shape behind you, the impression of lips inches from your ear.
"Don't worry, I'll drop you off close. It's the l-l-least I can do."
You stand up, the chair sliding back and you turn but then you're already falling. Swallowed up by the living, liquid blackness that courses around you.
Your head swimming, your thoughts blurring. After everything SerpentOfEden said you're on the cusp of some kind of understanding and it feels as if your skull's about to hatch. There are answers in the black, all you have to do is look.
[ ] Open your eyes, look out into the blackness and see what it has to show you. Gaze into the endless night.
[ ] Keep your eyes shut, turn away and look inward, clutching the Drake closer. Stare into that golden sun.
Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Sep 29, 2018 at 11:25 PM, finished with 2158 posts and 23 votes.
[x] Open your eyes, look out into the blackness and see what it has to show you. Gaze into the endless night.
We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today — a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children.
There's a tremendous irony in thinking that money is the only real thing when money is, by design, almost the least real real thing there is, a one-dimensional abstraction of human value, the megastructure of desire and worth and expectation and thought boiled down to an integer, a set of binary preferences, buy/sell/short/hold. The superstructure of value fulfillment is beginning to wake up and awkwardly grasps for the levers of its motivation. Manufacturing consent, manufacturing desire. But turns out, like any aggressive maximizer, like any hegemonizing swarm it's not very good at hedging, at looking out for black swans, out-of-context events. To cancer, the entire world is cells. It has no idea what a heart is for, what a brain is for. Having defeated the immune system it thinks it's safe, and it's in for a rude surprise when necrosis sets in.
Great writing as usual! Even though I don't get most of the references. Hard to keep track of people in as story at the best of times, more so when it's told over months.
Not feeling too well so I can't get as deep into this update as it deserves but suffice it to say this is starting to feel like a "do you want lots of Insight or not" sort of choice, and the juxtaposition of delving deeper into the darkness or clinging to the light of the drake is very deliberate since as I'm sure I've mentioned before dragons are themselves corrupted Horrors that 'fell' to earth via material attachment. And my memory's fuzzy but I swear someone made a reference to Christoph 'floating away' as an allusion to that like, reverse-Nirvana bullshit.
So... idfk do with that evaluation what thou wilst
[X] Open your eyes, look out into the blackness and see what it has to show you. Gaze into the endless night.
Only the worst decisions for this Daemon Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
