A Visitor to the Future - 39 - The Vice Grip of the Multispheres
"But how did the Consortium become a target in the first place?"
"Ah, I see - you'll need more context," said Alexandra, "Back to basics then. Following the Second Cyber Crisis, there was a significant period of the time from the mid-2400s to the early 2600s where the entire Sol system was dominated by corporations. During the rush to Mars in the 2300s a claim system had been set up and legally recognised which massively favoured corporate interests - it pretty much said that if you had the orbital infrastructure to enforce a claim, it was yours, and with most of Earth's space infrastructure in private ownership after the Second Cyber Crisis, the conditions were perfect for a mad corporate rush to space. The assets of the solar system were divided over a number of decades, with corporations staking claims over large swathes of resources and planets, even if they had no ability to exploit them at the time - after all, what was an orbital station or small fleet of ships worth compared to the possible future value of an entire planet or moon?"
"Surely people resisted?" I said.
"That was much harder than you might think. The situation on Earth was much the same - the average private citizen owned very little, constantly paying off their debts to the corporations. It meant that troublemakers were effectively cut off, or for the worst Multispheres, disappeared. Most resistance came from other Multispheres - they were not averse to warring for control of resources. That being said where corporate influence was a little more tenuous some private citizens did try to strike back - the Jovian Pirates are probably the best example. But to really give you an idea of what the Multispheres had become, some corporations were even issuing their own currencies, giving them as much political capital as the countries of your own time and making their workers almost entirely dependent on their continued employment to live. That's not something that Crux did, I'd like to think we were better than that. But you can imagine that if you lost your job and were to be evicted from corporate residences on Ganymede, you'd have to take on a hell of a lot of debt to get yourself to somewhere else, and be in a great deal of trouble in the meantime. Simply put, the Multispheres made the monopolies of the centuries prior look positively competitive in comparison."
She shook her head slightly and sighed a little.
"Oh, and if anyone asks I would say that you should ignore whatever Earth countries people say still existed in the 2500s - the reality was that they were all under the influence of Multispheres - which I should explain is what we called the biggest corporations because they operated in multiple spheres of influence. It was actually a word invented and popularised by Crux's own marketing department, long before I took charge."
She took a series of three silver coins from a drawer of her desk, and stacked them one on top of the other to display her next point.
"So picture it - a tiered system. At the bottom you have the average worker. No matter how talented they were, they didn't have the wealth to really matter in the system. Then you had the CEOs and smaller corporations like myself and Crux, who had power over their own companies. The top tier was the Multispheres and their key shareholders, who effectively kept their stranglehold through generational wealth. We'd essentially regressed a thousand years - a class system, based on ownership of land and resources. Except this time the Multispheres and shareholders were the kings and queens."
She suddenly scattered the coins across the desk. It was an awkwardly emotional display, contrary to how she usually seemed so composed.
"And to think, at the time I defended it! I was truly an idiot," she said, exasperated. She stacked the coins again before continuing. "Picture it, the early 2600s, a system where the wealth disparity was enormous, with the rich owning everything and the poor, nothing, in a system where even air to breathe isn't a guarantee. CIs outside of Mars were still effectively slaves, and most human workers weren't much better off! We'd built a dystopia and we had the gall to call it the free market! All hoarding our little advantages over each other, with each Multisphere trying to outbid, outthink, or outgun the others, and the people in the middle of them just trying to survive. Which is when the Mars Consortium first made its appearance."
She tapped a few buttons on her desk and an image of the red planet appeared on the glass, her demeanour calming a little. "For about three hundred years everyone had thought that Mars hadn't been up to much. The CI rebellion of the 2300s had crippled the economy of the planet, leaving scattered settlements and a diminished industrial base - that is what every single source of corporate information on the planet said. Every new attempt to set up a new base on the planet failed, and reports stating that projected mineral wealth was a lot lower than initially expected, and atmospheric conditions made both life and industry there very difficult. Had we looked with a more critical eye, we might have realized that the fact that every report out of the planet said the same thing was suspicious. But we were too busy fighting among ourselves."
"May I explain?" Tungsten asked Alexandra, who nodded, "The state that immediately preceded the Consortium was the called Union of Mars. The events of the CI rebellion left the planet in a quite dire state, with most industry having to be rebuilt from the ground up. The Union was created in the 2400s as a necessity - the Mars colonies had to pool their resources or else collapse, even if they differed in ideologies. Just as the planet's population was to exceed fifty million, the Multispheres began to overshadow the political system on Earth, the United Nations was disbanded, and the corporate claiming rush really got underway."
"Regolith often says that period was like a coming storm," added Alexandra, "They had to do something or be swept away."
"Which led to the Great Deception," said Tungsten, "The greatest disinformation campaign in history. Not wanting to be overwhelmed by growing Multisphere interests and fearful for the rights of its CI citizens in a corporate solar system, the Union became more insular, choosing to hide its true numbers and value. Conveniently, one of the well-learned lessons of the first CI rebellion had been just how fragile surface settlements were - you only had to look towards the ruins of the old Mars capital in Kasei Valles, destroyed by orbital strikes. So new settlements had been built mostly underground, protected from both environmental and military hazards and hidden from orbital view. After that, the Union made great efforts to ensure that the value of Mars was understated."
"Tungsten makes it sound simple," said Alexandra, "From what I understand, it really wasn't. There are a number of projection documentaries about the layers of deception involved. For example, Trident Mining did an extensive survey of Mars in the 2520s and found that there were large deposits of exotic metals around the equator. That triggered a gold rush, with the mining companies all sending several expeditions hoping to finally make it rich from Mars. They all found nothing, made a massive loss, and left Mars as quickly as they came. This happened quite a few times - Yellowstone Dynamics and Kuiper both joined the list of companies that tried and failed to make it big on Mars. Eventually Mars became known in CEO circles as the fool's gold planet. I found out years later that the Union had not only faked the survey results, but also baited potentially problematic companies into overstretching themselves and collapsing! They were even the ones that came up with and popularised the phrase, fool's gold planet - everyone played right into their hands. The Union really did have one of the best shadow agencies ever operated."
Tungsten continued, "In the peace and quiet that the Union had bought them, the people of Mars finally achieved political and economic stability. The Union eventually became the Consortium, a society with very different views on personal liberty to the Multispheres. It was then that the Consortium began to look at the rest of the system - and plot."
Alexandra nodded, "Eloquently put. Had we known of the advances they'd made or the society they'd built, no corporation could have ignored Mars. But as it was, when the Mars Consortium suddenly established itself as an organization claiming the entirety of Mars, acquiring the ice-miners and random mining companies that were barely making a living, it was the subject of many jokes at high-profile events. After all, who would want that worthless planet? I myself laughed at the jokes - like I said before, what a fool I was. Little did I know that a combination of CIs, self-determination, and the peace that the people of Mars had built themselves had led to the greatest technological leap forward since the industrial revolution. And among those advancements was the Consortium Program."