Evo
Radical transhumanists to the core. The most progressive major organization in the Sixth World, despite being a former Japanocorp -- they have a free spirit as their largest shareholder, and their current CEO is a Naga. This has gotten them into hot water, as they've largely been blamed for the CFD crisis due to their acceptance of Monads and AI's, though they've slowly bought their way back into acceptance. Acceptance isn't just a slogan for them -- any race, ethnicity, species, or gender can make it in Evo.
Culture
Evo looks like they’ve gone back to their deeply divided (one might even say “fragmented”) origins. This time, instead of Filipinos/metahumans/Buttercup vs. Japanese hardliners, it’s more like biological vs. digital. What everyone at Evo seems to have forgotten in the rush to have a naga CEO is that most naga are Awakened supremacists. Ever-increasing numbers of stories have leaked out about Ysil’s disdain for (and sometimes outright bigotry toward) anyone who hasn’t touched or been touched by mana in some way, especially AIs and Monads, who she sees as imitations of people at best. Given that two of Ysil’s competitors for the CEO job were an AI and a Monad, and that the Monads who stuck with Evo have been instrumental in helping the corp bounce back from the fallout of CFD, Ysil’s attitude is causing a lot of tension. There’s also the “small matter” of the Corporate Court’s investigation into Evo’s involvement with CFD, which only began after the NeoNET case was closed. Any revelations from that will probably cause even more fault lines—if the corp is even still around, now that former NeoNET CEO Richard Villiers has not-so-secretly kicked off an all-out shadow war against them
History
Nowadays, everyone knows Evo for their world- class augmentations and being the Official Corporation of Weird, but how did it all start? Back in the 2030s, they were called Yamatetsu, and they started as a Japanese/Filipino shipping company. As the corp grew, they developed a rep for meta-friendly products. In the 2040s, they literally fought their way into the ranks of the Corporate Court, backed in a corp war by Ares, Aztechnology, and Saeder-Krupp (who wanted to break the power of the other Japancorps). After Yamatetsu reached the Corporate Court, things got weirder. A Japanese exec named Hideo Yoshi- da arranged enough corporate shenanigans to both replace the founding chairman, Tadamako Shibanokuji, as chairman of the board, and oust the Filipino contin- gent from power in Yamatetsu. Yoshida and his chief crony (or as they like to call it, “President/CEO”) Saru Iwano steered Yamatetsu away from those pernicious foreign influences and the distasteful policy of treating kawaruhito (metahumans) like actual people, bringing them in line with the rest of the highly conservative and patriotic Japanacorps—or at least, they tried. Two major events in 2050 put a halt to Yoshida’s plans. First, Shibanokuji retook the chairmanship of Yamatetsu’s board and doubled down on the company’s meta-friendliness by both catering to metahuman customers and installing a record number (translated: “more than zero”) of metahumans in management positions. Then, Buttercup stepped in. Buttercup was a mystery investor who’d grabbed a good ten-percent stake in the company and the board seat that came with it during Yoshida’s coup against the Filipinos. She was also a free spirit, as she revealed to the rest of the board, supposedly in the middle of one of many vocal arguments between Shibanokuji and the embattled Yoshida. Buttercup’s revelation sent shockwaves through not just Yamatetsu, but the entire Japanese corporate-political complex. Letting metahumans take leadership positions was bad enough, but having a free spirit on a corporate board was unthinkable. That was the beginning of the break between Yamatetsu and the rest of the Japanacorps, accelerated by Shibanokuji’s increased acceptance of metahumans in management from 2056, and his death in 2059, when his son Yuri—an ork!—replaced him on the board of directors. Buttercup and Newton Chin (another director, who was as beholden to Buttercup as Tadamako had been) both threw their support behind Yuri as the new chairman Predictably, when the news got out that the new Yamatetsu chairman was an ork, their share price dropped like a rock. Investors scrambled to get as far away from the “deviant” Japanacorp as they could. The conservative faction of the Yamatetsu board lit- erally told Yuri to frag off or die, and when he refused to do either, they had an assassin put a bullet in him. Even that didn’t dissuade Yuri, though; in fact, the assassination attempt was what triggered Evo’s move to Vladivostok, once Yuri and Buttercup had weaseled enough of the board into voting to accept it. Buttercup convinced Ramon Dizon, head of the remnants of the Filipino faction of Yamatetsu, to join the Shibanokuji-Buttercup-Chin bloc, while also buying up enough shares in Yamatetsu to give her a whopping forty-three percent ownership. The conservative Japanese faction had no choice but to cave to the demand, and the company headquarters moved to Russia. 2064 brought the announcement that Yuri Shibanokuji was suffering from Methuselah’s Syndrome and was aging abnormally quickly (even for an ork) as a result. Combined with Crash 2.0 cutting Vladivostok off from the rest of the corp and Newton Chin passing away the same year, Yuri’s announcement gave the Iwano-headed Japanese faction the chance to run amok, both within and outside the corp. Some of the more radical members tried to take over pieces of Ares and the newly-collapsed Cross Applied Technologies in the wake of the Crash, and even got themselves involved in ongoing or just-finished wars in Poland and Central Asia. Luckily for Shibanokuji, the upheaval and Newton Chin’s death had given him and Buttercup control of fifty-one percent of Yamatetsu’s voting shares. When Vladivostok was re-connected to the rest of the world and the shiny new wireless Matrix, Shibanokuji called the corp to order and blamed Saru Iwano for the mutiny in Yamatetsu’s ranks. Iwano, in the finest Japanacorp tradition, committed seppuku as penance (or to avoid having to bend a knee to an ork, you decide). With the corporation now firmly in their control, Shibanokuji and Buttercup began transforming Yamatetsu into Evo. They appointed a former Russian astronaut named Anatoly Kirilenko to replace Iwano as CEO (and act as Evo’s liaison to the Vory v Zakone) and drafted a corporate policy they called the “Terms of Unity” that became the foundation of the sunshine-and-rainbows-we’re-all-equal policy we now call EvoCulture. In the second half of the 2060s, they reinforced their “we welcome everyone” image and expanded their operations worldwide, including into several Awakened nations. In the 2070s, Evo took their controversy international. First it was the company’s open acceptance of technomancers when they appeared on the scene in 2070, alongside the AIs they’d been courting since the Crash at least. Then it was the “Fake Justice Hino” scandal, where it was discovered that Corporate Court Chief Justice Yoshiko Hino was actually dead and Evo had replaced her with a very convincing AI. Then, the knowledge Evo had gained while creating Fake Justice Hino went into another program called the Dickens Project— which we now all know was Evo’s contribution to what would eventually, in partnership with NeoNET, become CFD. The Evo board also appointed the naga Ysil as the second “sentient non-metahuman” megacorp CEO in history, but with CFD threatening to overrun the world (including former-CEO Kirilenko, who had gotten infected with it and was later killed, which is why Ysil was promoted in the first place), most people in the shadows didn’t even notice.
Comments