"The miners went on strike yesterday. I paid off some pirates to go kill the foreman that had been working them up. I tipped off the miners at the last minute and it was a pretty impressive battle. After the last pirate died, I got all the miners who were left and gave them a few concessions and some funeral expenses, much fewer than we would normally have had to. I'm riding that battle solidarity all the way to a corner office."
~Overseer Tang Midan, SMC
Mining
SMC is the most prolific asteroid mining firm among all gigacorporations. They ply the
Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the
Oort Cloud. They have an absolutely immense labor force made up of
Clones,
Uplifted, and
Shackled AI.
Alchemy
SMC has experimented heavily with
Atomic Restructuring, and has used it to gain a huge market share in raw resources. They have begun opening public-service franchises called 'SMC Remake!' on most worlds where, for a fee, one material can be turned to another at a rate of about one pound a week.
Sanctions and Scoffing
Most recently, SMC gained some severe bad press via a series of accidents in their experimental facilities. Originally, a space station in permanent opposition orbit to
Neptune was attempting to open a stable portal to
Whitespace. The containment failed and the result was the largest genesis explosion in known history, causing a
hazardous debris cloud that makes navigating opposite
Neptune hazardous and killing most of the research team. Judging
Whitespace to be too dangerous, the SMC instead began experimenting with
Redspace portals, which they found could be more stable. Their facility on
Deimos was then nearly overrun by
Redspace Adversarial Intelligences, and SMC was fined and banned from further experimenting. They tied down regulatory authorities in lawsuits and it's a generally accepted fact that they continue to experiment with mining extradimensional spaces in some capacity somewhere. Everyone generally hopes that it's not near them.
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