The Pleiades Corporation

Pleiades, The Seven Sisters, also known as Messier 45 is a constellation well known to amateur and professional stargazers alike. In the middle years of the twenty-first century this name was appropriated to name a corporation. This corporation's meteoric rise was nearly miraculous in character; for nearly thirty years the corporation succeeded in every endeavor, even the most outlandish.

The corporation was founded by seven sisters, orphans after their parents were lost in a suspicious accident during their father's public demonstration of the first practical portable fusion power system. The sisters, the youngest were still teenagers at the time, proved far more capable, and aggressive in protecting their father's work, than any might have expected. They took their cue from the fact they were seven sisters, and the year 2045, to name their new corporation, formed to commercialize their father's work, after Messier 45, the Pleiades constellation also called The Seven Sisters. The corporation maintained a fairly low profile at first, focused on building the first practical fusion space drive, they had only a prototype, and an ugly purely utilitarian one at that, ready in time for the Martian Colony disaster of 2047-2049. Despite the prototype nature, unproven design, and limited capability, this DSTV became the hero of the day, saving tens of thousands of colonists. Suddenly known to everyone, the corporation leveraged this goodwill into a host of new subsidiaries, including major power delivery systems, exotic materials, and metals refining. The corporation also used monies earned to quickly purchase a range of other businesses and by 2052 had become the largest company on Earth. Throughout the 2050s and 2060s it seemed this young corporation had perfect judgement, and the company grew to over a million, then ten million, then over a billion employees by 2060. In the same time period the corporation founded and supported a new colony on Mars, as well as colonies on Ganymede, Titan, and the growth of the luxury domes of Luna, on Earth's moon. Corporate facilities were built on Calisto, scattered across the asteroid belt, and even the ultra-secret intelligence headquarters on Oberon orbiting Uranus.

Over the next ten years this corporation became so large and powerful, so utterly unchallenged, that what few governments remained in 2070 were nothing but window dressing to cover the Corporation's absolute control of life throughout the solar system. The Sisters grew into despotic rulers of humanity's billions, on Earth and the colonies across the solar system. The domed communities of the moon, called Luna, were the exclusive province of the wealthy elite of the corporation. Technically the corporation owned Luna, and the inhabitants were either executives of the corporation, retirees, or former "unemployed" who had earned favor in some way (usually nefarious). By 2075 you either worked for the corporation, and accepted absolute control of every aspect of your life by corporate policies, or you lived outside the corporate zones; the dark lower levels of megacities (called downlevel), the unincorporated asteroid mines, the outer fringes of colonial facilities on Mars, or similar dark corners of society. For most people it was just a "normal" life. For the few who look beneath the thin veneer of society, it had become a world of desperate danger, and incredible opportunity, if you were good enough and didn't mind getting a bit dirty in the process.

Major Corporate Facilities
2095

The crawler colonies of Titan, with a combined population exceeding half a billion drawn by the high pay and low living expenses, formed the largest source of hydrocarbon raw feedstock, mostly used for medical purposes and polymer manufacture. The facility on Oberon, the second most distant facility in the solar system was known to exist, but denied in all official documents. This intelligence facility is thought to house massive computing systems for machine learning and behavior analysis, along with massive fusion power systems. The most distant facility, the deep space observation platform in a stable solar orbit at 45 AU, took over a month to reach in a long range DSTV and housed a permanent population of over thirty two thousand with a rotating population of more than one hundred thousand researchers. The Colony on Ganymede used fusion power to support massive hydroponics operations under the ice worked by over three hundred million residents, and provided nearly half the agricultural output of the solar system. Calisto, nearby, housed the secondary headquarters of the corporation, and boasted a permanent population of more than two hundred million along with a visiting population of nearly fifty million. On Mars the Hives supported a population exceeding two billion, entirely dependent on fusion power and food from Ganymede. Luna's population was capped at half a billion, and only rarely did a condominium open up for a new resident. The terraforming satellites of Venus and the solar focusing satellites supporting the tungsten mines on the dark side of Mercury housed a mere hundred million, mostly temporary workers. The remaining 8 billion were inhabitants of Earth, and population global control policies ensure that all population growth will happen elsewhere in the solar system.