Preferred Conclusions, Ltd.
HQ: Chicago, with small field offices across the globe.
Type: Private company (primary client: Infinity Unlimited).
Purpose: Expert interdimensional forgery and document processing services.
If you’re an academic with a strong work ethic, a firm grasp of at least one historical era, and an absolute indifference to being immediately blackballed for life from working for any university and/or historical foundation, Preferred Conclusions will happily give you a job. They’ll even throw in moving expenses. They sort of have to; people who openly work for Preferred Conclusions tend to want to move out of their old academic stomping grounds right quick, before some professor decides to get drunk one night and throw a brick through the window.
Why the animosity? Well, Preferred Conclusions is there to help Infinity Unlimited wreck the historical record on alternate timelines. When the I-Cops slip some personnel files into a bureaucratic office under cover of a natural disaster, they use files forged by Preferred Conclusions. When Alternate Outcomes is looting a museum or library when a city’s being looted, a Preferred Conclusions staffer is directing the snatch team. When Infinity Development needs to bamboozle historical figures into selling valuable pieces of real estate, Preferred Conclusions will provide background materials, psychological assessments, and known pressure points. The company doesn’t care what the job is, as long as it isn’t actually illegal by Homeline’s rather lenient standards. Everything else is fair game.
To their (marginal, at least in the opinion of regular members of the academic-industrial complex) credit, Preferred Conclusions really is a stickler for the law. Homeline law: nobody from the company intrinsically cares anything for the laws of other timelines, including those of historical echoes. The company doesn’t send many people out to other alternates very often; the few that do go out-time will follow local laws to avoid local retribution, but that’s just out of sheer pragmatism. The corporate atmosphere isn’t quite sociopathic, but ‘callous indifference’ comes pretty close to the general attitude.
Honestly, the only things that really keeps Preferred Conclusions in check are Homeline laws, and the need to keep Infinity Unlimited from ending its contract (the company does 95% of its work for Infinity). Which means that a Dark Infinity will have an even darker Preferred Conclusions. And that, if Infinity is getting darker in a particular campaign, symptoms of it will show up in what jobs Infinity starts asking Preferred Conclusions to do. It’s easier to spy on Preferred Conclusions than it is to spy on Infinity, too.
The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.