Pushback!
There are a lot of misconceptions about what it’s like, working on a corp site on a corp world. I don’t know who to blame more: people who have never worked for one, or people who have never been offworld. Probably it’s the ones who are both.
And, to be fair: corps make great villains, in fiction. Sneering, intolerant of failure, callously impersonal, dedicated to the bottom line. What’s not to love in a bad guy? Only, in the real universe the corps are all aware that you can build a robot in a day, a base in a year — but a human takes two decades to grow, and another one to develop to full maturity. In space, people are a corp’s most valuable resource… and they’ve got the spreadsheets to prove it.
So when I ran into Mika’s office (no use of interceptable comlinks, obviously), all I had to do was say “Lifeping.” firmly enough for her to smash the Big Red Button. That started an automatic process that would end with every planetary system with a human presence sending back a message saying Yup, we’re alive. And if one didn’t? Well, checking that out would be the next step, right?
“So, which one?” Mika asked me as she went through the next step on the checklist: to wit, pulling out a drawer and making sure her personal weapons were charged or fueled or whatever. Another thing corps learned early: when it comes to exploiting the Tomb Worlds, in terms of long term ROI there’s nothing like arming your employees to the teeth. Bullet holes are easy enough to patch.
I wish my employer was half that awesome.
Which is not to say my employer is bad, just that they haven’t issued me any weapons and do not have an automatic system to check that I am still alive.
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I doubt they consider either to be any sort of useful.
Yes, but the population of Sol Three, today, provides for relatively easily replacement of you .. or me, for that matter.
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In the world of “Ghosts”, it sure sounds like there aren’t enough meatbags for all the necessary work.. which would tend to change things a bit.
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Of course, I could be wrong.
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Mew