"I'd like to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the press that several of the buildings damaged in the blast were owned by Weyland Consortium subsidiaries… I'd say it's nothing personal, but corporations are people, too."
Jack Weyland was a university boy who attended Ivy Consolidated given his parents' combined wealth in private venture. They wanted him to become a businessman. He decided to become an engineer, instead, until he dropped out and founded his own research lab where the science-fiction of nanoferrules became reality. Several investments and a half-baked marriage later, Weyland-Osman Materials was born, and with it, the grant money and government contracts that allowed for the full realization of its next phase, Weyland Constortium. Investing across a multi-layered portfolio of business interests, Weyland Consortium turned its full attention to constructing the Beanstalk, the beyond-ambitious space elevator of Jack's engineering dreams. In ten years and the substantial pooling of much of the world's government wealth, the Beanstalk was a reality. Jack immediately turned his attention to next tackling more efficient space travel, off-world colonization, and fusion refinement, but the Weyland board of directors deemed him too fast and forward-thinking. Wanting to protect their massive investment capital for the Beanstalk project, they ousted Jack Weyland from his own corporation.
Weyland, himself, left to fund many of his own projects, and remains an enigmatic visionary amidst a system which became far larger than he intended, and one which is utterly corrupt in his absence.
At this point, the Consortium is so cross-networked in New Angeles and beyond that no one can really say what their line of business is. They buy and sell assets, intellectual properties, land grants, and patent claims anywhere and everywhere. Pharmaceuticals, building contracts, weapons and security factories, mining subsidiaries, and agricultural conglomerates are all within their purview. The operative question today isn't what Weyland owns, but how you ought to stay out of their way. With Jack Weyland's departure, the Consortium has become a profit-at-all-costs mega-entity, bent on control, manipulation, and subversion. More often than not, a hacker looking to skim creds or information off of their servers doesn't end up netjacked and booted, they end up dead.
The Weyland Consortium's particular skill-set is having a connection to nearly anything you involve yourself with on a daily basis, especially infrastructure. The road you're walking on? Built and owned by Weyland. The apartment block in which you live? Same. The temp job you took to scrape between runs? Weyland subsidiary. Effectively anything not directly controlled by the few other global/stellar megacorps has Weyland's fingerprints all over it. With a controlling interest in Globalsec, the planet's largest and most effective private security force, Weyland maintains a standing army in all but name. Innumerable shell corportaions ensure that global profit markets effectively all feed back into the Weyland kitty. Examples include Jemison Aeronautics, GRNDL, Argus Security, Gagarin Deep Space, and Titan Transnational. Mercenaries, hitmen, blackhackers, and even most of the local cartel leaders ultimately get paid by Weyland and sit comfortably in their pocket, unless they screw up, at which point they're vaporized without ceremony.
What does Weyland want?
- To advance agendas with impunity
- To direct the flow of logistics and resources
- To absorb other corporations at little cost
What doesn't Weyland want?
- To have their security compromised
- To be discredited in public
- To allow loose ends
Weyland NPCs:
Elizabeth Mills, executive
- A master of spin and double-talk, adept at deflecting blame and nullifying negative exposure
- Has any number of rapid response teams on a short leash, capable of "de-escalating" scenarios
- Incredibly paranoid about being replaced, overshadowed, or caught in failure
Mr. Stone, fixer
- Responsible for the quiet and efficient removal of dissenting opinions, internally and externally
- Net presence buried behind a mountain of hunter/killer ICE protocols
- Former Globalsec chief of operations, SanSan Branch
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