Corporation

In hanyo times, the corporation was the only social structure on earth. Governments had ceased to have power in the 2040s, and the Helios Fail of 2048 finished off whatever was left of them. By 2050 all human males were stakeholders in one corporation or the other, and they all lived in the corporate enclaves, while most females, known as 'slags', lived in corporate service territories and did hard, brutal work for a meagre living, while a small privileged minority known as chicks, lived and worked in the corporate enclaves.

In the twentieth century

Zigsa's trunk of treasures led her to believe, contrary to her teachers' assertion that corporations were a hanyo invention of the early twenty first century, that they had existed long before the rise of the hanyos, and the hanyos had inherited them from their fathers, the Old Men. Zigsa discovered that the corporate strategies of dispossessing and enslaving people and destroying the earth and its systems were much older than the hanyos would admit, and that far from being the benign providers and rewarders of 'merit' that they presented themselves to be, corporations had always been cover operations for evil.

The 'manpower' crisis of the 2030s

Around 2035 the Old Men were panicking, because Male Hypertoxic Syndrome was killing their sons. Some Old Men recruited men from lower social strata to take the place of the vanished heirs to corporate boardrooms and clubs, but that could only be a temporary solution. When Pradip Shankar announced his success in saving the first batch of hanyo babies, there was jubilation. Rich and powerful fathers queued up to have their sons save, or to adopt sons whom their parents did not want or could not afford to support. This created a social vacuum that sucked men up into the privileged and less visible spaces of corporate power, while on the streets, young women growing up without brothers were partying like it was the end of the world. A few cautionary voices wrned that the men hadn't vanished: they were controlling everything behind the scenes, but in the initial years this was regarded as unwarranted pessimism and raining on one's parade. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, teenage hanyos began to take over corporations bigger than countries and to plot for world domination.

The Corporate Wars

Beginning slightly earlier than the Bitch Wars, and continuing at least in name till 2050, the Corporate Wars involved competition for customers, employees and market share. By the 2030s, the younger workforce was predominantly female. They would get hired right out of college and given a company charge card and an empty flat. They would have to furnish the flat with products all made by their employer, because of the Total Home Solution, a corporate standard since 2032. Everything in the home was networked and the whole system fit together seamlessly. Your shower talked to your wardrobe which talked to your fridge, which talked to your microwave and your garage door, which talked to your car. That is, until you got rootkitted. If someone employed by another corporation, who could be your neighbour on the bus, or someone at the next table in the cafe, was close enough to you for their devices to be in range of yours, the Dark Hacks of the rival corp could install a rootkit on any of your devices. This would cause your home to go haywire, locking you out, burning your clothes, or tossing all your food in the garbage. If you were a valuable employee, your bosses would sanction a cleanup, otherwise they just abandoned you t the tender mercies of your rootkitter. If the rootkitting corp didn't want you, you were effectively homeless.

Rootkitting caused intense anger among its targets, and became a strong reason for them to join Bitch Groups and wage war against the hanyo corps. After the Sweep of 2050 the corporations confined themselves to their core territories and only sniped at each other on the margins, thus ending this phase of the Corporate Wars.

The Bitch Wars

The Bitch Wars were the next step in corporate domination of the world. The New Daughters, as they were called, had a disruptive effect on patriarchal power structures, and older women rallied to protect and support them. This led to a split between women and Old Men, resulting in such vicious propaganda wars that many women stopped calling themselves by that term and insisted on begin known as 'people'. Having got a small taste of freedom, people became increasingly militant as the ahnyos sought to clamp down on every perceived threat. A number of pro-people groups resorted to terrorism as things got worse, and the corporations responded with deadly force. Then in 2047 Antarctica was opened up for oil prospecting, and the New York-based superconglomerate Helios Energy bagged the franchise. Helios were known for their use of deep fracking techniques to mine petroleum from the sea bed, and there was a storm of controversy over their winning the race for Antarctica. The CEO of Helios assured the world that all care would be taken to preserve the fragile ecosystem of the continent. Three weeks later he was dead, along with New York and most of the coastal cities of the world, as the Ross ice shelf collapsed and took with it most of the world's centres of government and commerce. This broke the back of the resistance groups and ended the Bitch Wars.

The Sweep of 2050

There ensued a period of paranoia among the hanyos. As many Old Men had supported the Bitch Groups, the hanyos saw them as a potential threat, but there were too many of them to take down safely. They therefore decided to offer all of these men a place in the corporations. Recruiting roadshows set out, appealing to Old Men to come forward and sit in the Masterchair, an imposing black leather confection where, the men were told, they could sit and say anything they wanted, rant at the hanyos and their ways, and then get offered a dream job. 'Just come and talk to us,' said the hanyos to the Old Men, 'even if you won't work with us.' Ambitious climbers were offered status, wealth and luxury in a world where most people could not afford to eat anything but starch, and wear anything but plastic. Bleeding hearts were offered amnesty and the chance to make hange. Family men brought their loved ones with them, singles were offered any chicks they wanted. Men could dream about education for their children and good matches for their daughters. About twenty percent of men refused all offers and were allowed to leave, but what they didn't know was that the few minutes they had spent sitting on the Masterchair had sterilised them permanently. Towards the end, as the men out there grew fewer and their comrades deserted them, pretences were dropped and the last few men were rounded up and disposed of.

During this period there was also a 'territory reshuffle' where the corporations agreed to divide the earth up between them. This made them effectively governments, except that they owned everything and everyone, and instead of rights there was Human Resources.

THe Robot Wars

This was the last phase of corporate conflict at the end of the twenty first and beginning of the twenty second. Ramdhun Corporation