Jumbonano, let's be honest here: if you're a hypercorp in EP, LN is about the "best" you get. It only goes downhill into full-on villainy from there.

Could you use a more specific title for your posts? I hate to be a grammer nazi about it, but a title of "Corporations" could mean a number of things. It could for instance be about making a new corporations, or talking about pre-fall corporations. A thread title of "Morally Bankrupt Corporations" would be better. Anyways, I'm not sure about the most morally bankrupt, but I'm confident that Cognite is highly dangerous. Not so much about how dangerous they try to be, but rather how much risk they tend to take and how little precautions/responsibility they have. They have their own clean up task force, not because they think they should take responsibility but rather they don't want any more trouble with the hypercorp special police (Oversight). They're getting tired of cleaning up after Cognite. Despite their efforts, their special police is understaffed, inexperienced, and greatly overworked.

I agree with Noble Pigeon. Go-Nin group is supposed to be the most unscrupulous and ruthless corporation in the inner system (they're also one of the only megacorps left). Go-Nin also has fingers in a ton of pies and their own Pandora gate, so they're probably one of the most generically powerful corporations in system.

Leetsepeak wrote:

They say Somatek is actually the most reformist of the uplifting hypercorps, and actually features a lot of uplifts in positions of authority that were previously uplifted by the hypercorp.

I just double-checked Panopticon, and now I have no idea where I got the idea that uplifts didn't like them. :/ That's completely my bad.

You could check Gatecrashing. It talks about the guy who "stepped down" from his CEO position at Somatek to take control of a moon beyond a gate that he had purchased before his "retirement". The facilities there are for studying uplifts. Stuff they do includes buying uplift rejects, leaving them in hellish conditions when they aren't studying them, and doing a lot of unethical stuff that you couldn't do back home. Some Firewall concerns have been raised by some evidence that he may be doing research on making async smart animals. See GateCrashing p. 135 & p. 192

Leetsepeak wrote:

No worries, I thought the exact same thing until I stumbled onto that a few days ago. I suspect you and I were both thinking of Somatek's founder, who seems to take a paternalistic view of uplifts to an oppressive extreme. That, combined with historical information about how they treated uplifts like Jumbles and stuff, it's easy for a casual reader to walk away with an idea in their mind that Somatek is bad news bears.

I feel obliged to remind you that Somatek [b]are[/b] still Bad News Bears, they just are no longer Double Evil Pandora Portal Black Label-tier villainy. Need I remind you, they [i]happily[/i] enforce indenture terms on the uplifts they make. Creating an entire caste of people specifically to enslave them is still Single Evil Black Label-tier villainy, no matter how lighthanded you make it; at the end of the day, Somatek expects their uplifts to work their way to freedom, and the uplifts have no say in it. And how, exactly, do you think Somatek responds if one of their soft-hand-treated uplifts gets some damn fool notion like "Freedom is the right of all sapient beings" in their heads and refuses to work, huh? Obviously, they won't just say "Well, fine, we're cutting you loose." That would not only be a loss on one investment, it would encourage the others to go full Ghandi and refuse to work, too. No, [u]then[/u] we see what they'll do. Probably they grab the uplift in the middle of the night, and either sell their indenture contract to someone who's much less likely to be gentle-handed with them (like, say, the Shui Fong triads who are [i]happy[/i] to put an unwilling indenture to use in their brothels,) or they break out the psychosurgery to replace all that damn fool idealistic "autonomy" shit with "love the corp, live for the corp, work for the corp with a smile, die for the corp with a smile" shit. Don't confuse "as a general rule, we find that affording our slaves a modicum of dignity and comfort yields a better return on investment than hork hork tyranny" with "are okay blokes."

This could be a good time to ask questions about how evil the corporations might be once there are no longer an abundant supply of infugees in cold storage. At some point, they'll run out, and some time later all the remaining contracts will end. Sure they'll be many, possibly a great many, that will get bad contracts or pick bad terms and thus will have to indenture themselves once more, but I'm sure that most will eventually learn their lesson. As I see it, a lot of the bad things they do is possible because there aren't forces out there that can/will challenge them. Most of the other forces in the inner system are other Hypercorps, and they too feast on the exploited labor of infugees, so they have a motive to maintain the status quo. The outer system might be willing to oppose, but they lack the numbers and the foothold to make much of a difference. The indentures themselves might be willing, but most are still under the illusion that they can overcome the glass ceiling that will keep them in poverty. Even if they weren't, they don't have the resources or the organization required (yet) to do much. If the Hypercorps lack foresight, then they might end up hastening the end of indentureship far better than those who actually want it to end. In order to get a competitive edge over their competition, they will likely try to use more indentured labor. In doing so, they will use up indentures faster. The competition don't want someone to get an edge over them, so they'll hire on more indentures too. They'll use up the remaining storage in no time, and will eventually have to give all the indentures they morphs they are owed (and everything else they promised). Once the lower class have some power and are no longer desparate, the power of the Hypercorps will be diminished. I suppose they could continue to use indentureship on Uplifts. They literally create their work force that way. They might also choose to do the same to AGIs. Actually, do the books say that AGIs get indentured to pay for their production? I don't remember. They could also hand out shittier contracts. Not just contracts that last longer or give out worse pay, but contracts that have fine print or don't properly prepare an individual to survive on their own. You finish your contract and now have a splicer morph. Great! Its now time to live the good life that you saw in all those vids the corps were so kind to offer. First thing first, you're hungry. However, you don't have any money for food. You also don't have anywhere to sleep...

As Leetsepeak says, every hypercorp engages in slavery pretty much, and has since well before the Fall. There's a sidebar in Rimward, I think, which highlights that the Extropian/right-libertarian/an-cap hyper/microcorps just juggle the verbiage and ideology around a bit but do the same thing with a sign-off that's basically like, "Tell your friend who is now a slave to read up on Extropian contract law next time, sheesh." so I think it might just be Titanian microcorps that don't engage in the practice on a broad scale, of the corp structures. So really, depends on the kind of evil you want to layer onto the monumental evil of slavery (and slavery of survivors of an apocalypse, to boot)! Fa Jing is my fave big bad, Direct Action can do some of the more atrocity-level stuff more frequently than the others, but it's worth mentioning that they are also in the public spotlight (spotlights plural, really, since there's a very different filter on Morningstar vs PC spotlights on hypercorp actions, and inner system vs outer and Sifter vs Solarian and Jovian vs Locus and so on) since FJ and DA are both [b]major[/b] shareholders/controlling interests in the PC. On the other hand, the numerous smaller mining hypercorps are probably able to get away with more evil shit more often, and I wouldn't put it past smaller private security companies (especially those with practically sure-thing contract renewals on their primary sources of income, like Herzog with the Pathfinder Gate and Pathfinder City) to really pull out all the stops during massacres and go for broke. The system is a scary place, but not all of that scary is exsurgents and basilisk hacks. Some of it is people conditioned to do heinous shit over and over again in the shiny, rotting ruins that are trying to swell and distend to fill an absence 9 billion people strong.

Honestly, I think that's a realistic element of the setting. Sure, some hypercorp stuff is cartoonishly bad and exploitative (what's a good speculative fiction without some exaggeration), but honestly, most corporate entities are actually basically amoral structures with the intention of making profit via whatever it is that corporation produces. Most of them won't go out of their way to be ludicrously exploitative or malicious to the common man or their employees, but their whole purpose is to generate money. Hypercorps are just what happens when you let technology streamline that process and hand the oversight to the corps themselves. If it'll hurt their bottomline, they'll avoid it, and some know they aren't big enough to sweep the really bad shit under the rug so they don't bother, and some survive in their niche by being nice and friendly to employees and customers (like today), but a corporation exists to produce a profit for itself - some of them just happen to do so by making things you like.

I agree with NP, I wanna see a Hypercapitalism supplement or a Planetary Consortium supplement written as if for Ozma newbie eyes rather than Firewall...or maybe that'd be more interesting to do for a Belters or Commonwealth or Autonomist Alliance supplement now that I think of it. [b]That[/b] would be the place to peel back the rug on the underside of some nasty Firewall secrets, but also of some of the others you call out as setting darlings! It almost makes me wanna write short fiction from the perspective of an Ozma agent...

IIRC the next one is one about criminals.