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Soon-Bok, an automated military powerhouse, suffers from having too many guns and not enough people. A problem they solve by exporting their high-tech firearms and augments to other territories for hefty profits. Prior attempts at conquering other territories through force had always gained initial success, but stock market manipulation had brought Soon-Bok's forceful advances to a grinding halt before any real progress could be made. The mass-manufacture of automatons for the purpose of warfare often left Soon-Bok in the red after every attempt.
For the organic residents of Soon-Bok, life is quite comfortable compared to other megacities. Habi-cubes are built with families and recreational space in mind, an attempt to bolster their military forces with cheap, expendable humanoids. The incredible affordability of guns and hardware has made the lower levels of Soon-Bok a constant gang war for imported Saraswati drugs, Czarina drinks, and the territory to sell them on. Out of these gang factions, two stand out from the rest. The Integral Ducks and The Truthful Jewels; headed up by Mal-Chin the Persistent and Mi-Cha the Beautiful, respectively.
Due to the territory being deep within the realms of the All-Gobi desert, massive terraforming efforts have taken place to keep Soon-Bok habitable. Efforts such the Wall Dosi, a gigantic wall made of megacities intent on keeping the desert beyond it with help from heavy desalination projects lining its many coastlines. Other projects include the Furnace Dosi, which instead regulate temperature by grounding out heat and utilizing it in their industries, conducted away from the populated portions of the spire.
Even before the temperatures finally caught up with the region, North-East Asia, by certain quirks of geography, remained one of the safest, and most habitable regions of the southern climes. The mountains sheltered fertile valleys with rain that never made it further inland, the polar sea currents kept the waters cool enough that fish migrations into the areas kept them full of seafood, the geothermal power of the region gave easy access to power before advancements in solar made the source redundant.The territory that would one day become Soon-Bok rose from the vast mineral needs of the first megacity projects. Immense amounts of rare earth metals, basic functioning building materials, and all the necessities of raising spires that would scratch the upper limits of the atmosphere meant that there were some regions of the world, however hot, that were simply impossible to completely abandon. The North-East Asian zones were easily exploited given that the full effects of climate change came to them last, and when they finally did arrive,immense automation and terraforming efforts went into securing the mineral wealth of these places in the lower latitudes. It wasn't until the old nation states began to fall apart that Soon-Bok Heavy Ordnance would find its market share rise from just another manufacturing corporation to one of the holding companies that run the new world.
The Genewars kicked off when a collection of nations from around the world, those who either could not, or had not, invested heavily in the Bunker Project, but had not yet collapsed into full anarchy, decided that their best option was military conquest. The massively population dense North-East Asia was their target of choice, along with others such as the former siberian steppe. The war exploded across the world as massive automated, A.I. controlled drone fleets were launched to attempt to systematically exterminate the populations of those regions. The remnants of other nations, already beginning the efforts to move underground, turned their genevats and manufacturing efforts towards a last, desperate bid to save as many people as they could.
They created the Nayalings, beings stronger, faster, and more capable of fighting in the wars than baseline humans. The Nayalings, unlike other genetic modification projects, cast away any idea of keeping the subjects looking human, so that they wouldn't be identified as targets by the invading A.I. swarms. Their scientists used the new nano-fabrication forges to create ancient weapons capable of cutting through the best of surface armor, and armor capable of withstanding the former weapons. They were supplied with magnetic rail weaponry, and EMP explosives, and sent to war to save the world. As they deflected the first attacks, the A.I. controlled drone fleets reorganized, and began to spread to other territories, the Nayalings followed. The efforts to build, and maintain this genetically enhanced army rather than finishing the last stages of the bunker network no doubt assisted in the full collapse of the bunker networks into anarchy, and as they did, the Nayalings were cut off. By this time, the nations that had launched the drone fleets had also completely fallen into anarchy. The A.I., lacking maintenance, either shut down or escaped into the nascent digitial realms. The world was saved, but the Nayalings were left without their leaders, or a shred of proof that there ever had been an enemy, but their weaponry and armor, from the katana to the gauss rifle, had been spread across the entirety of the new world. And just in time, for without a firm hand on the wheel, the automated forced biodiversity biofactories had gone out of control, and the last remnants of the old world died under a flood of mutated flesh.
Soon-Bok Heavy Ordnance was founded during this conflagration. It supplied one, possibly more, of the sides with heavy munitions and other military supplies. The same thing that truly ended the conflict once and for all pushed Soon-Bok into eminence. The rampant forced biodiversity initiative stations of the North Pacific began pumping out monstrosities beyond counting. Mutants and Kaiju rampaged across the Pacific side of the world, and forced several of the megacity founding corporations to pool assets to put an end to it in the most permanent manner possible. The Ronin Expedition spearheaded these efforts, putting out the call for mercenary forces and offering them bases of operations and logistical support, and Soon-Bok Heavy Ordinance won the bid to supply Ronin with the munitions to do so. They leveraged the deals to acquire the earliest dosi's from the current holding company, and then leveraged that extended wealth to purchase yet more. Today no one remembers what Zaibatsu was the original holding company that ruled over the territories that Soon-Bok controls today. The leading families of the Zaibatsus, by and large, retired to the Walled Street early into its formation, becoming some of the earliest members of both the shareholder ruling class, and the inhabitants of the Bezosphere.
Several times, Soon-Bok turned its actual military hardware, in the form of enormous automated warfare drones, against holdouts, forcing them to capitulate in exceedingly hostile takeovers. Fueled by massive stockpiles of weapons, and the angry remnants of the Nayaling armies, the first war took everyone by surprise. The war drastically cut not only into Soon-Bok's own profits, but into the profit margins of other territories, and in turn, Soon-Bok's own shareholders pulled the plug, leveraging insider trading to crash the stock of Soon-Bok, and force their executives to give up their dreams of world domination through military violence.
It might have ended there, but then Soon-Bok attempted to launch a second war of conquest, when their original shareholders had immigrated to the Bezosphere, and they thought they had slipped their leash. Once again the shareholders played games of insider trading, and forced an early end. Then, a small megacity in what was becoming the New Sarajevo Interest Zone (one day to become the territory of Sarajevo Seven Holdings) invented something that changed the world. The fractious and warring corpo-states of the NSIZ had never gone to full blown warfare like Soon-Bok had on its neighbors, at least, not with as much verve or flair, but they engaged in constant skirmishes and attempts at hostile takeovers. One of these corpo-states, after seeing the funds of one of their allies completely drained from the digitally run central banking system by means of quantum computing backed hacking, sought a way to protect its funds. They invented the cred-chip, a tiny, quantum-computing storage device that contained a perfect and impossible to break record of quantum data that represented currency. This data could not be hacked, required no central processing system, and the only way to steal it was to physically steal the chip that contained the credit data. It might have died then and there, never to be popularized... but Soon-Bok saw in it a way forward. They invested heavily in the new invention, and transferred all their liquid wealth into it. They banned all trade through the old central banking system, and demanded all trade be made in credits through credit chip compatible systems. The world still needed Soon-Bok's mineral wealth, and Soon-Bok was far too strong to force the issue via military might. As the world began the transition to Credit-Chips, Soon-Bok attempted to launch a war with stockpiles of enormous credit, so that they could ignore the shareholders.
The third war was by far the longest of their invasion attempts up until that point, but in the end, it failed for the same reasons. No amount of stockpiled credit could ever surpass the greed of the executive classes and the impact of losing so much stock value. And so a pattern was established, Soon-Bok would build up vast wells of credit, carefully squirreling them away, downsizing employment and upping automation to cut down on costs to save yet more credit, build up what it thought was enough of a reserve, and then launch a war. The war would continue for longer than the last, but inevitably, it too would end in their defeat.
6 times, Soon-Bok has launched full blown assaults against the rest of the world. Invading Saraswati, Czarina, the Ronin Expedition, and even J.A.V. Once they managed to launch an attack on the Walled Street and Nazzdack itself. Each time they have been defeated not by direct military confrontation, but by stock manipulation and direct economic warfare, cutting their ability to wage war off at the knees and forcing them out of the ruinously expensive process of waging war against the world. After the 6th invasion attempt, the investors in Nazzdack, and some say, the Bezosphere, had had enough. A ELF named Hwang Jin, some say the only man to leave the Walled Street, others say the specially chosen representative of the world's hyper-elite, arrived with his Remake "Children" and declared himself in control. The Bloodless Coup of Soon-Bok was executed in a series of lightning raids, blackmail, and perfect corporate warfare that in the last half century became the textbook template by which inter-corporate warfare was waged. Catspaws, agents, blackmail, sabatoge, and perhaps a targetted assassination or two, no more, no less. Soon-Bok's warmongering ways would be put aside, Hwang Jin was here to insure steady, quarterly, profits, not only for Soon-Bok, but for its neighbors. There would be no more disruption of the supply of golden rocket tickets. Today, Soon-Bok is held as an object example of why war is unprofitable, though all nations watch them with one eye.
Soon-Bok's corporations largely take a disinterested view in running their
own territories, instead giving tacit permission to various criminal gangs to oversee the operations of the
lower levels of their vastly automated Dosei. Gangs are given semi-official placement within
Soon-Bok's structure, often derived from worker crews that govern specific functions of the dosi
functions, whether it be mining equipment, water filtration, cooling grids, or solar furnace mirrors. These
associations often take on flowerful names to represent their whole group, derived from transposing the
numbers assigned to their work unit and then converting them into ancient pictographic glyphs whose meaning
is all but lost, before picking a name based on what the combined glyphs look like. The corpo-cops do not
come down into the undercity, nor do they interfere overly much in smuggling operations provided that a cut
of all profits are kicked up to the managers and directors, and the fighting doesn't interrupt the
smooth operation of the dosi's ability to manufacture and support life.
Among the upper levels
the management engages in a ballroom dance of subtle maneuvers and deadly duels of wit and skill.
Assassination is not unheard of, but more common are subtle arrangements that lead to losses of face, and
thus, position. Each Dosi Spire is ruled by a single director, who in turn oversees fractious executives who
must answer both to him as director of the spire, and to the actual owner of their employing company.
Corpo-Cops are used far more often in the protection of individual executives from poisoning and
assassination attempts, or in the execution of those same attempts, than they are in enforcement actions in
the lower levels of the spires. The management only deploys them when the gangs have utterly failed to
enforce 'order' in the appropriate manner (which is to say: the flow of money has been
interrupted somehow). Corpo-cops only go to the undercities when on a direct mission for the manager or
executive they answer too, or when the director of a spire has determined that a purge is necessary to get
the flow of goods and services functioning at an acceptable level once more.
Soon-Bok Heavy Ordnance controls a mountainous and mineral rich stretch of the
most geothermally active territory in all of the New World, in addition, they have built far further south
than any other holding company, retaining territory in latitudes long since abandoned in the rest of the
world. They export vast quantities of both finished and raw goods to every other place in the world, but the
majority of their money inevitably goes to the vast amount of preventative maintenance in maintaining the
dosi so far into the All-Gobi.
Their major income sources are as follows:
Soon-Bok Heavy Ordinance has special trade relations with the following Territories:
It should be noted that tourist attraction and travel prices in Soon-Bok are deliberately kept as close to cost as possible, and even below cost, to encourage immigration. Soon-Bok is making an active attempt to try and entice as many employees from other territories into immigrating as possible. For this reason it is not considered a major earner in their economy, despite its prevalence, up to and including several dosi almost entirely dedicated to it. This voracious appetite for new employees has other holding companies worried, for they can see no proper explanation for it, nor how dovetails with their current rapid buildup of military manufacturing.
Soon-Bok is a culture of extremes, from the environment they live in, to the
levels of etiquette most are expected to maintain and the amount of weaponry available. These extremes in
many things are what define the people of Soon-Bok, regardless of whatever dosi they hail
from.
Practically everyone is incredibly well armed, and most children receive a weapon from the
class they scored the highest marks in upon graduation from the corporate boarding schools. It is considered
unusual for someone in Soon-Bok to NOT know how to properly use a weapon, even if it is superfluous to their
job (the logic being: if they can't use it properly, they won't know how important it is to buy
the latest upgrade, and are more likely to kill themselves with it, thus removing them as a customer
unnecessarily). This level of armament also impacts the structures of Dosei, where even the paper walls and
tattamis are made from bullet proof carbon fullerene rather than normal materials.The gangs of the undercity
are all not only armed, but know what they are doing with those weapons to an almost military degree, and
this makes fights for territory flashy, brutal, and highly concentrated whirlwinds of violence that often
make it onto the digital realms as the latest cool meme video.
A certain level of perfectionism
pervades every level of Soon-Bok culture, even among the lower classes. Doing your job well and living for
the company has been past down for generations since the time of the ancient lost zaibatsus, and it means
that local Soon-Bok products are often of a noticeably better quality than the local provisions of other
nations, and smuggling depends far more heavily on bringing in variety of choice than simply improvements in
quality compared to other regions. This perfectionism extends to the appearances of their living and working
spaces, leading to amazingly livable and beautiful settlements and habitation levels.
It is important
to note that there is an incredible level automation in Soon-Bok, with only Schwebenwagen outstripping them
in sheer industrial capacity represented in automation. This creates an environment where even the lowest
level workers are more often engineers or drone operating specialists, leading to an overall higher level of
education in the populace, and one with significantly more leisurely time that is devoted towards
politicking, scheming, and martial arts than many people would believe. Open warfare between Gangs is
exceedingly common, but within the gang itself, advancement becomes a matter primarily of subtle violence,
intrigue, and machination in a mirror of the managers and executives of the higher floors.
While
Soon-Bok is famous for being the least subtle of the holding companies, actually engaging in full and open
warfare 6 times in the 400 year history of the new world, internally they are hypercognizant of paper thin
operating budgets and costs. The profits from the Furnace Dosi more than cover the costs of the vast
terraforming efforts of Wall Dosi to keep Soon-Bok's territory operating, but this must also compete
with the shareholders' dividends and the need for constant, infinite growth all companies are expected
to maintain. To a Soon-Bok Executive's way of thinking, there is no time or resources to spare on
anything but absolutely necessary and efficient actions. Never fire a missile where a bullet will do, never
fire a burst when a single shot will suffice, never discharge a round where a swung knife will achieve the
goal. To the Soon-Bok Executive, every action they take is in a long, complicated dance to achieve a place
in the director's penthouse of their dosei spire... and perhaps even on the board of directors of
Soon-Bok proper.
Soon-Bok's uniquely extreme climate and geography requires that quite a few things are done differently there than in the rest of the world, but these are the most prominent.
Most of the organizations in Soon-Bok are various criminal gangs who exchange illegal and unregistered weapons in return for drugs, undrugged food, and various bootleg items.
Settlements in Soon-Bok are always heavily armored against the elements, and retain vast storage vaults of supplies that make living in the desert possible. For this reason, they are also always heavily armed one way or another, and often manned by people with twitchy trigger fingers.
The people of Soon-Bok are often soft spoken, evasive in settling on specific answers, and focused on etiquette to the extreme