Manual - Pandora: First Contact - Proxy Studios

so triggered plan IA3. I had my subsidiaries bet the farm thatour stock would drop after the AGM. By the looks of things,that bet covered our loss on the prototype ship, the costs ofanother ship and gave us a nice bonus on top. Now, to work,gentlemen. We’ve got a world to buy.”***No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenthcentury that Earth was being controlled keenly and closelyby intelligences more subtle than most men’s. The NoxiumCorporation didn’t exist then, of course. But the handful ofgreedy men who valued their own happiness more highly thanthat of a thousand others had existed since the 17th century.The slow cartelisation of most economic markets really tookoff in the 19th century, but advanced marvellously in the 20thcentury, and in the USA in particular. By the end of 2000,the poorest 80% of people in the USA owned just 15% of thecountry’s wealth – and that fell to 10% in the next five years.By the 21st century, these financiers had reached an almostperfect capitalist state. They did nothing. They producednothing. They gambled huge amounts of money on stockmarkets like roulette wheels, but hid it carefully when thetaxman came to call. When the countries of the world, drivento desperation by their collapsing incomes, eliminated taxhavens, these financiers just bought up the nascent spaceindustry and moved into orbit.Noxium wasn’t the first company to make money from spacehabitats – in fact its main focus was on asteroid mining – butits establishment of the so-called Ceres Cartel with the EmpireManagement mercenary group in the 2030s meant that it was quitesoon the only business in town. Habitats that weren’t launched41