Asteria

Asteria was founded by the last chief scientist of Angelicon, Katarzyna Ostrowska. She was spared by the Supreme Cartel after accepting their “suzerainty” in exchange of convincing the entire science team of Angelicon to form a new initiative with her and work “co-operatively” with the cartel. Cartel members were too suspicious against each other so instead of letting scientists to be stolen one by one by their competitors, they indirectly forced Katarzyna to form a new company, rally all the top talents and control them on their behalf.

With the Cartel’s blessing and sponsorship, Asteria quickly flourished in their new HQ, which was founded in the old ruins of Los Angeles. For obvious reasons, the corpo-city named as the “Angel City”, shortly AC, but over time gained a nickname “Dream City” because of the magnificent augmentations they can make to human body, thanks to their know-how coming from the transcendence program.

Asteria never allowed to continue the transcendence program, but they were encouraged on human enhancements, augmentations, synth tech and AI programs. Due to the naturally occurred demand, they also focused on luxury and beauty augmentations, as well as military. However, arguably their greatest impact to the human civilization was the fact that they have significantly boosted the “eugenical humans” program.

In 2569, the Cartel decided to investigate the bionics and biogenetics labs complex in the ruin city of Buenos Aires, former Argentina, after receiving suspicious reports about the place. The main suspicion was actually the CEO’s, Katarzyna’s, unbelievably young looking body, despite her old age. They found that she was secretly augmenting her body by using top notch genetic technologies which were entirely hidden from the Cartel. Asteria had no private army to protect itself from the wrath of the Cartel, so the company forced to accept the terms and paid a hefty sum as a fine, and surprisingly Katarzyna kept her seat, mostly because she agreed on sharing the secrets of the eugenical program with the top execs of the Cartel.

Katarzyna died in 2685, when she was 200 years old, while celebrating her birthday. Despite some public backlash, which was quickly surpassed by both Asteria and the Cartel enforcers, her seat was taken over by her daughter. Reason behind the protests was, her daughter literally appeared out of thin air and many executives and scientists accused her being a clone of her mother. The daughter’s name is Nadezhda Ostrowska, and she is still the CEO of the company.

Shortly known as the Raven, due to her unnaturally black eyes and deep black hair which keep changing its color with different black tones, and fascinate people, Nad led the company with a significant success and quickly gained a huge respect among her fellow scientists. Her greatest achievement was gaining independence from the Cartel after genius diplomatic maneuvers. She also focused the company’s efforts toward space technologies, transformed Asteria into an essential component for the Cartel fleets and space stations, and eventually secured an equal seat in the grand senate of the Cartel. Furthermore, she established a solid and balanced army, not to attack other corporations and cause war, but to protect people especially against pirates, scavengers and ghouls.

Today Asteria is one of the few corporations that people respect. Of course, like all the others, Asteria has also a dark face. However at least they seem to follow a balanced, even fair policy towards the people they are responsible of. Yet, their human augmentations and synths are not welcomed by all the communities and groups, and some corporations directly despise them, so they are not without enemies. Besides, Nad’s bold public statements time to time cause problems. The most famous (disastrous?) one happened when she publicly declared her biggest hero was Charles Isambard Drake, the last CEO of Angelicon. She even said “he was the greatest visionary of our race, but we were too shallow to digest his majestic idea about our race’s future”. When she was asked “what about his dark creations, the fallen angels?”, she replied without hesitation with a shocking question: “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so sure young man” (*referring the interviewer). Then the journalist replied: “You are talking as if you were there.” Nad’s response was another shock: “Well I am sure you weren’t”.

After this live interview went viral globally, another unexpected thing happened and Asteria’s shares skyrocketed. A massive social campaign orchestrated by the corporation and led to one of the most successful guerilla marketing of the modern ages, generated billions of Neo-Coins for the company.