233: Eden Ventures

ENTRY 233: Eden Ventures

“Traditionalist.”

- Ultimates insult

Of all the organizations devoted to exoplanet colonization through gatecrashing, Eden Ventures is most notorious for its minimalist approach. Typically they find some (barely) habitable exoplanet, crowdsource a sizable amount of funding and materials with the aid of dedicated religious subscriber networks, and then send forth the “seed” colony—typically, between two and eight transhumans with minimal food and equipment and no plan for continued support. Eden Ventures considers this a “shotgun approach” to colonizing multiple worlds very quickly, but critics of the gatecrashing corporation deride it as “Adam & Leave,” which typically requires someone else to go behind them and rescue EV’s hapless “colonists.”

Seeds

• Eden Ventures is heavily involved with religious networks, buying advertisement space and programming drives to solicit donations and investments in its colonization activities. However, a group of these investors wishes to bring a multiple-habitat class-action suit against the company for its predatory practices—but they need evidence to do it. They wish to hire the PCs to visit six “colonies” EV has established, to find out how well the colonists were prepared, what supplies and training they were given, and how much follow-up support they received. If, that is, the colonists are still alive.
• A nasty property dispute has cropped up on the exoplanet Jezza III between a mining hypercorp and Eden Ventures regarding the ownership of a deposit of titanium ore. EV insists they have an established claim based on a previous colonization attempt—and hires the PCs to sneak into the titanium-rich caverns and quickly establish a makeshift “colony” so they can push their claim. How much can the PCs do with the limited resources available to them, and against the challenges faced by a hostile world?
• A critical impasse has come to the grass-covered exoplanet of Savannah: relations between the colony members have broken down because two of the female biomorphs have decided to engage in a monogamous relationship with each other, which poses a critical threat to the colony’s long-term genetic diversity. Eden Ventures hires the PCs to peacefully resolve the issue as neutral mediators, giving them the authority to promise the colonists anything from artificial insemination to the Lilith Sequence (see entry 126), but the PCs will also have to deal with the colonist’s religious beliefs.
• In preparation for every colonization attempt, Eden Ventures does considerably location scouting using gatecrashers like the player characters. The PCs are hired to scout out the terrain of Puddle, a world of sunken continents where all of the solid ground is covered by at least 1-10 centimeters of water. To fulfill their contract, the PCs will need to explore and map a circle at least thirty kilometers in radius around the gate—wading through tall grasses that might conceal deep water crevasses and quicksand, tiny carnivorous fish, and lumbering amphibious mugwumps. If the PCs consent to babysit a geological surveyor (a hapless neohominid called Earwig), Eden Ventures will even pay them a bonus.