ENTRY 269: Quo Valis
“You are now a living cell in a greater organism. Though you
may not always be able to perceive it, you are a part of a life form greater
than yourself, your actions affect it. We cannot always understand the higher
functions of this ego, but we do know that it is aware of us. Quo Valis loves you.”
- Excerpt from the Quo Valis Employee Introduction Package
On Progress, Quo Valis is a middleman hypercorp best known
for three things: the strong French/Spanish corporate culture with over 2,000 full-time
employees (and perhaps ten times that many temporary workers outside of
Progress), an unusual communal structure where the indentured employees are
also the owners of the hypercorp, and the stringent belief among the
shareholders/working body that the hypercorp itself is alive. Spokesbeings for
Quo Valis claim that the upper management of the corporation is handled
entirely via automated computer processes, with regular input from low-level
officers, and that the middle management is partially integrated into the
system via cybernetic augmentation, and that over a period of years the
officers of the corporation have come to recognize Quo Valis as an organized,
living entity, of which each employee/shareholder is a part, carrying out the
operations that contribute to the continued existence and growth of the Quo
Valis corporate entity.
Most outsiders call bullshit at this point in the spiel,
with the most generous critics allowing that the Quo Valis automated software
may have achieved AGI status (or have an AGI buried in there somewhere pulling
the strings). The employee/shareholders of Quo Valis are determined in their
belief though, often speaking of being a part of something bigger than
themselves, feeling the “spirit” of Quo Valis through their actions, and the
augmented middle management even claims some level of communion and
communication with the Quo Valis super-ego, able to sense or judge its moods
and convey them to the faithful employee/shareholders. The phenomenon has
attracted any number of hypercorporate sociologists and psychologists, who
claim that the belief in a higher form of life which directly or indirectly is
responsible for the orders they receive has a generally positive psychological
effect on the corporate population. However, they also claim that the
ineffability of Quo Valis is an integral part of the unique concept, and anyone
claiming to be a direct representative of the Quo Valis superego is generally
greeted with a display of flash mob violence.
Mechanics
Quo Valis as an NPC has no normal stats. It’s SOM is
measured in the strength of its employees, for example, and if it is a sapient
entity then it is probably more comparable to a humpback whale than any normal
transhuman standard.
Using Quo Valis
All bullshit aside, most hypercorps in Eclipse Phase can be
played at the table like an NPC, with its own sometimes chaotic, inefficient,
and self-defeating goals and methods—Quo Valis is just more honest about this
approach than most. It is comforting for many players and gamemasters to focus
on specific officers as focal points for attention; we as humans like to focus
on individuals of singular power, influence, vision, skill, talent, and
ambitions, the Gordon Geckos and Steve Jobs of the world. The truth, however,
is that the strength of corporations lies in their ability to survive and
thrive despite the greed or greatness of any single officer, to harness the
abilities of many people working in tandem toward a goal, and in the far future
of Eclipse Phase a great deal of the normal decision-making processes of
corporations—approvals for sick leave, vacations, purchasing, cleaning,
hypercubicle assignment, training, etc.—will probably be automated, leaving the
officers to focus on more important tasks like innovations, cultivating
interpersonal relationships with clients, managing their immediate
subordinates, and so on. As such, Quo Valis is generally in invisible and
elusive character that PCs grapple with only through proxies and agents who
attempt to carry out their orders, often (but not always) without question.