BioCorp
 | |
Native name | БиоКорп |
|---|---|
Company type | Public |
Traded as |
|
| Industry |
|
| Founded | June 13, 1999 in Belgrade, Serbia |
| Founder | Krešimir Novac |
| Defunct | June 16, 2341 |
| Fate | Split into over 20 different companies after a Coalition antitrust ruling |
| Headquarters | Belgrade, Serbia |
| Threat level | Substantial (last recorded) |
Area served | Interstellar |
Key people | Harcourt Bergeron (CEO) |
| Products | |
Number of employees | 13,244,163 (Jun 2273) |
| Divisions | |
| Website | bio |
BioCorp (stock ticker: BIO) was an interstellar bioscience and pharmaceutical megacorporation headquartered in Belgrade, Serbia. Founded in 1999 by Krešimir Novac, the company was at a time one of humanity's largest biomedical corporations. The company developed a multitude of products, including gene editing, spatial cell control, and life extension technology; as well as a large number of agricultural solutions for hydroponics, critical to the space industry. It also developed wetware technology used in computing, chemical and biological weapons, and a multitude of solutions for the exophysics industry. At the time of its collapse, the corporation was the subject of ongoing controversy due to its past actions, and its general approach to scientific ethics.
Products
Agriculture
BioCorp's original venture, and initially its most lucrative, was agriculture. It developed numerous pesticides and agents key in preventing blight, making it critical to the global farming industry. During the Second Space Race, BioCorp began to supply hydroponics systems to national space agencies and private corporations such as Paradigm, making the corporation dominant across the hydroponics sector, with continued dominance well into the second space age. Raven also became reliant on BioCorp hydroponics for food in its atmospherically sealed facilities, including Black Mountain.
Bioweapons
BioCorp developed several biological weapons for a number of world governments, which implicated the organisation in numerous controversies during its existence. These included Ember-IV, a highly contagious agent accidentally released into a Japanese seafood market in the Nagasaki Outbreak. Raven later specifically contacted BioCorp to produce a number of extremely lethal bioweapons for use against sapient and self-replicating anomalies.
Exophysics
After the First Incursion, Raven contracted BioCorp to develop treatments for organics exposed to entropic radiation, which the company stole from the Department for Exophysics. The company performed its first unsanctioned experiments after the Ir'vaki transport crash, where it began to experiment on the injured Ir'vaki diplomats to reverse engineer their biological psionics. Concurrently, BioCorp was contracted to develop gridform mitigation systems.
Pharmaceuticals
By far one of BioCorp’s largest arms was its pharmaceutical division, which produced all manners of pharmaceuticals for nearly all sectors. Prominently, the organisation became one of a select few first to develop functional life extension treatments, as well as powerful nootropics. The organisation also became implicated in a scandal when it was discovered it was contracted to manufacture a mind control drug for the fascist government of New Sublantica, known as Product 21; the company later secretly manufactured amnestics and “truth serums” for governments, including for Raven’s own counterintelligence activities.
Morphology
BioCorp developed Metamorph, the very first total-control style system for morphology, underpinned by Spatial Cell Control. The first Metamorph facility, housing the Sulfur, Brimstone, and Neural Cleaver components, allowed for the printing of cells, the assembly of cells into multicellular organisms, and programming of neural tissue. Initially capable of
modifying existing organisms, the capability to print new organisms from scratch was later developed to support the company’s wetware program.
Wetware
The launch of wetware computing systems by BioCorp, enabled by its development of spatial cell control technology and the reverse engineering of Ir'vaki biology, disrupted the technology industry. Power-efficient, EMP-resistant wetware computing systems began to be utilised to run complex heuristic algorithms that at the time no manufactured neural network could support.
The military-industrial-scientific complex became a significant customer of wetware computing technology due to its effectiveness in running scientific simulations and efficiently cataloguing massive amounts of data. It was not until much later that the technology’s true origins became public and its ethics called into question, prompting many customers to withdraw their systems from production.
Collapse
BioCorp was dissolved in 2341 after a number of significant events, including information being made public about its role in the causation of the Ir’vaki Conflict, as well as its hand in the creation of sapient anomalies, and the existence of the Anima shadow cult backing its most powerful executives. The Coalition utilised new antitrust treaties to break up the company, which it unsuccessfully lobbied against. When BioCorp failed to comply, the Coalition began to establish itself on a war footing and deployed the Coalition Defence Fleet (CDF) to surround BioCorp’s corporate headquarters on Mars.
The majority of the company stood down without bloodshed after Raven threatened to proscribe it under the Dimensional Security Accords and use the full force of Calamity Mitigation against its HQ; however, much of its senior leadership fled and either got away or made final stands as its headquarters were seized by the CDF. Ultimately, the megacorporation was split up into over 20 different organisations, including Eden Morphology, Applied Wetware Systems, Exodus Laboratories, and New Leaf Hydroponics.