Beginning its corporate life innocuously enough as a minor subsidiary of Viridian-based hyperconglomerate OmniHelp, Planet Maker first rose to prominence in 5227 when Viceroy of Marketing Flouter Needman began promoting the company’s new line of residential arcologies as the only means of surviving a potentially devastating war with Vermailia. Despite the Confederacy’s protests of peaceable intent, Planet Maker’s LifeBunker and SurvivorTown series proved to be impressive sellers, while the corporation’s military subsidiary Peaceforcer Ltd. underwent a boom of its own, selling state-of-the-art military–economic growth packages to both governments.

Planet Maker’s profits hit an all-time high during the panic of the Lesser Stillness, as terrified residents flocked to the company’s Fortress Grove reinforced communities while the Viridian government purchased SecuriCage-brand penal colonies to house their former neighbors.¹ As the crisis passed, however, an anti-arcology backlash forced the company to adapt, building elaborate arcological theme parks and Simcation spots to alleviate malaise, as well as a successful line of neo-natural megadevelopments featuring artificial skies and wind for a more perfectly simulated sense of well-being.

By 5260 Planet Maker had purchased its own parent company and become the sector’s prime supplier of residential, recreational and military solutions. Its rapid expansion had come at a price, however: the cost of building and maintaining its various projects now outweighed the actual resource wealth of the Viridian system. To maintain the survival of its business model, the board of directors threw the company’s full weight behind Nova Generator development.

The generator’s destruction would bring about the collapse of both Planet Maker and the greater Viridian economy. At his 5296 trial for fraud, racketeering and ecocide, CEO H. K. Needman III would insist that Planet Maker was, in a legal sense at least, a single mass-entity far greater than the individuals that comprised it, and that no one member of its executive class could be expected to understand such a being’s intentions, much less be held responsible for them. The presiding judge, by coincidence a past recipient of Planet Maker campaign contributions, found the argument uniquely compelling, and dismissed the charges entirely.

—Recorder 3000-21