The Life of a Collaborator

Inside an ESTEMP, citizens are not citizens: they are collaborators. They do not fight for flags but for targets. They receive propaganda 24 hours a day asking for total engagement with the brand that pays for their living.

An ordinary day + contribute

• Wake up in company housing, the day's target panel already lit on the wall.
• Coffee from a suction sachet, because spoons are not a good look (see The Cutlery Revolution).
• Shift. Compulsory break for the motivational video.
• Shift.
• At night, the team scoreboard, the relocation notifications and the Colony Dream campaign.

The chip + contribute

Every collaborator has a Corporate Biometric Chip implanted when hired. It opens doors, pays bills, clocks hours and serves as a passport. When the person is dismissed, the chip is blocked, and so is their whole life (see The Corporate Quarantine and The grounded catalogue).

There are no fixed careers. You are an allocatable resource. If the footwear sector stalls, tomorrow the advertising copywriter may be cleaning sewer ducts, in another city, in another dormitory.

Refusing relocation means summary dismissal.

How it works + contribute

• The notice arrives through the chip, with a 72-hour deadline.
• The family may or may not come along, depending on the role's "mobility package".
• Work history does not count. Relocation follows the company's needs that quarter.

Officially it is called the Human Capital Lockout Law. When a collaborator is dismissed, their biometric and tax record is blocked, and they are barred from being hired by any other megacorporation for at least ten years. The stated aim is to prevent industrial espionage.

Whose law? + contribute

There is no signed treaty. The quarantine was born as an OmniTerra contract clause right after the First Corporate War, when hiring someone from the other side came to mean importing a spy. The other companies copied it. Today it is market practice: some companies apply it for longer, others for less, but all of them apply it, and those who do not are frowned upon.

In practice + contribute

The dismissed become pariahs. Without a chip they cannot open a door, pay a bill or buy medicine. They are pushed into the poverty of the REGESTs or into nomad life. The only legal ways out are the Monsoon loophole and the Severa mines.

In theory, the rules apply to everyone. In practice, the higher the post, the more privileges, and corporate society is corrupt to the bone. A director can be on the relocation list and simply not go.

The star executives deserve a note: executives treated as celebrities, with fans, campaigns and scandals. Kidnapping one is one of the AntiFaCa's classic Campaign hooks.

Today, space is only for mining. Nobody lives there, and the colonies do not exist. Even so, since 2120 OmniTerra has been repeating one campaign:

The campaign works because it is collective and vague. Nobody wins an individual place, there is never a date, and any complaint becomes "you are holding everyone back". It pairs with the spoon campaign: one mocks those who disagree, the other promises paradise to those who obey.

It is a lie. There is no colony project under way, and no budget for one. OmniTerra knows; most collaborators suspect; almost nobody says it out loud.