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One year after the events of the Skaði Festival, we bring you a documentary of the origins of the ATC polity. We know how they came to be, but the ATC can be traced back farther than that and, at our request, company officials have released this information to the general public.

During the days of the Rim Confederacy, the ATC was a family company, a research branch from a larger conglomerate that had begun its operations in a new market by predominately Finnish speaking ethnic groups. It did so with various degrees of success, but overall the ATC had enjoyed stable and fairly rapid growth, and from what is known pre-Exodus, had grown to be a financially healthy middle-sized company of its own.

Records of the Exodus are still somewhat unclear, but while most companies were content to let the authorities handle the evacuations, the ATC actively helped organize the transportation of its citizens and their belongings to the sleeper ships, citing a social obligation to its workforce as the main reason to. As a result, some of the Exodus ships housed fairly large concentrations of ATC employees, rather than be scattered amongst ships, and Deiran, Zethira's father, used this to his advantage as he tried to leverage benefits and concessions for the emerging ATC faction, though never through the use of violence.

Deiran retired in 1 NS, feeling that in a time where the ATC would step into a new era, it would be up to his daughter to lead the ATC through that path. He had orchestrated most of the events that led up to the ATC's secession from the Mercantile Alliance housing its former parent conglomerate, and felt his daughter was now experienced enough to lead the company -- now a polity -- in a way that would make him proud. Unfortunately, his death in 10 NS meant he did not live to see the first successes of Zethira's marketing and business strategies.

The ATC, being a family business at heart, is organized in much the same way as the Chabeol of old. It is run much like a regular business conglomerate, with the exception that most of the focus lies on the worker community rather than the individual. It is not uncommon for entire families to work in the same company, and the company in turn provides housing close to the workplace, and schooling for the children that will in most cases end up working at the company or one of its subsidiaries as well.

The Top 20 Chaebol in the ATC form the Polity Council, which advises the ATC on polity matters and allows for the organization of larger, all-encompassing projects such as the most recent Omniport Nephele, or long term projects spanning several years to complete. The ATC, bearing legal ownership of the entirety of ATC-controlled territory, leads the Council. A Chaebol's 'score' depends on a number of factors. Revenue and profit are of course important factors, but also non-tangible matters such as reputation, status and accountability weigh in to prevent a cutthroat mentality from forming. Even so, successful startup companies have been known to be snatched up by the Big Twenty if not funded outright, or have its more talented staff hired away, in an attempt to remain members of the Polity Council, and the internal economics are quite unique within the Federation.

While the ATC may not always be considered the best place to start up an independent new company, it is considered somewhat of a 'Trial by Fire' for many corporations to start a successful venture there. With news of several corporations from the Progress Made Manifest Coalition petitioning for entry into the ATC's economy, it will be interesting to see what effect the PMMC's line of thought and ways of doing business would have on the Chaebol structure.

For more information, click this link on the ArachNet: Chaebol