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Ng Security Industries, Inc.

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Stephensonia

*Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile high neon skyscraper near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the Metaverse, it's open twenty-four hours, because it's always business hours somewhere in the world. Hiro leaves his bike on the Street, takes the elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist daemon. For a moment, he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian--just like him. If a white man had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese office girl.

"Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"

"Customer service."

"Whome are you with?"

"You name it, I'm with them."

"I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at handling irony.

"At the moment I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."

"I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. "And what product is this in regards to?"

"Reason."

"Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice. It is another daemon, an attractive black/asian woman in highly professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office suite.*

Authored entries

Description

Ng was once a chopper pilot in South Vietnam, during the evacuation in 1975. A stray tracer round hit his chopper and started a fire, igniting leaking fuel, before he was able to land the chopper on a US aircraft carrier. Consequently, he is badly handicapped by the results of the fire and requires extensive use of augmentation technologies to breath, to eat, shit, and interface with both reality and the Metaverse. As an engineer, he likely was personally involved in developing many of the technologies that now keep him alive.

These days he likes to drive around in his personal wheelchair: a German airport firetruck, the ultimate Sport Utility Vehicle, he can squash the average bimbo box like a bug. He controls this vehicle via voice input and can simultaneously operate in the Metaverse, where his daemon geishas operate as mediated avatars for the electroconvulsive gel his damaged body lives in.

As president of Ng Security Industries, Inc. he produces many 'non-human systems' to provide security for his FOQNE customers, particularly Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, which features one or more "Rat Things" at every franchise. He also produces Reason, with which Fisheye and Hiro Protagonist gain mixed experience.

His product philosophy he describes when he explains to YT, "The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements, and Mr. Lee understands this," which is a convoluted way of saying Ultima Ratio Regum. "Instead of hiring a large human security force--which impacts the social environment--you know, lots of minimum wage earners standing around carrying machine guns--Mr Lee prefers to use nonhuman systems."

Ng's product philosophy, and Mr. Lee's implementation, is an example of creating embedded contracts through technology, in order to structure one's society in such a way that it will stay that way.

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