Swan Technology Strategies
The American technology conglomerate Swan Research Inc. collapsed financially in the mid-1990s, following the mysterious disappearance of their founder and CEO Joseph Swan, and the equally mysterious overnight failure of many of their patented technologies. Creditors carved up what assets retained their value, and a small group of investors acquired the consultancy division, Swan Technology Strategies (STS).
Among Swan Research's many illegal activites in the 1980s and 90s, STS was a sideline specialising in the gathering of incriminating information on certain people who could potentially become useful assets one day. Twenty years later, many of these people had influential positions in industry, universities, and government, and STS was able to leverage its incriminating information to ensure that a steady supply of favourable contracts from these organisation continued to be won by clients of STS. To put it bluntly, STS was engaged in selling the fruits of blackmail on a corporate scale.
As the decades passed, STS became a very wealthy self-sustaining engine of mass blackmail. Their agents continued to speculatively gather incriminating data on a large number of people, then leverage that data should the target ever become a useful asset.
In 2075, STS became aware of a secretive mission planned by the Winkernickle Foundation to retrieve some valuable cargo, and had clients who were very interested in that cargo. STS tasked one of their "consultants", Corbin Johnson, with approaching the drivers hired to transport the cargo and convincing them to sell out the Winkernickle Foundation. Believing all drivers to be amoral guns-for-hire with no loyalty to anyone and no love for anything except money, Johnson thought it would be a simple matter to tempt one of them by offering considerably more reward than the Winkernickle Foundation was. But things did not play out as exactly as he expected.