Evo Metahuman-Architectural Haven
Written by: Coupe
I love an Arcology, don't you? And Corps love them too, and build 'em for a multitude of reasons: It keeps their employees close to work, curtails exposure to non-corp approved information and thoughts, lets them set up shop in places without sturdy infrastructure and so forth. The Evo Metahuman-Architectural Haven however, holds a special place in my heart among all arcologies for two reasons: The first is that it looks like it's covered in bubble-wrap. The second is that, far as I can tell, it's the only arcology made by a megacorporation for the simple reason of spite. But we'll get to that later. The EvoMAH sits close to the edge of Raleigh's city-limits nearby Jordan Lake, close enough for residents to walk into town but far away enough for them to hold off on doing so unless they have to, and to keep a healthy amount of space for potential expansion and its prototype Aquatech-facility. Visitors are always welcome - and the residents occasionally come out en-masse to advertise such - but everything else, like the big old 'scientific' moat and the commute-time, the whole thing has this big sense of exclusivity that's almost out-of-character for Evo, of all corps.Think of it this way: They're saying that you're only gonna get inclusivity if you're a part of the corp.
Demographics
The EvoMAH's still majority-human, but the corp's ever-present attideu of tolerance and broad-mindedness means the percentages of metahuman residents are jumped up a substantial percentage compared to the norm in Raleigh, albeit with a lower percentage of awakened individuals owing to recent drafting by other corps in the area, and only a couple of technomancers in the entire arcology.
Government
The Arcology's style of leadership is pretty hard to categorize, since by most means it wants to operate like EVO's usual 'open-minded' corporate hierarchies, but it's status as a self-sustaining colony means they also need to accomodate management and leadership in civic and infrastructural needs. As a result, the arcology's got a weird and erratic psudo-democratic system operating outside of the normal employment-ladder, often coming in the form of innocuous emails and polls along the lines of 'who do you think would make for a good Sanitation-Advisor?' and making the offer based off the public response. The result is that sometimes you get entry-level employees like janitors and cafeteria-workers working in key civic-management posiitions for their second shift and getting an appropriate boost to their pay, while higher-ups in the normal pecking-order have to watch what they say even more in case the guy pouring their coffee might also be the guy overseeing living-space distribution.
Defences
Evo does its best to keep security visually low-profile in the EvoMAH halls to keep everyone at ease, but don't mistake that as meaning they're a pushover: Evo knows the R&D done in the arcology's inner-buildings makes it a juicy target for competitors, so no expense has been spared when it comes to deterring unwanted visitors. Corpsec are all fitted out with unobtrusive but high-performance cyberware synced with the hundreds of cameras flushly hidden in the arcology's architecture, and there's even a small HTR-team waiting on standby in the arcology's security-center, in case things get real dicey.
On top of the active defences, the arcology's also pretty cleverly built to facilitate a lot of passive deterrences towards intruders: The aquatech-pools that surround the structure are basically a moat, making it difficult to cross into the facility in the first place without drawing attention, and the overall structure of the arcology subtly draws from the 'Panopticon' style of prisons, giving the people in the central building a very clear and unobstructive view of whatever's happening in the outer rings.
Industry & Trade
To nobody's surprise, the EvoMAH's main export is the medical and biotech business. Most folk visiting the arcology are there for the top-notch medical facilities and 'relaxation conclaves' inside, while residents focus mainly in the research and development side of things, designing new consumer and industrial goods to peddle inside and out. And of course, both the locals and outsiders are drawn to the shopping-floors like moths to the proverbial flame, buying their NERPs and walking out with the latest "exotic" fashions they didn't even know they wanted until they came in.
Infrastructure
The EvoMAH is counted as a 'true' arcology in spite of its smaller size because it's completely self-sustaining. Power's supplied by a nuclear-fusion plant underneath the center, food is grown in-house in fancy high-density vertical farming systems and augmented with seafood grown in parts of the aquatech-moat, which also serves as the main source of drinking-water for the arcology. Being EVO, the healthcare infrastructure's heavily intergrated into the whole structure, with hospital-facilities easily accessible throughout the whole building and individual living-quarters designed to easily accomodate medical equipment for long-term care and recovery.
Assets
If it's Evo-produced, the arcology's got it somewhere, either built in-house or imported from dedicated manufacturing-facilities outside and distributed to residents and visitors all the same in the shopping-complexes. Of particular note is the 'Quaxi' store-chain, a recently-founded producer and seller of barbequing goods unique to the North Carolina area that had its start in the arcology and is begining its spread throughout the rest of the state.
History
So it's kind of an open secret that the EvoMAH was built out of spite, despite what the powers-that-be at Evo claim. The megacorp had its eyes on the University of North Carolina School of Medicine for a long time, back when they were called Yamatetsu, to consolidate their rep in the CAS as the big cheese of medicine and biotech. So when Universal Omnitech beat them to the punch with their aggressive corporate-warfare tactics and reopened the campus as the Universal Omnitech School of Medicine, you can be sure there were some frayed tempers in the corp's CAS branches.
Not one to shy away from competition, Evo eventually settled for second-best by buying up cheaper land wholesale on the edges of Raleigh and started constructing a new medical-facility and campus, figuring that if they couldn't own one of the CAS's most prestigous medical-institutions, they're gonna just outright try to offer a better product. At least, that was the plan until the current head-honcho of the UO School of Medicine, Abuna Masih, made a racist jab at the Evo campus's project-leader, a troll by the name of Lou Cohen, in an internal-messaging conference that was leaked into the public, causing tempers to flare and egos to bruise.
The circumstances surrounding this leak suggests it was intentional, mostl likely a shadowrun, but if anyone's claimed responsability for it I haven't heard about it. Either way, he gets what's coming to him for his bigotry.Evo capitalised on the slip-of-the-digital-tongue by increasing the scale of their project and pouring more money into getting the core parts built faster, looking to take advantage of the loss of customers caused by Masih, when one of the people overseeing the whole thing got inspired: He saw the masses of temporary-housing built up for workers sent in to accellerate construction, in particular their modular and portable designs, and thought it would be a wizz idea to incorporate it into the growing structure's design, giving it the novel ability to extract and remove entire rooms and compartments by slotting them in and out on the outside. Details were hammered out, and it was at that point that Cohen decided that since the project was gonna be on the scale of an arcology (a small one, mind you), they might as well make it an arcology, and a fancy one at that. Construction trundled on leasurely through the late 60s, prioritising on having the vital-infrastructure and hospital facitlies functional as soon as possible, and using the profits made there to help fund the rest of the building. Things hit a bit of a snag on 2071, when Lou Cohen was found dead at his vacation-home in Colorado as a result of an undetected complication in one of his cranial-implants inducing a fatal stroke. The suspicious circumstances behind his death caused a months-long delay in upper-management back at the construction-site until the final days of the year, when the project was finally given a new leader in the form of Pathos One-Who-Analyses, a metasapient AI and one of the first to be issued a SIN in Evo. The arcology finally opened for real in 2074, and was immediately filled to 81% capacity by an influx of local Evo-workers and migrants from other parts of North Carolina. Visitors were initially put off by the distance of the newly-christened Metahuman-Architectural Haven along with its unusual outer aesthetics (often described as looking like a donut of bubble-wrap tied up in barbed wire), but after consulting a local PR firm and starting an aggressive (and overbudgeted) advertising campaign, it wasn't long until it was importing patience and exporting products (including their own football-team, the Evo-Lociraptors) enough that the Arcology was looking to pay for itself before the decade's end.
In fact, they were making so much scratch at the time that they ended up donating a wing to the UO School of medicine, after the bombing in '76
Architecture
The EvoMAH's core structure consists of a tall central building surrounded by a gigantic hexagonal ring of buildings which is in turn closed off from the rest of Raleigh by a circular body of water. We'll go over each section at a time:
The central tower's called the 'Lightouse' by the residents, and acts as the central administrative building for the arcology. The basement-floor contains the central fusion power-plant, the ground floor contains the main administrative facilities, increasing in levels of importance until the fifth floor, where the main security-center's located. After that, you've got several floors of dedicated IT/networking hardware followed by the communications center and the 'central offices', where the building's current corporate and civic leaders do their thing, along with a helipad on top. Outside the building you've got a nice ring of fields, low-rise parks and recreational areas that seperate (but don't obstruct) the central tower from the main ring, underneath which you'll find most of the arcology's facilities for manufacturing whatever it needs.
And underneath that you'll find the most secure parts of the arcology's R&D facilitiies, operating on their own power and infrastructural-systems seperate from the rest of the arcology. But you didn't hear that from me.Next up, you've got the main ring, where the majority of the Arcology lives and does their business. The ground floors are dominated by the Arcology's hospital and biotech facilities for ease of access, with the commercial and shopping centers located above that and a mixture of residential and recreational rooms and buildings making up the rest of the ring's considerable bulk. One of the arcology's unique designs is the incorporation of 'modular interchangeable rooms', with certain parts of the structure (mainly bedrooms and private hospital-rooms) built and mounted seperately from the rest of the architecrure, enabling them to be slid out of place and moved to other parts of the arcology on a complex system of outer rails. This allows the arcology to mix and match parts of the building as needed, mainly for things like organising patients and moving injured/ill residents from the residential-blocks to the wards and back without physically moving them from their bed. Finally, you've got the moat. Evo doesn't like it being called a moat, but there aren't exactly a lot of other words to describe a body of water around a big building with a few retractable bridges on top. The surprisingly-deep waters are seperated into sections that can slide in and out of the walls of the moat's inside, with most sections being dedicated to some kind of aquatech research or high-density seafood farming but a section or two usually made into recreational swimming-facilities. All of this is controlled both above ground and below, with multiple basement-floors looking into the depths through reinforced windows.
Alternative Name(s)
The EvoMAH, the Haven
Type
Arcology
Population
Aprox 1,100 registered inhabitants
Location under
Characters in Location
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