Horizon

You’re probably used to the idea that a corporation—especially a megacorp of any tier—lies through their teeth/tusks/texts/whatever. That’s pretty much a given; hell, it even applies to almost anyone who wants to make some scratch. Lies sell. That’s the whole point of them. But Horizon … hoo, boy. They’ve made prevarication a fragging art form. They could found a school called Charlatans University, intended to teach people how to lie effectively, and then take thousands upon thousands of nuyen from their clients, not teach them a damn thing—which is essentially theft—and their students would praise them for the incredible life lesson that the whole experience taught them instead of suing them. Horizon doesn’t just just talk out of both sides of their mouth. They have a third side of their mouth they talk out of, and maybe even a fourth or fifth, depending on whom you ask.

What really gets people worked up about Horizon is their on-the-surface commitment to social responsibility and inclusiveness, even to a level above Evo. How can you ever regret supporting a corp dedicated to cleaning up the environment or helping the homeless or eradicating childhood diseases? (Let’s just temporarily ignore the fact that Horizon often makes money off the efforts they promote.) They’ve even got this wiz internal rating system, the Horizon Internal Persona (or the “HIP” system for short; isn’t that just charmingly clever?), which lets your coworkers rate you as both an employee and a metahuman being. And if you have a high- enough HIP score, then gratz! You just earned yourself a promotion by being such a wonderful and diligent person. A true credit to society and to Horizon’s decadent scam machine. No need to even sweat your way through a bulldrek job interview, no sirree! The thing to remember with Horizon is two key words: Pretty sells. Horizon’s office buildings, their media blitzes, even their fragging sim-star CEO, Gary Cline, are all façades that are, admittedly, wonderful to behold. To most people façades are, well, shallow, but Horizon revels in them. As long as Horizon can dress something up in enough glitz and glamor, people will flock to it, take pictures of it, share those pictures everywhere, thereby using them to help people define beauty and stature. They can put enough lipstick on a pig to somehow make you forget that you’re even looking at a pig, and if you do discover you actually bought a pig, they can convince you that you can totally have a luau and pig roast for all of your friends. What an unexpected silver lining! There’s no wrong answer with this mega. Even major snafus like the anti-technomancer sentiments that led to the massacre in Las Vegas back in ’74, or the allegations that they had something to do with the birth of the AIs that proliferated CFD, or the shenanigans precipitated by the utter collapse of Consensus 1.0—all of those were mere bumps in Horizon’s surprisingly well-paved road. They came and went with only a modicum of lasting damage to Horizon’s public goodwill, and then they were largely forgotten like yesterday’s donuts or recalled like a distant memory and then waved off without any lasting consequence. I mean, a conscientious mega that supports so many humanitarian and social-welfare programs and offers so many good services and products is surely allowed a few foibles and benefits- of-the-doubt along the way, neh?

On the surface, Horizon is a Los Angeles–based AAA mega that specializes in PR, marketing, and media—but that’s not all they do, not by a long shot. (And if you think of them as just the “PR megacorp,” then congratulations, you’ve fallen for just another one of their lies.) But make no mistake—their biscuits and gravy is in the business of shaping the mediascape of reality so that reality (or at least the perception thereof) matches what they want you to think you want it to be. Confused yet? You should be. Because the most pernicious lie is the one you believe without even realizing where the belief came from. For example, a high-profile corp exec—who happens to be a Horizon client—could go out in the middle of New York City, shoot down someone in cold blood, and Horizon could make you believe not only that this was all a big misunderstanding, but that said exec was the real victim in this whole fiasco. They essentially weaponize victimhood, but the real trick is they’d get you to think that you already believed all of that before Horizon told you what to believe.

Horizon basically started as this humanitarian thinktank with lofty notions of social responsibility, and through some incredible luck—and maybe more than a little bit of nudging from shadow folk—they snatched up enough dough and assets to land a spot in the Big Ten. (It still sits at the bottom spot, but even the lowest layer of the crème de la crème is still, well, crème.)