Security Guards, Or how did we get from Barney to Ninjas. Options

[cx2]

I agree that the corps would go to this extent for loyalty, I mean it isn't that much in exchange for people who would be willing to consider laying their lives down just for the corps.

I can imagine worker's children perhaps being given aptitude tests and then put in certain categories at school from a given age, depending on where they thought they may be useful. Perhaps scientists, business etc, and so on. The future security guards would probably be put in for a lot of physical training. Just imagine the subjects though -
Corporate history
Corporate ethics or philosophy (or "why we're good for the world")

Especially for the kids intended for security I could imagine them being encouraged or forced to go to something similar to the army cadets they run here in Britain, sort of like a club for teenagers where they would get training and discipline. For those special few they might even offer something like a cross between that and the scouts, for potential special ops people. The bottom grade would likely end up as disposable sec, working the way up to the corp military or even the corp special ops teams. Failures would probably still be offered jobs, most likely as cleaning staff or other such work. Perhaps something similar would be there for other categories too, meaning that from even as young as 12 or thereabouts future corp businessmen would be competing to get the best results and thus the best jobs.

[Mercer]

There's a little of that now, if you look at the hyper-competitive nature of the elite preschools in places like New York. If little Jimmy isn't eating the right kind of paste, he'll never be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

At the same time, a big part of the SR world for me is that its essentially like the world I live in now. There are fancy add-ons like magic, cyberware and dragons, but at its base its still a world where regualr people are leading normal lives-- going to work, raising their kids, watching bad tv shows. That's what grounds the setting for me.

In that respect, I find it helpful that the social machinery that keeps the in-game world humming along to be roughly the same as that of the real world. The staff at the 2070 Embraceable Zoo are likely still going to be disaffected high school kids, rather than genetically-modified super-cadets trained from birth to sell plush toys (although that might make for an interesting subgame, in a Paranoia-style world).

By-the-by, what's this topic about anyway? It seems like we've drifted far afield from the initial query about security guards. Or maybe just I have. (Embraceable Zoo super-soldiers, where the hell did that come from?) It would seem that any corporation will find a way to protect its assets in a way commensurate with their worth.

Also, if we're talking about corporations with extraterritoriality, it seems like we're not really talking about security guards, but police and military assets. That seems like an important distinction.

[cx2]

I would imagine corp sec forces acting as police too, but mostly for their own. For those not resident in the enclaves, and not all sec people will be at the enclaves either, they will just act like regular guards overall. Difference is if you get caught you might not get handed over to the cops.

[Grinder]

[kzt]

[Mercer]

And US embassies have Marines, which one would hope are tougher than your average mall security guard (at least the mall security guards who are not themselves former Marines).

Granted, I've been out of the scene a little while (the SR scene), but arcologies are more like small cities than embassies, and a lot of them have public zones that have a lot of "tourist" traffic such as shops, restaurants and so on. So in that way the corporations running the arcologies have all the problems of an embassy and a small city. Especially since the "public" services in the cities the arcologies are located tend to be privatized, so the police and fire departments are corporations (read: competitors) themselves.

I don't know if its ever been detailed, but it seems like a lot of juridictional complexity. Let's say a UCAS citizen is murdered on Ares property in a city that contracts to Lone Star for its police services. (The PR game alone that both sides would be playing would make for a pretty interesting game, nevermind the actual murder mystery itself.)