Global Engineering And Protection Corporation

“We make the world.”

History

Rise of CACEPS and Laminar Cities

The Global Engineering and Protection Corporation started its existence as the Global Engineering and Protection Project, inside the umbrella of the Unified Human Government’s Humanity’s Survival Initiative. A group of scientists tasked with the unenviable responsibility of developing a way to stabilize the climate in a given area, it quickly became one of the most resource hungry of the MegaProjects. Man-made Climate Change had merged with the atmospheric destruction of The Last War to produce an environment so unstable that meteorologists were no longer able to algorithmically predict what would happen each day.

Eventually, in ???? there was a breakthrough. Through a combination of cloud seeding¹, laser guided discharge of electrical potential², utilization of carbon nanoparticles³, and massive computational power⁴, the GEPP Scientists announced the creation of the Climate Analysis, Control, Engineering, and Protection System.

The system was monumental in scale, incredibly complex, incredibly expensive, and was limited in its range. The UHG initially resisted the solution, insisting there had to be a planet wide option. Finally, the UHG sent back a mandate to GEPP: Either make the system planet wide, or figure out a way to consolidate the human population.

In ???? GEPP once again produced a viable option. Dubbed “Laminar Cities” due to their appearance and utilitarian design, GEPP had designed massive metropolises that were perfectly symmetrical, perfectly equal, and designed to minimize differences in living environments.

As a positive side effect, the cities would allow any storm systems that did manage to bypass CACEPS to pass right through with minimal resistance, and may even help to break the storm up.

Such an egalitarian solution strongly appealed to the UHG of the time, and in ???? the Regional Unification and Modernization Initiative was signed into law, signaling the start of the largest series of construction projects in human history.

AI Controversy & Proposition EAICAR

During the initial UHG Conferences on CACEPS, the fact that the system would not work planet wide provided enough of a distraction to prevent the UHG Representatives from probing at a potentially sore spot of the CACEP System, namely the fact that no human or team of humans was anywhere near fast enough to process all the analysis data and control the vast array of drones and satellites with the precision that GEPP was advertising.

Since the Committees didn’t ask, the scientists didn’t see any reason to announce the fact that they were using Artificial Intelligence to control the system. Between the vast array of sensors, drone aircraft, satellites, computer control modules, and the massively complex calculations needed to account for entropy, a team of humans didn’t stand a chance at doing more than staving off the very worst. An artificial intelligence however, could.

Their secret remained safe through the construction of all the cities, and through the initial relocation of the global population. All seemed like it would go perfectly to plan, and by the time any information had leaked, people would be so comfortable it wouldn’t matter.

Then, in ???? a whistleblower announced the secret behind CACEPS during primetime on a Global News Network. By the next morning, the global population was a hair’s breadth away from a full scale riot. Everyone knew the official story of the AI’s disobedience during The Last War, and the idea of this same type of disobedient intelligence being in control of their very survival was simply too much to handle for the majority of the world.

Not content to allow the normal procedures and investigations to play out, people called for a Unified Human Election on a single proposition. The proposition’s language was fleshed out within 24 hours, calming the population, and barely more than one hundred hours after the news first broke, Eliminating Artificial Intelligence in Climate Analysis and Regulation went to a vote.

GEPP scientists watched in horror as, in a landslide, the proposal passed. They were given fourteen days to develop a plan to move away from AI intervention, and 90 days to implement it.

The Human Era of Climate Engineering

As expected, once AI had been removed from the system, its performance dropped dramatically. Human operators were only able to prevent 75% of the extreme storm category, and 40% of the moderate storm category. In deserts, massive dust storms being channeled through the Laminar streets became common. Along coastlines, a new cottage industry sprang up helping people to put Hurricane Shutters on their apartments.

Rather than attempt to prevent everything, the human operators quickly learned to only focus their time on potentially lethal storm systems, and within a few years almost every city would experience a minimum of two storm systems a day.

Surprisingly, the population didn’t actually mind. Alarm systems were developed, meteorologists suddenly learned to read the CACEPS output, and the world normalized into a human controlled, albeit stormy, climate lifestyle.

CASH Act & Independence

Severed from their governmental dependence by the CASH Act in ????, GEPP was spun off to become GEP Corporation, but interestingly, not much changed for the Scientists involved.

Sure they had to report to a board of directors, their expenses were intently monitored, and their salaries had shifted, but the severing from a government source of income had all but ensured that another Laminar City could never be created. As the existing Laminar Cities were still technically regulated by the government, the idea of private citizenship, at least for GEP Co, was a foreign one.

Their income was primarily in the form of government subsidies, and their expenses were the same as they were previously. The end result is that GEP Co. functions as a sort of privately controlled government department.

Products

• Climate Analysis, Control, Engineering, and Protection System
• Laminar Cities

Notable Employees

To Be Developed.

Important Dates

To Be Developed.

Corporate Headquarters

To Be Developed.

Author Notes & Meta Information

Except for the single incident involving Artificial Intelligence, the public is actually pretty comfortable with GEP Co’s public image. They stick to their domain quite well, and they’ve become fairly transparent with the information they release. Realtime CACEPS data for areas both inside and outside the sphere of influence is freely available to any tax-paying member of the public, and they’ve even volunteered to help train individuals from the local news agencies on how to interpret it.

Internally, GEP Corporation is one of the few that doesn’t have a large hunger for power. Their domain is fairly stable, and the board of directors typically view their stewardship as a type of community service to the world, and as such they aren’t typically interested in milking the corporation for every dime.

However, within the Scientific Directors, there is a large group of individuals trying to gain slight influence over HALOC’s HAARPS curriculum. These scientists reject the official account of AI’s role in The Last War, and believe that the Government is withholding their actual role in order to make humanity look better. They believe that a slow shift in HAARPS curriculum could positively influence the population to vote to allow them access to AI once again, which would solve the current storm issue.