- President/CEO: Yoshi Anjiro
- Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
- Seattle Division: Pacific Rim Communications Northwest, 6th Avenue and Union Avenue, Tacoma
- Division Head: Cassandra Paul
Keep an eye on this one, chummers. If “he who controls communications, controls the world” (I saw that on some PRC suit’s office wall), then Pacific Rim Communications is a corporation with serious ambitions. The corp’s area of interest is telecommunications, mainly large-scale telecomm systems for other corporations and governments, but also municipal telecomm grids. PRC runs the Seattle LTG, giving the corporation some serious clout—not enough to make it a first-string megacorp, but enough to make it a very big deal in the Pacific Rim.
PRC has a lot of influence along the PacRim, but little elsewhere. The company would love to expand its operations into the rest of North America and Asia, and the collapse of Fuchi was just the opportunity PRC’s been waiting for. The corp has been snapping up regional telecomm contracts as quickly as it can. Unfortunately, its capabilities are limited; a second-tier corp can’t swallow in a single bite all the assets Fuchi lost. This forces PRC to proceed cautiously and maneuver craftily around the competition.
The PacRim Comm complex in Tacoma occupies the land once owned by Pacific Northwest Bell, which the corporation bought out in 2046. The office complex handles the administrative needs of the Seattle branch and answers to PRC North America in San Francisco. Physicalplant security is decent, relying heavily on electronics such as maglocks and key-card systems, backed by alarms and sensors. The corporation has its own security force and usually arms them with tasers and stun-batons, breaking out the heavy weapons only for major trouble. As might be expected, the facility’s Matrix security systems are first-rate.
> That’s for sure. The PRC system itself isn’t all that tough, but the company’s squad of expert deckers on duty certainly are. The corp has deckers online 24 hours a day to handle any problems. You have to get past tough trace ice and patrol deckers to get at the treasures in the PRC system. Ah, but what treasures! PRC has telecomm records, including unlisted LTG numbers and information on telecomm systems installed for clients all over the metroplex. A lot of the information is online in the customer-service database, to let the reps help customers fix and finetune their systems over the comm. That setup also allows us to get useful intel on the opposition’s capabilities.
> The Dead Deckers Society “In Kibo We Trust”
> PRC’s control of the Seattle LTG gives them a huge edge in information- and intelligence-gathering. Think about it: PacRim Comm controls the network everyone in the metroplex uses to transmit their valuable data. Even with encryption and data security, that means a lot of data gets captured and analyzed by PRC before it goes wherever it’s going. If you want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, take a look at what PRC is doing today.
> Smiley
> Let’s not overstate things, chummer. First of all, those encryption and data-security sequences you dismiss so quickly aren’t easy to crack. By the time a corporate decker has it all figured out, the data is most likely so out of date it’s useless. No corporation trusts anything really important to any system except its own PLTG, which is not maintained by PRC. Second, the company can’t afford to be accused of spying on customers’ communications. If the United Corporate Council got up in arms about it, the metroplex government would yank PRC’s contract so fast it would make their bytes spin. Lastly, the corp simply doesn’t have the personnel that would be needed to monitor the vast amounts of data that pass through the Seattle Matrix every fragging minute—though they might get their hands on something timely by accident.
> Brother Data