Shiawase

Shiawase builds and runs reactors. Power for cities, power for other corporations' facilities, power for anyone whose grid stopped working during the plague years and never fully came back — which is most places.

They are also the name on the lawsuit. When people explain how corporations stopped answering to countries, the case they cite is Shiawase's. Every other megacorp on this list is standing on a door this family opened.

Canon reference: Shiawase Corporation on the Sixth World Wiki, for anybody who wants the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

What the crew knows

• Family-owned and family-run, which is unusual at this size and means the fights inside the company are literally family fights.
• Openly, formally religious in a way that surprises people who assumed a corporation couldn't be. There are shrines in their facilities and the observances are not decoration.
• They own power plants near both cities. When the lights go out in your district, whether they come back on is somebody's commercial decision.
• And the refinery. The Chevron plant at El Segundo and the AES generating station at Redondo are both theirs, bought together in the 2040s, sharing one administration — so the company that held the San Onofre storage contract still runs the largest refinery on the poisoned coast, inside the cordon, on the same shift pattern as before. See the beach cities.
• Their intelligence arm has a bland departmental name and a bad reputation. Runners who cross Shiawase report being researched rather than hunted.
• The oldest and most patient of the eight. They do not appear to be in a hurry about anything.

And "researched rather than hunted" is not the same as safe. It's a description of their first instrument, not their only one. Anybody who has watched Shiawase work through a problem can list the ladder, and it should be said out loud the first time the crew crosses them, because the tempting mistake is to treat a file as harmless:

1. A file, with a name in it. Nothing happens. This is the part people relax about.
2. Administrative harm, which is where being a utility stops being trivia. A meter that fails and takes eleven weeks to be looked at. An address flagged for a safety inspection. A rate that rises for one building. A permit that is neither refused nor granted. None of it is deniable, because none of it is even wrong.
3. Employment. They are one of the largest employers on this coast. They can make a person unemployable across an entire sector without saying anything to anybody — and they can offer somebody's sister a very good job in Osaka, which is the same move wearing a smile.
4. Substitution. They buy the thing you were going to sell, or they buy the person you were going to sell it to. Frequently cheaper than dealing with you at all.
5. Law, which is their native weapon. Corporate extraterritoriality exists because Shiawase won the case that created it. They are better at this than anyone and it is the ground they prefer to fight on.
6. Physical, contracted out, and late. It happens months afterwards, to somebody on their day off, and it looks like an accident — and a company whose facilities are full of ways to have an accident does not have to be inventive about it.
7. A retainer. The version nobody sees coming: they hire you, permanently, and being on a Shiawase retainer is a form of custody. It's the most generous offer anybody in this business ever gets, and it is how this list ends for most people.

Standing with the crew

Neutral. If they were interested you would not know yet.