First Corporate War

The **First Corporate War** was a global conflict that lasted from 2085 to 2101. The majority of the world's major corporations, alongside several nations, fought as part of two opposing military and economic alliances - the Jackson Coalition and the Saint-Aignan Coalition. These coalitions were formed based on one's support of either Dynetic Systems Interstellar or the Lasanne Corporation, the two major competitors who had started the period of corporate conflict with the Ray Park Attacks in 2082. During the aforementioned attack, half a dozen Lasanne employees were killed when an unidentified mercenary group drove by the Baudelaire Tower in San Francisco and opened fire indiscriminately. Lasanne public relations speakers openly accused Dynetic Systems of perpetrating the attack, whereas Dynetic Systems denied involvement completely and labelled the attack as being conducted by a third party. Regardless, the attacks spurred a three-year period of corporate warfare between the two rival companies, which eventually expanded into the First Corporate War.

Previously neutral companies first became involved in the conflict between Dynetic Systems and the Lasanne Corporation when the Old Big Five information technology corporations made a push into the insurance market, in the wake of the American Insurance Collapse of the 2070s. While Alphabet limited their expansion to only a thirteen-percent share in the newly-subsidized Allstate Corporation, the rest of the Big Five (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms) sought large buyouts of various defunct insurance companies. Amazon, for example, purchased a seventy-percent share in Progressive Insurance, officially subsidizing the corporation in 2081. All these factors served to create a divide between the dominant American tech companies, and the surviving insurance companies who had managed to retain their market shares post-collapse. These included State Farm Insurance, Wells Fargo, and Prudential Financial. Empowered under the new insurance bloc, each of these companies invested into their own private military connections, in efforts to ward off Big Five hostile takeover tactics. This proved to be a wise move when Microsoft agents were discovered infiltrating the hardware databases of State Farm in 2083, with the goal of breaching the entire system and using the threat of a data leak to strongarm the company into being bought out. Controversially, these agents were summarily executed by State Farm security teams instead of being handed over to the California State Government, fueling personal conflict between the two blocs alongside the existing political divide.

Conflict also brewed within the retail market between competitors such as the Target Corporation and Costco Wholesale. Tensions between the various retail giants had emerged since the collapse of Walmart in 2073, after which other retailers jumped on the opportunity to buy up assets. The particular incident which encouraged conflict was Costco's controversial purchase of a Walmart supply center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city generally accepted to be under Target's sphere of influence. Target responded by buying out a collection of Walmart warehouses in Seattle, Washington, however, these warehouses never survived as a series of gas explosions broke out in 2074 and destroyed them completely. Like Lasanne, the Target Corporation chose to air out their accusations publicly, claiming that Costco personnel orchestrated the explosions. The next incident to occur came in 2076, when Target-paid mercenaries stopped a train en route to Seattle from Kansas City, and stole a car containing Costco goods. From that point on, corporate warfare began between the two companies.

The final major theatre of conflict that broke out as part of the lead-up to the Corporate War was that which emerged between the American telecommunications giants and the AT&T Corporation, which had submitted itself to a partial buyout by Chinese companies. This violated a reported agreement in 2080, that stated that none of the major American telecommunications companies would sell stock to Chinese corporations, and negative press related to the deal was released throughout the following months. Independent agencies began to report that corporations like Verizon and Comcast had paid for this media campaign in early 2081, after which, conflict between the telecommunications companies broke out in full. Emboldened by their new partnership with Chinese actors, AT&T began the back-and-forth by bombing a Verizon communications tower near Reno, Nevada.