Director Geoffrey Ashby

Overview

Geoffrey Ashby is a board member of the Terran Resource Consortium and one of the architects of the belt’s contract labor system. At 61, he represents the Earth-based corporate elite at its most insulated – a man who has never been to the belt and cannot conceive of the workers there as anything more than figures on a spreadsheet.

Background

Earth-born and corporate-raised, Ashby has spent his career perfecting the economic machinery that drives belt extraction. He designed much of the debt indenture system that governs contract labor – a system he considers a masterwork of efficiency. From his perspective, it is a perfectly balanced equation of labor, cost, and profit.

Physical Description

Impeccably dressed, with the soft, well-fed look of someone who has never performed a day of physical labor. He projects an air of effortless, patrician authority. His expression is usually one of mild disappointment, as if the world is constantly failing to meet his standards.

Personality

Ashby operates on systematic amorality. He is not motivated by simple greed, but by a deep-seated belief in the system he has built. Human beings are resources; their management is an efficiency metric, not a moral question. He is proud of the elegance of his designs.

He speaks in the smooth, confident, jargon-filled language of a corporate executive. He is condescending without being overtly insulting, speaking to others as if explaining simple concepts to a child. His pronouncements are delivered as incontrovertible facts.

His arrogance is total. He is utterly insulated from the consequences of his decisions. The idea that labor could have power over capital strikes him as a violation of natural law – not something to be angry about, but to be bewildered by, like a chess master whose pawn has decided to move like a queen.

Role

Ashby is the face of corporate power at its most impersonal. He doesn’t need to know the names of the people affected by his policies. The system runs on its own logic, and he is its chief designer.