data.cult: A Weird Corporation for Modern RPG Settings

This fictional company is part of the Destiny City role playing game setting.

This fictional company is part of the Destiny City role playing game setting.

data.cult is secretive analytics and data brokerage company founded by former WitchTel employee Raymond Fabrice in the early 2003. data.cult keeps its customer list quiet but includes foreign governments and international corporations.

Fabrice had been a linguistics and symbolic logic professor but was attracted to Hugo Ortiz’s fringe, esoteric theories of mathematics and computer science. Finding himself increasingly marginalized in academia, he left his university and joined WitchTel in the early 1990s when the company was building its web search engine. He eventually decided the company wasn’t pushing far enough into artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing. He quit and founded data.cult to research harnessing the human mind for pattern detection and large scale human processing.

Fabrice said when the company was founded that the name was a joke to reflect how dedicated its employees were to their jobs. But it seems to have become a reality. Employees shave their heads, wear black robes and are often seen in public but seldom speak to anyone, even each other. They seldom leave their corporate headquarters.

Not much is known by the outside world about how data.cult’s methods work. It’s known that data.cultists are chosen young and given a they’re given a battery of peculiar tests. Rumors abound that the interview process is actually designed to find people with psychic abilities.

Briefing

  • Type: Private
  • Industry: Technology
  • Founded: Destiny City, 2003
  • Headquarters: Destiny City
  • Area served: Worldwide
  • Key people: Raymond Fabrice (founder, CEO)
  • Number of employees: 1,300

Products and Services

data.cult offers a wide range of data services, including data mining, lead generation, and web analytics. Their secret sauce, so to speak, is combining human observation with electroencephalography to process images and data, not unlike the DARPA Sentry system.

Criticism and controversies

data.cult’s secrecy has led to allegations of being a literal cult.

The company is also frequently accused by politicians around the world of aiding various governments with various forms of espionage, but no hard evidence of data.cult’s involvement with any sort of illegal activity has been produced.

Story seeds

  • Go undercover to expose data.cult’s secrets
  • Extract a data.cultist from the company on behalf of the cultist’s family