The Board of Directors
Agenda: Direct and perpetuate the WEC.
Structure: Corporate-political committee.
Symbol: WEC logo.
Overview
The Board of Directors is mistakenly believed to be President Gauthier?s inner circle, while the Senate does the ruling. In truth, Gauthier has little use for sycophants and yes-men; though the WEC?s bureaucracy is huge and bloated and reliant on politics as much as competence, he truly believes that the WEC must be, and therefore that it must function well. So while the Senate debates and schemes and puts on a show for the vidcameras, the Board of Directors actually does things.
No one on the Board is friendly to each other; that is the way Gauthier likes it. Gauthier is no fool. He sought out he most cunning and competent people he could find, regardless of whether they respected him or each other. He uses their infighting to maintain the status quo, with himself on top, and subtly guides their competence towards needed goals. He trusts them just far enough to do their absolute best with their departments.
President and Chief Executive Officer
Though called President, [Marcel]* Gauthier is effectively a monarch. He can be called Mr. President informally, but he is often addressed with Your Excellency. The President could do without the board--he just knows he couldn?t do as well. He believes in the WEC as a cause, not just as a way for him to make money and consolidate power (though he has more than a passing interesting in that, too). To that end, he has assembled the group he believes is best at maintaining the WEC?s financial and governmental viability in both the short- and long-term.
There are few secrets the Board can hide from Gauthier. His personal resources and holdings are immense, and as he is the head of the WEC they are effectively orders of magnitude greater still. He has all the contacts and money he needs to find out anything, given time. His only weakness in this area is his reliance on Bolger; the man himself is a mystery.
Chief Financial Officer
Dr William Rothschild III is a mathematical savant. He was solving nonlinear equations by age 5, and had a doctorate in mathematics by 10. His talent for pattern recognition picked up the writing on the wall well before 2150, and he branched out to economics. He was assistant to an international megacorporation?s CFO by the time he was 22, and has been the WEC?s CFO since its inception.
Surly and unpleasant, Rothschild is consumed by greed. He is not loyal to Gauthier, but has concluded that for now, Gauthier is the best choice for a president. He seethes with resentment and self-loathing, knowing that it is far too late for him to acquire the skills for the job, let alone contemplate becoming CEO himself. He never married, never had children, and has few people he would count as friends.
Dr Rothschild has no allies on the Board, not even Gauthier, but most know his mathematical prowess and experience in economics would be nigh impossible to replace. Generally, they leave him to his numbers, allowing him to nurse his grudges in his declining years.
Chief Knowledge Officer
The head of intelligence and counter-intelligence, CKO Arvin Bolger delights in mind games. He has asked the Board to perpetuate the myth that the various intelligence agencies report to a different person, who are at each other?s throats for political power; in reality, each is Bolger in disguise. This method is perhaps more time-consuming, but more effective at creating just the image he wants, and get all his information unfiltered, compared to having to rely on other people. Whether to keep him placated or because they take as much delight in the act as he does, the Board has humoured him.
Bolger is a consummate actor, performer, and (not to be clich?d) a master of disguise. One of his ?subordinates? is an obese man six inches taller than Bolger himself; another is a sensually curvy young woman with a bevy of agents wrapped around ?her? little finger.
Arvin Bolger was born with a surprisingly well-developed multiple personality disorder. At 23, desperate for relief from the chaos of his mind but unwilling to part with his closest ?friends?, Bolger went to a prominent neurosurgeon with a plea: not to eliminate all but one of his personalities, but give him the ability to control them. It required almost six months of tests on hapless mental patients before the first success. After Bolger underwent the treatment, he switched to his most ruthless personality and killed the doctor and all the ?patients? who had not already died for him to find peace.
Since then, he has learned how to create new personalities with a fully-developed history in his meteoric rise through WEC?s intelligence divisions. Since arranging for the death of the previous CKO and rising to the position almost seven years ago, his ability to literally see things from many points of view has kept him in a nearly-unassailable position. It was Bolger who first suggested that the Resistance?s Petra experiment be allowed to continue past the first stages to a disastrous and public failure; this is perhaps his one black spot, as it seems to have galvanized the remaining Resistance cells.
Bolger?s ?default? personality is that of a genial, chipper, and rather harmless middle-aged man--essentially, Bolger himself. His wife calls him ?cute?; his voice is pleasantly and cheerfully high-pitched. His small, slender build only aids the illusion. Underneath it is his ?board? personality: quiet, icy, ineffable. This personality is an utter psychopath, unburdened by guilt and with a hundred murders to his name, at least a quarter of those since he became CKO. He doesn?t use the personality for the games of chance he engages in as hobby and practice, but remembers the precise facial muscle configurations for bluffing. He maintains at least half a dozen other personalities that he engages in routinely, though he could have tens of others set aside for various contingencies.
The CKO can read people like a book. Every millisecond-long facial tic in response to surprising information might as well be in slow motion for him. He is a master of disarming and confusing body language and vocal tone, combining defensive posture with aggressive words, or friendly language and tone with a bully?s stance.
Among the Board, Bolger (quite naturally) has the most diverse range of skills, though he cannot use them all at once. His secret is just that; most of the Board assumes he is simply an actor par excellence.
Like other Board titles, Chief Knowledge Officer does not reflect what a CKO would actually do in a corporation divorced from government. Arvin has a few ?trusted? underlings to do business management for him; he is far more interested in the espionage aspects of his work. These subordinates naturally report to CFO Rothschild, giving Bolger several spies on the CFO's staff.
Chief Operations Officer
A former Elite Stormtrooper, General (Rt) Jesminder Nagra ensures that the bureaucracy of the WEC runs with military efficiency--or at least attempts to. She takes her post of COO very seriously.
In her time with the Special Forces, General Nagra, and Elite Stormtrooper, tended towards favouring MilOps, though it was the less powerful of the two conventional military divisions. With the Silencers given to resisting Enforcer (and thus SecCart) authority on missions, that meant if they took sides (and SecCart?s refusal to take no for an answer would ensure they did, one way or the other), it would most likely be MilOps they went with. Nagra felt that regardless of numbers, whoever had the Silencers would achieve victory if it came to violence.
After the former COO died of a vicious stroke (the only board member to die of natural causes for two decades) approximately six months before the destruction of the Vigilance Platform, Nagra was coaxed out of retirement by Gauthier, who appealed to her sense of duty. Though hardly incorruptible, she almost has a sense of honor about her activities, and prefers open fighting to political backstabbing (though she excels at both; one cannot become a general in any force, let alone the WEC's military, without being a dab hand at politics). Gauthier almost trusts her, which is probably more than he can say for anyone else in his life.
Nagra is young for the Board, not even sixty, and others tend to look down on her. In Gauthier?s case, this is deliberate; he notes that when she is feeling patronized Nagra is driven beyond all reason to exceed herself, and usually does. With the others, it is genuine, at least to some degree, despite the fact that she also acts as liaison to MilOps. For this reason, in fact, she has a vicious rivalry with the CSO.
Thanks to regular exercise and modern medical practices, Nagra is still in fantastic shape; she looks forty, and is almost as fit as she was at thirty-five. She doubts she would quite be up to Elite Stormtrooper standard for physical fitness, but is quite convinced she would be able to outwit any ?child? young enough to still be a field officer.
Chief Security Officer
Donald Yen is the Chief Security Officer, looking to the actual state of readiness of the WEC to weather attacks. He cannot, of course, look after security everywhere; he only personally manages the security of the Directors' headquarters. He instead drafts security policies, such as how many cameras must be installed in a room of a given size in a facility of a given security class, or defining reasonable certainty of a Resistance cell's location ("reasonable certainty" being the requirement for an assault team to, without warning, sweep the premises and kill all personnel within).
In recent months he has been driven to fits, both by the sudden surge of Resistance successes and in former Chairman Draygan's constant needling of him for failures on the part of security. While tightening security strictures and quietly appealing to CKO Bolger, he has been also been trying to arrange meetings with the heads of the Silencer Corps, to help brainstorm strategies that would be effective against a Silencer, but they have remained aloof.
Unlike Nagra, the CSO is not a former military officer; he is a General in the Elite Guard, though no longer a field officer, and currently the head of SecCart as well. This gives him more influence than COO Nagra, who is retired, and thus a ?mere? liaison. He has, more than once, "slipped up" in Board meetings and called her "girl".
The CSO frankly does not trust CKO Bolger, as someone who knows that much is by definition a security risk. He is reasonably loyal to Gauthier, but thinks the President's focus on money and politics weakens the WEC's military position.
Chair
The Chair of the Board of Directors is currently vacant, as Nathaniel Draygan was killed when the Resistance took over Darkside Base on the moon. Successors proposed by the Board include President of the Senate Raheem Byrd, the head of Harvard Law's political science department Professor Seth Hamidi, Enforcer Commanding General, and even the Resistance's General Maxis (CFO Rothschild refuses to believe that anyone could be sincere in democratic principles; others, wiser in the ways of people, generally ignore his suggestion).
*I just picked a first name.