Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #149 - Corporate Security

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Corporate Security

Merchants and businesses have had to protect themselves since the beginning of human civilisation. The threats have varied and evolved over time, from bandits and robbers attacking trade caravans, through to modern scammers and cyber criminals. The defences have evolved over time as well. It started with merchant hiring armed guards to protect their premises and wares, evolved to complex locks, alarm systems, and financial instruments to avoid carrying cash. Now, global multinationals have the kind of corporate security that many countries would be jealous of. Armies of security guards and even (in the case of Blackrock and petrochemical companies) armed mercenaries. Equally large armies of lawyers. Computer and cybercrime experts. Advanced vaults, AI-driven threat analysis programmes. Some even have significant offensive capabilities, all wrapped up in corporate double-speak about asset protection and threat removal.

How do merchants and businesses in your setting protect themselves ? Tell me a story about how it works in practice ! What is the threat, where do the risks come from ? Who do they hire to protect themselves ? How effective is the protection ? What happens, and what does the business do, if their hired security lets them down or even betrays them ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂