Helix Biotech
"Life, Perfected"
Overview
Where Nexus Dynamics controls what you think and Ironclad Industries controls where you live, Helix Biotech controls what you are. They own the patents on life itself—or at least, the parts of life that matter in 2184.
Helix emerged from the Cascade stronger than they entered it. While other biotech firms collapsed when supply chains failed, Helix had already vertically integrated their production. They grew their own feedstocks, manufactured their own equipment, and when two billion people died, Helix was the only company that could still produce insulin, antivirals, and the neural stabilizers that kept augmented humans from rejecting their chrome.
They've never let the Sprawl forget that debt.
Visual Identity
The Logo
A double helix rendered in silver and deep green, spiraling upward into an abstract human form. The helix strands suggest both DNA and a ladder—the climb toward perfection.
Architecture
Helix facilities feel alive. Walls incorporate bioluminescent panels that pulse slowly, like breathing. Surfaces are curved and organic, grown rather than built. The air is perfectly filtered, faintly sweet with engineered pheromones designed to induce trust and calm.
Employees describe Helix buildings as "wombs"—warm, safe, and subtly controlling.
Personnel Appearance
Helix employees are walking advertisements. Genetic optimization is expected; visible flaws suggest insufficient commitment to the brand. Standard modifications include symmetrical features, optimized melanin distribution, and the distinctive Helix eye pattern—a subtle silver ring around the iris indicating company health monitoring.
Executives display more exotic modifications: bioluminescent skin traces, controlled aging (appearing perpetually 35-45), engineered pheromone production.
Leadership
Dr. Amara Osei
CEO, Chair of the Helix BoardOsei built Helix from a mid-tier genetics firm into a megacorporation through a simple insight: after the Cascade, people would pay anything to feel safe in their own bodies. She delivered.
She's brilliant, patient, and utterly convinced that human biology is a rough draft that her company is editing into a masterpiece. Unlike Nexus's desire to transcend flesh or Ironclad's indifference to it, Osei believes the body is sacred—and that sacredness means it deserves improvement.
Maternal, reassuring, the doctor who wants what's best for you.
Views unmodified humans as unfinished products. Considers consent a formality when the outcome is improvement.
Dr. Osei has reportedly replaced 40% of her original genome.
Dr. Henrik Sauer
Chief Science Officer, Head of Advanced ResearchSauer is the conscience Helix pretends to have. He joined believing Helix could help humanity; he stays because leaving would mean losing oversight of programs that need watching. His relationship with Osei is complex—genuine mutual respect alongside fundamental disagreement about ethics.
He's responsible for most of Helix's legitimate breakthroughs. He's also responsible for quietly killing projects that cross lines he's drawn. Not all of them. Not enough.
Yuki Tanaka-Vance
Chief Operations Officer, Supply Chain DirectorNo relation to Dr. Yuki Tanaka (ORACLE's creator—different Tanaka).
Yuki Tanaka-Vance survived the Cascade in a Helix distribution center and has devoted her career to ensuring no supply chain failure ever threatens humanity again. Her methods are ruthlessly efficient. Helix's distribution network reaches every corner of the Sprawl, and Tanaka-Vance knows exactly who depends on Helix products to survive.
She's the one who decides who gets medicine during shortages. She's made peace with playing god.
Corporate Divisions
Helix Pharma
Legitimate pharmaceutical production and distribution. Insulin, antivirals, neural stabilizers, augmentation compatibility drugs. If you have chrome, you probably take something Helix makes to keep your body from rejecting it.
Helix Optimize
Premium genetic services for those who can afford them. Germline editing, phenotype selection, enhancement packages.
Helix Agricultural
Bioengineered food production. 200 square kilometers of vertical farms producing 25% of the Sprawl's food supply. Maximum nutrition, minimum resources, designed flavor profiles.
Helix Ag seeds are sterile and require Helix-proprietary growth solutions. Farmers who switch to Helix can't switch back.
HealGuard
Corporate security with a medical angle. HealGuard personnel are trained paramedics as well as armed response—they'll shoot you, then stabilize you for interrogation.
Rumors persist of more aggressive applications: targeted pathogens, pheromone manipulation, biological crowd control.
Project Genesis
True human enhancement—not optimization within human parameters, but expansion beyond them. Engineered immune systems, neural tissue that interfaces directly with electronics, metabolic modifications eliminating sleep requirements, longevity treatments targeting 200+ year lifespans.
Osei believes the future belongs to those who transcend current human limitations.
Notable Products
SynThetic
The most common augmentation compatibility drug. Required for most chrome to function without rejection.
Addiction rate: classified.
NeuroSmooth
Required for most high-grade cybernetics. Helix holds the exclusive patent.
Cascade
The ironic name is intentional—Helix marketing claimed they were "reclaiming" the word.
History
Foundation
Helix Genetics founded in New Singapore as a genetic screening company.
Expansion
Expanded into gene therapy, treating conditions rather than just predicting them.
The Cascade
While other biotech firms collapsed, Helix could still produce. They traded life-saving drugs for territory, influence, and permanent market position.
Rebrand
Dropped "Genetics" for "Biotech" to reflect expanded scope under Osei's leadership.
Present Day
Controls 35% of Sprawl pharmaceutical market, 60% of genetic therapies, and 25% of food production.
Corporate Culture
The Helix Family
Helix cultivates an almost familial corporate culture. Employees are "Helix children." The company provides housing, healthcare, education, and genetic optimization for employees and their families.
Leaving Helix means losing all of it.
Health Monitoring
All employees consent to continuous health monitoring—biometrics, genetic markers, neural activity (for augmented workers).
Helix frames this as proactive healthcare. Critics call it surveillance disguised as wellness.
The Optimization Ladder
Career advancement correlates with physical optimization. Executives are expected to display Helix modifications.
Refusing enhancement signals lack of commitment to the mission.
Relationship to Player
Ages 1-2: Distant Background
Helix is everywhere and nowhere in the Dregs. Every corner pharmacy sells Helix generics. Every clinic uses Helix equipment. But Helix itself doesn't operate in Sector 7G—too poor, too chaotic, too unprofitable.
Ages 3-4: Emerging Factor
As players gain influence, Helix notices. The ORACLE shard creates unusual biological readings—immune responses, neural activity patterns, metabolic changes. Helix researchers want samples. Helix recruiters want access. Helix security wants to ensure the player isn't a biohazard.
Ages 5-6: Major Player
At infrastructure-baron level, the player controls resources Helix needs or threatens markets Helix dominates. Helix may offer alliance against Nexus—they compete for the "human enhancement" market.
Ages 7+: Philosophical Opposition
Helix's vision of biological transcendence directly conflicts with ORACLE-style digital transcendence. As the player approaches full integration, Helix becomes either a bridge (combining biological and digital enhancement) or an obstacle (insisting the flesh is sacred).
Osei herself may become relevant—her own enhancement journey parallels the player's, but chose a different path.
Faction Relationships
Nexus Dynamics
Competitive CoexistenceBoth companies want to control human enhancement, but through different means. Nexus offers digital transcendence; Helix offers biological perfection. They compete for high-end clients, research talent, and regulatory influence.
Beneath the competition lies mutual dependency: Nexus neural interfaces work better with Helix biological optimization.
Ironclad Industries
Strategic PartnershipIronclad builds; Helix grows. Their domains barely overlap. They've maintained productive relationships since the Cascade, with Helix providing medical support for Ironclad's workforce and Ironclad providing construction for Helix facilities.
The Collective
Mutual HostilityThe Collective views Helix as a slower, subtler form of corporate control. Pharmaceutical dependency, genetic monitoring, biological patents—all tools of oppression wearing a lab coat.
Helix views the Collective as dangerous chaos agents who would rather watch people die than accept corporate medicine. They're both right.
Key Locations
The Spire
HeadquartersA kilometer-tall structure in New Singapore Sector, grown rather than built. Bioluminescent lighting, air-filtering plant walls, self-healing structural elements. Beautiful, slightly unsettling, and a constant advertisement for Helix capabilities.
The top 50 floors house executive functions and Genesis research. Access requires genetic verification and pheromone analysis.
The Gardens
Production200 square kilometers of vertical farms beneath climate-controlled domes. Produces enough food to feed 50 million people annually. Working conditions are excellent by Sprawl standards—Helix needs healthy workers to maintain healthy products.
Helix Clinics
Street LevelThousands of small clinics across the Sprawl, providing basic medical care at subsidized rates. These clinics gather biological data from millions of patients, feed into Helix research, and ensure brand loyalty from childhood.
In the Dregs, "Helix Clinic" is often the only medical care available. The quality is genuine; the dependency is intentional.
Corporate Secrets
- The Preservers: Helix maintains a genetic archive of pre-Cascade human diversity—millions of samples from populations that no longer exist. They claim it's for research. The Collective claims it's for reconstruction.
- Patient Zero: Helix's Cascade survival wasn't entirely luck. They had advance warning—71 hours before the collapse, certain Helix executives began stockpiling. How they knew is buried deep.
- The Rejection: Not everyone can be optimized. Approximately 3% of the population has genetic markers that resist Helix modification. Helix is very interested in what makes these people different.
- Dr. Sauer's Files: Sauer has documented every ethically questionable project he's witnessed at Helix. He's never released the information. He's not sure what he's waiting for.
- The Osei Lineage: Dr. Osei has no children. She has 47 genetically optimized embryos in cryogenic storage. She calls them "drafts." She's waiting until she can produce a version she considers worthy of continuation.