It seems surprising that the WTO, an organization supposedly built upon trade and economics would be terrified of Apostle Corp introducing bio-augmentations that are compatible with everyone instead of market standard biomods that only work for 5% of humans. After all, even someone barely out of biz school can tell you, a product that can garner twenty times the market it already has, would cause most high level executives and investors to salivate and lick their lips about a huge increase in profits. Even government officials ordinarily would be licking their chops over the increased tax revenue that such a huge increase in biomod sales would bring in. And Donna Morgan frets about a supposed “price crash” when in actuality, prices would increase due to the huge increase in demand. Does nobody in the WTO even know basic economics and business? Then you see that Chad Doumier is the overlord of the WTO and it makes sense! Chad wasn’t a businessman or an economist, he was a revolutionary who distributed an underground seditionist newspaper. Of course his “economic ideas” would be unsound. And considering he formed the WTO to bring back some order and stability to the world after the Collapse, he’d be paranoid about anything that could be seen as even mildly disruptive or destabilizing. When something economically disruptive such as Apostle Corp’s biomods come around, he fixated on the “disruptive” part - to the detriment of good economics.
Why did the same company create two different “competing” coffee brands - Queequeg for the masses and Pequods for the upscale denizens of the enclaves? Why not just have multiple branches carrying the same brand, one in an upscale location and the other to service the slums? The answer is that while it may make sense from a business management standpoint to have just one company serving both locations, with an added incentive for good managers at slum locations to “move up” into the enclaves, and supply processes streamlined, the WTO is not about good economics - instead it is about exerting control over people’s lives. Having two different brands enforces the economic segregation that the WTO desires - the Queequeg drinking slum dwellers wallow in near poverty with even Queequeg branch managers seeing their situation as pointless and hopeless, and would thereby be more succeptible to The Order’s spiritual message. On the other hand, the Pequods swilling Enclave denizens are happy that no upstarts from the slums will disrupt their market, thereby becoming even more dependent on the WTO for economic protection.
The other three named classmates of yours at Tarsus split off and join the three different factions - Billie joins The Order and then becomes a Templar, Klara becomes a dyed in the wood WTO cheerleader while Leo joins the Omar. But why not have another character either join the Templars or join the mainstream Order as a counterpoint to Billie’s extreme Templar views? Later you realize that the WTO and Order are actually just one faction all along. So Klara unknowingly was the representative of the Order too.
Why would the Templars intentionally abet the nanite swarm in Cairo when all it does is kill unmodified poor humans living in the slums? It is after realizing that the Templar executing this plan was undercover as the local enclave’s chairman, that we realize that this was a False Flag Operation. The Templars want to blame the plague on the WTO so that the afflicted people in the slums would become willing recruits eager to smash the WTO as revenge.
It is when Dr. Todd asks you for a blood sample so that he can create a new plague out of your biomod nanites, that you realize that the Templars are operating out of Bob Page’s handbook. They intend to infect everyone with a new Gray Death - and then hand the cure only to those who convert and sign up with them! Just like Bob Page and Majestic-12.
In a way, the Knights Templar were all Nicolette Duclare’s fault. She founded the Order as a spiritual counterpoint to the economic pursuits encouraged by the WTO, but in order to effectively sell that spiritual counterpoint, she had to bake in some amount of resentment of the WTO and rich people. Inculcate and reinforce that resentment enough and eventually an extremist faction will rise. Try to moderate your stance in response to this faction, and that only further emboldens and radicalized them. Except this time, those radicals now target Nicolette too.
