Cube Co

Cube Co is in the business of providing housing. The housing provided is cheap and the name of the company comes from the architecture and design of their properties. These properties are giant, chromed-out, cubes. When a potential tenant walks into the lobby it's a 6x6x6 foot room where you make an account and pay your deposit and first month's rent. Once you've paid the back wall slides open and you step into your new rental cube, which is another cube. The room comes pre-furnished with a single chair, albeit a nice chair, and a basic VR setup. In the far wall is a pair of tubes where water and food paste are dispensed. If you need to use the restroom you need to request it and your box will move to it, because these cubes move inside of the giant cube for the most effective storage.

In the top part of these cubes are all the utilities for the unit, and while moving they disconnect, but once stationary they connect to the next cube over, eventually connecting to a cube, or stationary unit on the roof, that contains the internet, power, food, oxygen, and water utilities. If you want to exit the facility you need to request your cube to be moved.

This company became popular about 60 years before the events of Strike Fleet as VR and cyberspace became popular, the key change became the mass adoption of virtual ownership and the ability to make an income in cyberspace. These buildings came to be called Cubes and were meant for people who were terminally online and worked in cyberspace. Sure they had Cubes that were just office spaces, but some people lived in them and never left Cyberspace.

When the company became a large company, marked by the expansion of its 13th cube in Cassius and the completion of 50 total cubes across all mega-city, a terrorist organization conducted its first attack. The attack went on to be named the Rubix Attack, with hackers gaining access to the internal data center that controlled the movement of cubes, the hackers began shuffling every single unit at the same time, units would occasionally have to stop but it hardly mattered because life support systems were cut off to the units, and they had no way to leave. This attack was to draw attention to how dangerous these cubes were, but the organization was mainly pushing against the idea of Cyberspace, saying that this was not the way people were intended to live and that doing this to yourself was a declaration that you were dead. The organization viewed the people who lived in the cubes as if they were already dead, they'd chosen a digital life over real life, and therefore only existed as much as their avatars did, which is to say they didn't exist.

Since the first attack Cube Co has stepped up its cybersecurity a great deal, but that has only slowed down attackers, and since the first attack 5 more Rubix attacks have succeeded in killing every inhabitant of Cubes. The total death count so far is roughly twenty thousand people.

Some mega cubes can house as many as ten thousand people, but most cubes can house between 1 - 5 thousand people.