Polygon is currently working together with TU TV to make graphics for the pirate station, and with NRG1 to do some design of parts to their latest nanotechnological project. It is not a very politically active cell, despite the ambitions of Dieter and Maurits, but instead acts as a service provider to the Concordat globally.
Its Credibility is currently Mediocre.
There is nothing Ilene dislikes more than followers. All her life she has been quietly building up irritation and contempt for the lemmings around her: so many possibilities, so little courage. She feels compassion for those held down by the system, bad luck or personal inability, but everybody else has no excuse: don't complain, do something about it. She learned at an early age that these views were not popular, and actively discouraged by practically everyone - another reason to break free. She decided to do it behind their backs, using the system and its weaknesses to climb towards freedom.
She is fond of her brother Dieter, but thinks he has his head in the clouds. Far too much adolescent ambition. Maurits is OK. He shares her individualism, although he is a bit too much into politics for Ilene's taste. Real change doesn't come from words or ideas but by practical application of skill, from her point of view.
She has been experimenting with applying gardening software to various tasks in computer graphics and multiprocessing, with some success. She is currently experimenting with ways of breeding better face recognition agents, able to search the net or camera networks for certain people.
Dieter wants to become a true nanohacker, to show the world his virtuoso skill with a nanolab. But right now he still has to prove himself. He is mainly designing subcomponents of nanosystems, or making recipes for MCs. His greatest success has been the recipe for the NanoDagger (tm), a diamond dagger of extreme sharpness and resilence (thanks to a complex internal bracing system that also gives it a cool iridiscent grayish-black color). He feels that the real nanohackers in NRG1 have not yet realized his potential, and does his best to come up with something that will truly impress them.
He regards Ilene as far too conservative and cautious to get anywhere; he advocates more drastic methods to expand Polygon and topple FOG. Maurits is reasonable, but also far too much of a thinker. Polygon could do with some action.
Maurits believes in the biosphere. He could almost be called a neopagan, although he worships Mother Earth with mathematics and bioremediation programs. However, unlike many ecologists he realizes that the human world is integral to the biosphere, and in order to make the whole system thrive humanity better thrive too. While he for a brief period joined the greens he soon became disaffected by their lack of understanding of modern ecology, the spread of luddist ideas and unrealistic plans. Instead of doing something about real problems like eco-invasions and krill decline they were busy supporting ecocorps or blaming industry. He turned to the Concordat instead, hoping to get a chance to influence the future through the InfoWar.
His studies have convinced him that a Cataclysm is closing in quickly; his models (and common semse) suggest that big changes are going to happen within a few years - at most. He expects it in a few months, and want to be ready to exploit them. From his perspective this is just another complex adaptive system that can be influenced: if it works for ecosystems it should work for the world system. He and a few of his Concordat colleauges have formed an informal system theoretical team, the "Cataclysts", who try to model what is happening in the human ecosystem. While they so far have not come up with much more than theoretical history, their Singularity Watch has become a popular program in the Concordat: it constantly displays the time remaining to the "critical point", based on estimates from world economy, political events, various indices and other data sources. Its reliability can be doubted, but the digits counting down give a sense of urgency and purpose.
Maurits cares deeply about Ilene, enough to stand her irritating brother.
RDR does rendering on demand: quite often media companies require complex scenery for virtuals, cartoons, movies or visualisations. They develop the scenes and animations, and then leave the rendering calculations to rendering firms. The major companies usually deal with their own rendering firms, but there is many smaller firms and sudden rendering needs RDR can meet. A few long-term contracts for standard promotional rendering keeps RDR economically safe, and it earns a rather minor profit.
Rendering is done using a rendering farm: a large room in the cellar crammed with computers doing the calculations. It is surrounded by electromagnetic screening and only connects to the net via the company firewall, in order to ensure that the rendering is secure and secret (sometimes advertising agencies try to take a peek at their competitor's adverts). All this also makes an ideal cover for a major computing node for the Concordat. During the time the farm isn't in use, it runs large computations requested by other Concordat cells: molecular simulations, code cracking and rendering of Concordat graphics. Ilene has aquired some SOTA computers and storage to hold the secret information and speed up the calculations; they are hidden in an extra room in the cellar. This is also where Polygon meet for secure meetings, as well as where Dieter keeps the recently acquired Matter Compiler.