“No fighting in the corridors! Move along! Or do you want me to get someone to start a sing-song for ya?”
—Enforcement Officer
Harmony is necessary in an enclosed community. The Department ensures this with two main approaches: carrot and stick. The carrot is in the form of entertainment, community guidance and 'jollying things along'; the stick takes the form of Enforcement Officers.
Enforcement officers perform much of the day-to-day drudgework of keeping civilization working. Equipped with a range of non-lethal weaponry they are instructed to use the minimum necessary force to resolve any dissonant incidents. If general scuttlebutt is to be believed, a fair number of those in post seem to delight in escalating situation so they are justified in using force. Computer only seems to intervene in such incidents if they are in fact overstepping boundaries of reasonable force for the situation at hand. Many Enforcement Officer take this approach as tacit approval to goad those on the wrong side of the law into asking for the proper punishment.
Enforcement officer are generally assigned to (and given legal power in) a particular sector and require computer authorisation before pursuing suspects into adjacent sectors.
Marshals are the elite agents of Computer. Their remit is to track down those who are off the grid, those guilty of wasting non-recoverable ship resources and those who sabotage critical ship machinery. All marshals were once top notch enforcement officers before they were plucked from their original jobs, given substantial additional training and redeployed with shipwide legal authority, restricted weaponry and a licence to kill.
In return for such privilege, Marshals are among the most closely monitored individuals on the ship, constantly tested for their loyalty to Computer and mandated to record any action they take so it can be justified to Computer.
Harmony Managers are the largest part of the department, and are mostly there to minimise the work of the Enforcers. They monitor the morale level of the people, and provide entertainment, social gatherings and counselling as required. Given the broad remit of the Managers, there are various roles undertaken by different people. Some monitor morale levels, using statistics from Computer and the Harmony Recorders, and advise the other Managers on appropriate responses. However, most of the work involves providing entertainment. The Managers produce many of the vid programmes, including the long-running soap opera Whitesiders. Harmony also provides referees for the NGF league. This could lead to calls of bias were the Harmony team actually any good.
As well as ship-wide entertainment, local Managers provide community-based morale-boosting. What this entails depends on the sector and the needs of the residents. You're more likely to find a Harmony sing-song in White or Rainbow than in Red, and you're more likely to find lizard fights to bet on in Red.
This is the smallest sub-department in Harmony, as Computer records useful statistics and vid feeds for many things. However, Recorders add that personal touch with their News vid feed. Computer will tell you that there was a cascading fabber malfunction in one of the grey sectors a few decades ago; if you pull the Recorder vid feeds they'll tell you of the human tragedy of one whole family being recycled except for little baby Michelle, and they'll also tell you of the wonderful charity of the family next-door who adopted Michelle and who used the extra recycling credits to get her a new doll.
The recordings from Harmony are available for a few months, then are archived.
Amandine de Bouillon is the head of Harmony. Known for her striking documentaries, as a former member of the ACTP she is well placed to lead the department.
The late Marshal Jack “Bloodhound” Salamaris used to be one of the most feared Marshals on the ship, his nickname deriving from the fact that once he was on your trail, you were never going to get away. His five year pursuit of the Dirty Grey, the then head of the Cosa Nostra is legendary both for its length and the highest ever case bodycount. For the last three years of his life, he had been forced behind a desk by Computer, and told to run the department. He clearly wasn't happy about this state of affairs, and took any excuse he got to head out into the field. It was on one of these fateful excursions that he was killed in the line of duty.
Marshal Alyssa Red is in charge of Harmony Internal Affairs. Her job and that of her division is to deal with those inside Harmony who are abusing their position for personal gain, exceeding reasonable force guidelines or are otherwise bad apples. Seen by many as the source of much unneccesary red tape, she is not popular within much of the department, but is held in high esteem by Computer.
Manager Amalia White is the chief Harmony Manager. She sees entertainment as quite a serious business, and people who meet her are often surprised at her dourness.
Pietro Rainbow and Logan Rainbow play the leading couple Chad and Coleen in Whitesiders.
Player characters who are part of this faction will be added here.