Tessier-Ashpool

Tessier-Ashpool is a fictional family appearing in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. The family owns Freeside, a space station shaped like a spindle Bernal sphere constructed in high orbit. The family resides in the Villa Straylight, which occupies one end of the spindle.

The family is organized and run as a corporation, Tessier-Ashpool S.A.. Family members are kept under cryogenic stasis and thawed out periodically so that governance of the family is cycled between members. According to "orbital law" they are legally dead while cryogenically preserved.

The Tessier-Ashpool family owns the mainframe to which one of their two artificial intelligences, Wintermute, is attached. As the computer hardware is located in Bern, Switzerland its resident AI thereby has limited Swiss citizenship "under their equivalent of the Act of '53". The other AI, Neuromancer, is housed within another family-owned mainframe located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Tessier-Ashpools were founded with the marriage of scions of two powerful families: Marie-France Tessier, who was Swiss and John Harness Ashpool, an Australian who inherited a Melbourne engineering company. After the two were married, Ashpool began construction of Freeside in high orbit due to the relatively relaxed laws governing construction.

The family became extremely successful financially, developing the attached space station, sponsoring human colonization of space, and acquiring a number of other firms which subsequently flourished. By the time of Neuromancer, an ownership search on one of their subsidiary firms required tracing through four larger corporations, although a share of their had not been traded on the open market for more than a hundred years.

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