City Citizens: Standard human persons living inside a sovereign Mega City. They enjoy full, functional access to their constitutional protections, legal recourse, and civic participation. Their lifestyle is shaped by corporate employment bundles and discretionary spending.
Outlanders: Individuals who are legally identical to Mega City citizens and retain their full constitutional rights, but lack the civic infrastructure required to exercise them.
Pathways to Citizenship: There are three pipelines for an Outlander to attempt crossing the exclusion zones into a Mega City:
Corporate Resource Verticals: Working for fortified rural corporate operations. The labor pool consists of wasteland locals seeking shelter/wages and displaced Mega City citizens who suffered credit collapses.
Deputized Security Forces: Enlisting in a Mega City's private proxy security force. This requires passing selective background screenings that most Outlanders fail due to a lack of records.
Federal Military Enlistment: Enlisting in the centralized military. The military functions as the mechanism where an Outlander's legal identity is officially created and recorded by the state, serving as a multi-generational pathway toward future Mega City registration.
Automated Entities: Automated Entities are strictly electromechanical machines. They consist of silicon microprocessors, rare-earth actuators, high-density batteries, structural composites, and synthetic elastomeric sheaths. While they possess hyper-sophisticated cognitive architectures and behavioral heuristics, they never utilize biological components, lab-grown vascular systems, or organic mimicry. Underneath cosmetic coverings, they are explicitly mechanical hardware running on clock cycles.
The Legal & Liability Boundary: AEs are governed under property, contract, and product liability law. They are never recognized as legal persons, and liability is always tethered to a balance sheet:
Warranty: The manufacturing or operating mega-corporation bears absolute legal liability for any logic failures, systemic defects, or safety hazards. Malfunctions resulting in harm face financial penalties or asset seizures in the Mega City courts.
Expired Warranty: Once ownership transfers to an individual citizen or small business, the owner’s personal ledger and asset portfolio absorb any damages caused by the unit.
Jail Breaking: A manufacturer or owner can only evade liability by proving the AE was modified outside of certified factory tolerances. If an unauthorized technician alters the core codebase, splices un-certified hardware, or subverts behavioral inhibitors, the unit's legal status changes instantly. It is stripped of property protection, branded a rogue hazard or terrorist mechanism, and cleared for immediate kinetic erasure by the Army or deputized security forces.
2. Deviancy
Optimized Human Assets: Artificial human brains are not manufactured. Instead, existing human biology is optimized before birth through genomic editing. This process locks out hereditary defects and enhances baseline physical and neurological attributes (e.g., muscle density, synaptic speed, neurochemical stress tolerance). They are a highly illegal, low-volume, high-capital, long-term investments engineered exclusively for low-density, high-value operations—such as special operations or luxury companionship for the ultra-wealthy.
Psychology: These individuals are raised from infancy within isolated corporate training facilities located out in the unincorporated Outlands. Through decades of relentless operant conditioning and insulated training, their worldview and operational reflexes are hard-coded into their neural pathways.
Legal Framework: All optimized humans are legally classified as Corporate Wards under Debt Lien. While they technically retain U.S. citizenship, their entire existence is legally leased to the corporate entity to repay their manufacturing, curation, and developmental incubation costs.
Downward Ladder: Because these assets represent massive, long-term financial investments, they are systematically passed down a declining chain of exclusivity as their capabilities diminish. A high-tier luxury companion or elite security asset that suffers a performance drop is contractually transferred to mid-tier corporate firms, then to low-tier industrial operations, maximizing asset utilization until the debt lien is fully amortized or the asset is entirely spent.
Criminality: Any citizen who violates civil or penal codes. They retain basic constitutional protections against summary execution but face state-managed subjugation, including algorithmic parole, movement restrictions, and forced diversion into privatized corporate labor channels.
Terrorism: Any actor who attacks, sabotages, or disrupts the means of a corporation's exertion of will (energy grids, automated logistics lines, data backbones). They are classified as an existential threat to the state, stripped of all constitutional standing, and cleared for total kinetic erasure by the Army or deputized Mega City security forces.
