# The Tier System: How GLMZ Sorts Its People

## You Are Your Access Level

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## What Tiers Are

Tiers are not income brackets. They are not social classes. They are ACCESS LEVELS — the degree to which the city's infrastructure recognizes you as a participant in civilization.

Your tier determines what doors open for you. Literally. A Tier 1 resident's wallet signature opens public transit gates, food dispensers, and Shelf-zone building locks. A Tier 4 executive's wallet signature opens corporate campuses, executive transit, medical facilities, residential towers, and restricted commercial zones. The same city. Different cities.

Tiers are not assigned by the government (there is no functional government). They are calculated continuously by corporate systems based on your economic activity — wallet balance, transaction history, employment status, augmentation level, registered address, credit history, and approximately 340 other data points that the QFIC's Behavioral Analytics Framework tracks. Your tier can change. It usually doesn't. Upward mobility exists. It is rare enough to be newsworthy.

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## The Five Tiers

### Tier 1 — The Street

Income: Φ0-500/month (UBC of Φ120 is often their only guaranteed income)
Population: ~25% of GLMZ (~3.5 million)
Locations: The Shelf, Old Harbor, The Narrows, informal settlements
Augmentation: Minimal — street chrome, black-market installs, salvaged hardware

Tier 1 is where the economy ends and survival begins. These are the people who live on the UBC stipend, supplemented by gray-market work, analog trade, and whatever the street provides. Their wallets open public transit (overcrowded), food dispensers (nutrient paste tier), and Shelf-zone housing (shared, deteriorating). Their wallets do NOT open medical facilities beyond emergency triage, corporate zones, or any service that requires a credit history.

Tier 1 residents are visible to the system but barely served by it. They exist in the gap between the UBC's Φ120/month and the Φ1,200/month cost of basic survival. That gap is filled by labor, crime, mutual aid, and luck.

The street knows Tier 1 by other names: baseline, ground floor, the floor, dirt tier.

### Tier 2 — The Working Poor

Income: Φ500-3,000/month
Population: ~35% of GLMZ (~4.9 million)
Locations: The Shelf (better blocks), Geartown, lower Circuit, transit corridors
Augmentation: Basic — licensed Tier 2 implants, functional BCIs, standard prosthetics

Tier 2 is where you work and it's not enough but it's something. Factory labor, service jobs, transit operation, maintenance, retail, food service. Employment is usually corponation-contracted — not direct employment (which would be Tier 3) but subcontracted labor through staffing agencies that take a cut and provide no benefits.

Tier 2 residents have functional augmentation — enough to do their jobs, not enough to compete with higher tiers. Their BCIs are basic consumer models (256-1,024 electrodes). Their prosthetics are functional but not elegant. Their medical access extends to licensed clinics but not specialist care.

The defining experience of Tier 2 is working full-time and still not being able to afford what Tier 3 takes for granted. The gap between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is the gap between having a job and having a career. Between eating synth-protein and eating food. Between surviving and living.

### Tier 3 — Corporate Middle

Income: Φ3,000-20,000/month
Population: ~25% of GLMZ (~3.5 million)
Locations: The Core, mid-level arcologies, corporate residential zones
Augmentation: Professional — Tier 3 BCIs (4,096-16,384 electrodes), quality prosthetics, licensed geneware

Tier 3 is where the corponation takes care of you — as long as you take care of the corponation. Direct corporate employment. Salary. Benefits. Housing in corporate residential zones. Medical coverage. Augmentation packages provided by your employer (and owned by your employer — read your contract).

Tier 3 is comfortable. Tier 3 is stable. Tier 3 is the tier that most closely resembles what the 20th century called "middle class" — except that the stability is entirely contingent on continued corporate employment. Lose your job, lose your housing, lose your medical, lose your augmentation maintenance. The fall from Tier 3 to Tier 1 can happen in 90 days.

Tier 3 residents don't think about the tiers below them. Not because they're cruel but because the infrastructure is designed so that they never see it. Their commute doesn't pass through the Shelf. Their entertainment doesn't include Shelf venues. Their social networks don't include Shelf residents. The segregation is architectural, not legal.

### Tier 4 — Executive

Income: Φ20,000-500,000/month
Population: ~12% of GLMZ (~1.7 million)
Locations: The Spires, executive arcologies, lakefront estates, corporate penthouses
Augmentation: Premium — Tier 4 BCIs (32,768+ electrodes), biocompute organoids, full-body optimization suites

Tier 4 is where you stop being an employee and start being an asset. Senior management, directors, specialists, high-value technical staff. Your compensation includes equity. Your augmentation is military-grade. Your medical care is personalized genomic medicine. Your housing has a view of the lake. Your children attend corporate academies.

Tier 4 residents live 114 years on average. Tier 1 residents live 62. The difference is not genetic. It is economic. The same medicine exists for both. The access does not.

The defining feature of Tier 4 is that the city works FOR you. Surveillance protects you instead of monitoring you. Transit priority routes clear your path. E.L.F.s in your augments are professionally maintained. The weather in your zone is managed. The air is filtered. The noise is dampened. You live in a different physical reality than Tier 1, in the same city, on the same latitude.

### Tier 5 — The Untouchable

Income: Φ500,000+/month (often uncountable — wealth at this level is measured in control, not currency)
Population: <3% of GLMZ (~400,000)
Locations: Private arcologies, orbital stations, airship estates, compounds
Augmentation: Bespoke — custom-designed implants, personal AI assistants, experimental systems unavailable at any price

Tier 5 doesn't interact with the tier system. The tier system interacts with them. These are the board members, the founding families, the people whose decisions create the conditions that everyone else lives in. They don't ride transit — they own transit. They don't visit clinics — clinics visit them. They don't worry about surveillance — they control the surveillance.

Tier 5 is invisible to the city the way the ocean is invisible to fish. The Shelf resident has never met a Tier 5. The Tier 3 corporate worker has met one, once, at a company event, and remembers it. The Tier 4 executive works for them and knows them by reputation. Only other Tier 5s know Tier 5.

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## The Tier Gap

The most important thing about the tier system is not the tiers. It is the gaps between them.

The gap between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is desperation — the difference between nothing and not enough.
The gap between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is the corporate wall — the difference between labor and career.
The gap between Tier 3 and Tier 4 is power — the difference between working for the system and being protected by it.
The gap between Tier 4 and Tier 5 is invisibility — the difference between having power and being power.

Each gap is harder to cross than the last. Tier 1 to Tier 2 requires a job. Tier 2 to Tier 3 requires a corporate sponsor. Tier 3 to Tier 4 requires being too valuable to replace. Tier 4 to Tier 5 requires being born there.

The system is not designed to be crossed. It is designed to be stable. Stability, in this context, means that the people at the bottom stay at the bottom and the people at the top stay at the top, and the infrastructure between them ensures that neither group has to look at the other.

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*Filed under: Social Structure, Tiers, Economics, GLMZ*
*Cross-reference: universal_basic_compute.json, quanta_as_compute_the_currency_that_thinks.json, exclusion_economy.json*