System · Algorithmic Trust Score
The Obedience Index
The score that decides privileges, mobility rights and employment. Aasma's was never assigned, which is either an oversight or the only piece of luck in her file.
An algorithmic trust score, used to assign privileges, mobility rights and employment status.
It is collected at compliance scoring terminals — kiosks that watch behaviour and withhold services accordingly — and it follows a person the way a shadow does, which is to say it is attached, it is not consulted, and it gets longer near the end of the day.
The index does not publish its weights. This is presented as a security measure.
Obedience Index: never assigned.
— Citizen record, Aasma, age 11
Aasma has no score because she has no record worth scoring: registered orphan, guardian removed, never enrolled in anything that reports. The state cannot rate her because it has already lost her. Her file closes Status: possibly forgotten, possibly protected, and the archive has never been able to decide which of those the index made true.
The name is the honest part. Nobody called it a merit index, or a citizenship score. They called it what it measured.