Class Passing
Social Phenomenon / Identity Performance / New Divide Navigation
"You learn to speak 200 milliseconds faster than your brain can think. You learn which words a Professional would choose under load. You learn the posture, the micro-saccades, the way they hold a conversation on two threads at once. And then you learn that the person you're pretending to be is easier to live with than who you actually are." — Anonymous up-passer, documented in Dr. Mensah's therapy transcripts
In the pre-Cascade world, "passing" meant presenting as a member of a group you didn't belong to—typically crossing racial or gender lines. In the Sprawl, passing means presenting as a different augmentation tier, a different consciousness level, a different class. The hierarchy is neurological now, but the performance is the same: learn the tells, suppress the truth, pray nobody looks too closely.
Three forms. Three directions. Each one exhausting in ways the others can't understand.
The Three Forms
Passing Up
Common and desperate. Dregs residents who scrape together enough for Professional-tier licensing during job interviews. Deprecated workers who borrow augmentation firmware from ripperdocs to get through a meeting. Basic-tier consciousness holders who've learned to mimic the conversational cadence of Professional-tier—speaking slightly faster, using more precise vocabulary, maintaining the parallel-thread tells that indicate dual-processing.
The borrowed firmware lasts forty-five minutes, typically. Enough for an interview. Not enough for a shift. The jaw tightens from producing words at the wrong pace. The shoulders climb from posture adjustments signaling higher-tier body mechanics. The body knows it's lying even when the mouth doesn't.
Passing Down
Rarer and more complicated. Corporate employees who visit the Dregs for connection tourism must suppress their augmented tells. Going raw is the process. The smooth check is the detector. The Dregs can spot a tourist within thirty seconds because the body betrays the mind's optimization.
Down-passers describe the deliberate sluggishness of suppressing parallel-thread processing, the wrong-footed feeling of pretending your baseline is lower than it is. Their eyes move too smoothly. Their word choices arrive too quickly. The body produces optimization artifacts that no amount of practiced slowness can fully mask.
Origin Passing
The most painful form. Designed children presenting as natural-born. In communities where genetic engineering is unaffordable, "designed" carries specific resentment. Designed children who grow up in mixed environments learn to downplay their capabilities—deliberately answering questions wrong, moving with calculated clumsiness, pretending to struggle with tasks their designed neurology handles effortlessly.
The performance is exhausting. The alternative is social isolation from the community they were raised in.
The Vocabulary
Every subculture invents its own language. Class passers are no different.
Ticking
Being detected as a class passer. The tells are showing. "She's ticking"—meaning the performance is failing, the real tier is bleeding through the skinsuit.
Skinsuit
The complete set of behavioral modifications adopted for passing. Posture, cadence, vocabulary density, eye movement patterns. A good skinsuit takes months to build and seconds to lose.
Clocked
The moment of detection. When the performance collapses and everyone in the room knows what you are. The receptionist's smile cooling. The bartender's hand moving toward the smooth check.
Going Native
A corporate person who's lost their corporate tells through extended Dregs immersion. Not performing anymore—the Dregs cadence has become the real one. The body forgot what it used to be.
Origin Passing — The Performance That Becomes the Person
Origin passing has its own behavioral vocabulary, distinct from tier-based passing. These are techniques designed children learn before they understand what they're learning:
The Deliberate Pause
A 200-millisecond delay before responding, matching natural-born cadence while the designed brain processes in parallel. The delay is calculated. The appearance of calculation is not. From the outside it looks like thinking. From the inside it feels like holding your breath underwater.
The Tremor
Deliberately introducing imprecision into fine motor tasks. Handwriting that wobbles. Brushstrokes that waver. The analog equivalent of anti-aliasing—adding noise to disguise the signal.
The Wrong Answer
In the Guessing Game, in classroom exercises: the designed child who knows the answer and says something close but not quite correct. The performance of struggle where none exists.
Identity Dissonance
Dr. Mensah's therapy groups documented that chronic origin-passers develop identity dissonance—the performed self blurring into the experienced self. The tremor in their handwriting, which began as deliberate imprecision, becomes involuntary. The body learns the lie until the lie becomes the truth.
The Deliberate Pause, practiced for years, ceases to be deliberate. The 200-millisecond delay writes itself into the nervous system. The designed child who pretended to be slower becomes slower. The performance dishonors both parties—the passer for concealing what they are, and the audience for living in a world where concealment is rational.
The Smooth Check
The smooth check takes four seconds. It is the Dregs' primary detection method for class passers—a rapid behavioral assessment that reads tier from body language, conversational cadence, and vocabulary density.
Eye Contact
An unaugmented Dregs resident holds your gaze and watches for micro-saccades—the fractional jitter of eyes simultaneously analyzing through neural-interface pattern recognition and looking through biological optics. Augmented eyes move too smoothly. The optimization is visible.
Conversational Cadence
A question asked at Dregs pace, watching whether your response comes too fast. The 200-millisecond differential between Professional and Basic processing. Your mouth answers before a Basic-tier brain could have finished thinking.
Vocabulary Density
Did your answer contain words a Basic-tier consciousness would produce under cognitive load, or words that emerge from parallel-thread processing? The difference is subtle. The Dregs have been watching for it their entire lives.
Four seconds. The Dregs know their own.
What It Feels Like
Up-Passing
The specific tension of maintaining augmented-tier conversational cadence. Responding 200 milliseconds faster than your processing allows. Conscious selection of vocabulary your actual tier would never produce. The jaw tightens. The shoulders climb. Every word is a choice made at a speed your brain can't sustain.
Down-Passing
The wrong-footed feeling of pretending your baseline is lower than it is. Deliberately sluggish, suppressing parallel-thread processing. Your body wants to optimize. You force it not to. Like running with a weight belt you can't let anyone see.
Origin-Passing
A designed child timing their answers three seconds late, their neurology fighting the delay with a tension visible in their forearms. A designed teenager in a Guessing Game, deliberately missing answers their brain served up instantly. The most physically painful because the body itself resists the lie.
"Every audit requires experiencing prejudice firsthand—feeling the receptionist's smile cool as tier becomes apparent."
Points of Inquiry
If the Hierarchy Requires Performance
Class passing reveals that the New Divide is not just a hierarchy—it's a performance. Every social position requires its own behavioral markers, its own vocabulary, its own rhythm. The performance is exhausting in both directions. If the hierarchy requires performance to maintain, the hierarchy is not natural. It is social theater with neurological props.
The Firmware Cliff's Casualties
Deprecated workers pass up because the cliff removed their capability but not their need to work. They borrow firmware for forty-five-minute windows, presenting as something they used to actually be. The cruelest form of up-passing—mimicking a version of yourself that was real last month.
Who Benefits from Detection
The smooth check is the Dregs' immune response to corporate infiltration. But immune responses don't distinguish between threats and refugees. A deprecated worker trying to eat gets the same four-second assessment as a corporate tourist slumming for content. The check protects the community. It also locks people out of it.
The Body That Forgets
Identity dissonance is not a metaphor. The designed child's nervous system physically rewrites itself around the performance. The tremor becomes real. The pause becomes reflexive. At what point does the lie become the truth—and does it matter if the person living it can't tell the difference?
Open Questions
- What happens to up-passers who succeed permanently—who maintain the skinsuit long enough that nobody remembers the person underneath? Do they become what they pretended to be?
- The smooth check has a false positive rate. How many actual Dregs residents have been clocked as passers because their cadence was slightly off?
- If identity dissonance rewrites the nervous system, is there a point where a designed child's origin passing becomes medically indistinguishable from being natural-born?
- Maren Vasquez-Osei is a professional class passer—documenting the New Divide by living it. How does someone who passes professionally avoid identity dissonance, or has she already developed it?