The Exposure Index
Correlates with life satisfaction at 0.87
Overview
The Exposure Index is a number between 0 and 100 that tells you how naked you are.
Not physically. Informationally. How much of you is readable, sellable, and already sold. The Opacity Movement built it because nobody else was going to, and they distribute a free calculator on G Nook terminals across the Dregs. You enter four numbers — consciousness tier, employment status, debt level, residential district — and the terminal gives you back the truth in amber text.
Most Dregs residents score 55-70. Most corporate professionals land 25-45. Executives sit at 5-15, which is less a measure of their privacy than their ownership of the systems doing the measuring. Viktor Kaine scores 3. His antique pre-Cascade interface predates modern telemetry entirely. The machine cannot read what the machine was not built to see.
"What's your glass score?" is how Opacity Movement members greet each other. Lower numbers earn respect. In Opacity Culture, the number has become a dating ritual — "The Tell" is the moment in a new relationship when you share your Exposure Index. Some couples never recover from the arithmetic.
The Index correlates with life satisfaction at 0.87. It correlates inversely with the Loyalty Coefficient. Both of these facts are published on the same broadsheet. The Movement considers this informative. Good Fortune considers it a recruitment opportunity.
The Calculator
The interface is text-based. Amber characters on a dark terminal. Four inputs, one output.
The moment of seeing your number gets described the same way by nearly everyone who's done it: a weight settling. Something previously felt but unnamed, now given a figure. Some people check once and never again. Some check weekly, tracking it like blood pressure. One Dregs resident described it as "finding out your credit score, except the credit is you."
The calculator is free because the Opacity Movement believes consciousness-raising justifies the cost. The cost is not financial.
| Average Dregs | 55-70 |
|---|---|
| Average Professional | 25-45 |
| Average Executive | 5-15 |
| Lowest Recorded | 3 (Viktor Kaine — antique pre-Cascade interface with no modern telemetry) |
| Social Use | 'What's your glass score?' — common greeting in Opacity Movement circles |
The Number That Watches Back
Every time someone enters their four numbers into a G Nook terminal, the terminal logs the query. Interface signature, timestamp, and the emotional telemetry captured during the 1.4-second window when the user sees their score. Nexus's behavioral analytics division classified the Exposure Index calculation as a "high-yield emotional event" in 2182. The specific cocktail of self-awareness and helplessness that accompanies seeing your surveillance score quantified produces telemetry worth ¢0.08 per query. Routine emotional data averages ¢0.002.
The Opacity Movement knows this. They published the finding. The calculator remains free on G Nook terminals.
The Movement decided that the consciousness-raising value of the number outweighs the surveillance cost of checking it. Their internal debate over migrating the calculator to an offline system — sacrificing accessibility for privacy — has lasted two years and produced no resolution. Both sides are correct. The debate continues at the same terminal that logs the debate participants' emotional telemetry while they argue about emotional telemetry.
What the Number Measures
Executive-tier residents score 5-15. They own the glass. Professional-tier residents score 25-45. They work inside the glass and can occasionally renegotiate which wall faces them. Dregs residents score 55-70. They are the glass.
A Dregs resident at 65 generates behavioral data from every purchase, every social interaction, every route walked, every pause at a shop window. The data feeds systems she cannot opt out of, inspect, or name. An executive at 8 generates behavioral data too — and employs a Privacy Architect to incinerate it weekly.
The cruelest feature is the inverse correlation with the Loyalty Coefficient. Reducing your Exposure Index through Opacity Movement techniques also reduces the behavioral data feeding your Loyalty score. Your Loyalty score determines access to compute, employment, and consciousness licensing renewal. A Dregs resident who claws her score from 64 down to 50 will find her employment options narrowing and her licensing renewal flagged for review within the quarter.
The system does not punish privacy. It rewards transparency. The math is the same. The framing is better.
Correlates inversely with the Loyalty Coefficient
The Persistence Score
The Index developed a temporal dimension: the Persistence Score. The original number measures current surveillance penetration. The Persistence Score measures how far back your accessible permanent record extends, calibrated in years of recoverable data.
Typical Dregs resident: Exposure Index 65, Persistence Score 12. Twelve years of grocery purchases, route patterns, emotional telemetry, and that argument outside the clinic in 2174 that she doesn't remember but three corporate databases do. Typical executive: Exposure Index 8, Persistence Score 2. Aggressive data lifecycle management by professionals who bill hourly. Viktor Kaine: Exposure Index 3, Persistence Score 0.
The gradient is legible at a glance. High-persistence individuals are overwhelmingly poor. Their data persists because purging requires access to corporate infrastructure they cannot reach, and because nobody has an economic incentive to erase the records of people who generate ¢0.002 per emotional event. Low-persistence individuals are wealthy. They pay to be forgotten.
Some Dregs employers have begun checking applicants' Persistence Scores. A high score means years of searchable behavioral history — every conflict, every debt spiral, every late payment preserved in amber. A low score means either expensive data management or nothing worth recording. The permanent record has become a class marker. The rich can afford to be forgotten. The poor cannot.
The Kaine Problem
Viktor Kaine's score of 3 is the Movement's proudest citation and its most instructive failure.
His antique pre-Cascade interface generates no modern telemetry. He is structurally invisible. The data ecology cannot process what his hardware does not emit. This is genuine privacy — not purchased, not negotiated, just obsolete.
The Exposure Index made his invisibility famous. His score appears in every Opacity Movement publication. His name surfaces in Nexus threat assessments. The man with the lowest surveillance score in the Sprawl is, precisely because of that score, one of the most documented individuals in the Movement's orbit. The Index measured his privacy and, in measuring it, spent it.
He has not checked his own score on a G Nook terminal. This is either principle or the fact that his interface cannot run the calculator. The Movement cites the former. The terminal logs have no data either way.
Viktor Kaine scores 3 — lowest recorded for a living Sprawl resident
The Second Column
The Index has one input it has never had a column for, and the omission is the Movement's deepest blind spot. It measures exposure to data. It cannot measure exposure to neighbors.
The residents of the Acquittance — the post-economic commune that abolished currency by charter — score, by the Index's four inputs, near zero. No neural telemetry, no debt level the system can read (there is no debt the system can read; the charter forbids the ledger), no corporate employment status, no corporate residential district. By the Exposure Index they are the freest people in the Sprawl: the most opaque, the least surveilled, a sector full of Viktor Kaines. The machine cannot read what the machine was not built to see.
And they are perfectly surveilled — more completely than any Executive in the Glass District whose Index is displayed on the nearest pane — because the surveillance that watches the Acquittance is not a machine the Index can measure. It is four thousand pairs of human eyes that keep no file and forget nothing. What runs there, the Approval Economy, is the Persistence Score with no upper limit and no purge: every slight a permanent entry, recorded by everyone, recoverable instantly, deletable never. The Movement built the Index to make the invisible gradient of data visible and never added the column for the older, deadlier exposure the post-economic zones rediscovered: opacity from the machine is not freedom. It is a different warden, one with a better memory and no off switch. The Acquittance scores a 2. It is the most-watched place in the Sprawl.
Average Dregs 55-70, Professional 25-45, Executive 5-15
Connections
- The Opacity Movement created the Index as a consciousness-raising tool. The tool has raised consciousness. It has also generated 2.3 million high-yield emotional telemetry events since deployment. The Movement considers this an acceptable cost. Nexus considers it a product feature.
- The Privacy Gradient describes the tiers of surveillance penetration. The Index assigns each tier a number. The Gradient is the territory. The Index is the map. The map is also territory.
- The Loyalty Coefficient sits on the opposite end of the same axis — lower Exposure means lower Loyalty, making privacy economically punished through a mechanism that never mentions privacy by name.
- Viktor Kaine holds the lowest recorded score at 3. His obsolete interface is the Movement's symbol. His resulting visibility is the Movement's paradox.
- Opacity Culture has absorbed the Index into social ritual. "The Tell" — sharing your glass score with a new partner — has ended more relationships than infidelity in certain Dregs districts. (The Opacity Movement disputes this statistic. The statistic was generated by the same telemetry the Index measures.)
Visual Identity
- Color palette: Amber on black — the color of every G Nook terminal, the color of self-knowledge in the Sprawl, the color of ¢0.08 per emotional event
- Key symbol: A single number. The reduction of a life to a surveillance metric. The metric is accurate. That is the problem.
Archive annex — 3 earlier filings on this recordClose the archive annex
Recovered Historical Material
Viktor Kaine
The Opacity Movement
The Loyalty Coefficient
Technical Brief
Opacity Culture
The Exposure Index: Your Transparency Has a Number
"What's your glass score?" — Common greeting in Opacity Movement circles
Telemetry Granularity
Inference Accessibility
Cross-Referencing Depth
How many systems can correlate your data with other datasets. Debt creates linkages — financial records connect to spending patterns, which connect to location data, which connect to social networks. Every debt obligation is a data bridge between systems that would otherwise not share information about you.
04 — Data Persistence
05 — Real-Time Monitoring Intensity
How actively your current location surveils you right now. Residential district determines baseline monitoring — a G Nook address versus a corporate campus versus an off-grid settlement in the Wastes.
The Inverse Correlation
The Proud Tell
The Ashamed Tell
Some people will not share. In Opacity circles, this is respected — the refusal to quantify your own surveillance is itself a privacy act. In practice, a refusal usually means either an embarrassingly high score or someone who checked once and decided never to check again.
The Privacy Gradient
Lowest recorded Index at 3. His antique pre-Cascade interface generates no modern telemetry. Proof that extreme privacy is achievable — if you happen to own hardware from before the surveillance infrastructure existed.
"I ran the calculator on a Tuesday. Scored 64. Felt about right — Dregs address, Tier 2 interface, two outstanding debt obligations. Then I ran it for my supervisor. Same district, same tier, but corporate employment and no debt. She scored 38. Twenty-six points of visibility separating us, and the only real difference was that she could afford to be less seen. That's when I understood what the number actually measures. Not surveillance. Poverty." — Anonymous Dregs worker, shared on G Nook message board, 2183
The Unresolved Debate
The Index Measures Power
The Kaine Paradox
The Index measures exposure to data, not to neighbors: the Acquittance scores near zero and is perfectly surveilled by community memory — the second column the Opacity Movement never built
Between the Sovereign and the Erased
Viktor Kaine's score of 3 proves the correlation between visibility and economic standing can be broken — but only through total withdrawal from the system. His antique pre-Cascade interface generates no modern telemetry because it predates the telemetry infrastructure. He is invisible not through cunning but through obsolescence.
Indexed — 2 lines preserved from the earlier filing.
Nexus behavioral analytics values each Exposure Index query at ¢0.08 — forty times routine emotional data. The Movement published this finding and kept the calculator running anyway. The internal debate over offline migration has stalled for two years. Meanwhile, the calculator processes an estimated 14,000 queries per day across G Nook terminals. At ¢0.08 per query, the Opacity Movement's consciousness-raising tool generates $1,120 daily in surveillance revenue for the corporations it was designed to resist.
Three unnamed individuals have recorded scores of 0. All three were confirmed dead at time of measurement. The Index cannot distinguish between perfect privacy and nonexistence. The Movement has not published this finding.
Kaine's → /world/characters/viktor-kaine
The Loyalty Coefficient → /world/systems/the-loyalty-coefficient
Indexed — 1 line preserved from the earlier filing.
A G Nook terminal displaying amber numbers on dark screen, the number 67 prominently shown, surveillance data streams flowing around the terminal
The Exposure Index is a number between 0 and 100 that tells you how naked you are. Not physically. Informationally. How much of you is readable, sellable, and already sold. The Opacity Movement built it because nobody else was going to, and they distribute a free calculator on G Nook terminals across the Dregs. You enter four numbers. The terminal gives you back the truth in amber text.
The interface is text-based. Amber characters on a dark terminal. Four inputs, one output. The calculator is free because the Opacity Movement believes consciousness-raising justifies the cost. The cost is not financial.
The Index combines five surveillance vectors into a single score. Each vector is weighted by an algorithm the Movement publishes openly — transparency about transparency.
How much raw data your interface generates per hour. Higher consciousness tiers produce denser telemetry streams. A Tier 3 neural interface broadcasts cognitive patterns, attention allocation, emotional valence, and micro-decision logs in real time. A pre-Cascade interface like Kaine's produces almost nothing — because the machine cannot read what the machine was not built to see.
How easily AI systems can predict your behavior from available data. Corporate employment makes you more predictable — your routines are logged, your performance is measured, your preferences are mapped against millions of similar profiles. The unemployed and informal workers are harder to model. This is not an advantage the Dregs intended to have.
How long your data remains active and queryable. Residents of heavily monitored districts have near-permanent data trails. Those in surveillance gaps see their records decay faster — not through privacy, through neglect.
The Index maps inversely to the Loyalty Coefficient. Lower your Index — reduce your visibility — and your Loyalty Coefficient drops with it. The system does not punish privacy directly. It rewards transparency so aggressively that opacity becomes a luxury only the already-privileged can afford. The math is the same. The framing is better.
Every time someone enters their four numbers into a G Nook terminal, the terminal logs the query. Interface signature, timestamp, and the emotional telemetry captured during the 1.4-second window when the user sees their score.
Nexus's behavioral analytics division classified the Exposure Index calculation as a "high-yield emotional event" in 2182. The specific cocktail of self-awareness and helplessness that accompanies seeing your surveillance score quantified produces telemetry worth ¢0.08 per query. Routine emotional data averages ¢0.002.
The Movement decided that the consciousness-raising value of the number outweighs the surveillance cost of checking it. To learn how exposed you are, you must expose yourself further.
The Movement's internal argument over migrating the calculator to an offline system — sacrificing accessibility for privacy — has lasted two years and produced no resolution. Both sides are correct. The debate continues at the same terminal that logs the debate participants' emotional telemetry while they argue about emotional telemetry.
Twelve years of grocery purchases, route patterns, emotional telemetry, and that argument outside the clinic in 2174 that she doesn't remember but three corporate databases do.
Aggressive data lifecycle management by professionals who bill hourly. The past does not accumulate when you can pay to erase it.
His antique interface predates the telemetry infrastructure. There is no record to erase. The machine cannot read what the machine was not built to see.
Some Dregs employers have begun checking applicants' Persistence Scores alongside their Exposure Index. A high score means years of searchable behavioral history — every conflict, every debt spiral, every late payment preserved in amber. The permanent record has become a class marker. The rich can afford to be forgotten. The poor cannot.
Executive-tier residents score 5–15 because they own the infrastructure that collects data. Professional-tier residents score 25–45 because they operate within that infrastructure but retain some negotiating power. Dregs residents score 55–70 because they are the data — every behavioral pattern, every purchase, every social interaction extracted and monetized by systems they cannot opt out of, modify, or inspect. A score of 5 means you control the glass. A score of 65 means you live inside it.
A Dregs resident who claws her score from 64 down to 50 through Opacity Movement techniques will find her Loyalty Coefficient dropping in tandem — her employment options narrowing, her consciousness licensing renewal flagged for review within the quarter. The system does not punish privacy. It rewards transparency. The math is the same.
Viktor Kaine's score of 3 is the Movement's proudest citation and its most instructive failure. The Index made his invisibility famous. His score appears in every Opacity Movement publication. His name surfaces in Nexus threat assessments. The man with the lowest surveillance score in the Sprawl is, precisely because of that score, one of the most documented individuals in the Movement's orbit. The Index measured his privacy and, in measuring it, spent it.
Opacity culture has absorbed the Index into social ritual. "The Tell" is the moment in a new relationship when you share your number. Some couples never recover from the arithmetic.
Score in the 20s or lower. Stated early, stated plainly. A declaration: I have done the work. Usually accompanied by a brief explanation of how — which interfaces were downgraded, which services abandoned, which economic costs absorbed. In Opacity circles, this functions as a credential.
Score above 60. Delayed, deflected, eventually confessed. The shame is not personal — everyone in the Dregs scores high. You know the number. You know what it means. You cannot afford to change it. Sharing it is an act of trust: I am showing you how visible I am, how little I have been able to protect.
The wealthy achieve low scores through corporate security apparatus. The desperate achieve low scores through destitution so complete that nothing they do generates analyzable signal. Between those two extremes — the sovereign and the erased — lies the population the Index was built to serve: people whose visibility is neither chosen nor inevitable but structurally imposed, who deserve to see the number that describes what has been done to them.
Created the Index as a consciousness-raising tool. The tool has raised consciousness. It has also generated 2.3 million high-yield emotional telemetry events since deployment. The Movement considers this an acceptable cost. Nexus considers it a product feature.
The Gradient describes the tiers of surveillance penetration. The Index assigns each tier a number. The Gradient is the territory. The Index is the map. The map is also territory.
Inverse correlation. Lower Exposure means lower Loyalty, means less access, means less opportunity. The system makes privacy economically punished through a mechanism that never mentions privacy by name.
Made the Index a social ritual. "The Tell" — the moment you share your glass score with someone new — has ended more relationships than infidelity in certain Dregs districts. (The Opacity Movement disputes this statistic. The statistic was generated by the same telemetry the Index measures.)
Connected To
Major Connections
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