A Day in the Stratified Mindkind

Maya wakes before her alarm, which is how she knows the subsidy ran out again. Without the cortical regulator smoothing her sleep cycles, her body reverts to its natural chaos: awake at 4:47 AM, brain already racing through the day's humiliations.

She lies in the dark and listens to the building settle. Forty-three floors of Tier 2 housing, all of them running on the same cognitive budget, all of them dreaming whatever dreams unassisted minds still dream. Above her, literally and metaphorically, the Enhanced districts hum with activity around the clock. They don't sleep like this. They barely sleep at all.

At six she gives up and starts her routine. Coffee, real coffee, which costs more than it should because someone decided the bean growers needed protecting from the synthetic alternatives. News, filtered for her tier, which means she gets yesterday's analysis instead of real-time synthesis. She could pay for faster access. She can't afford to pay for faster access.

The commute takes forty minutes because public transit still moves at legacy speeds. The Enhanced don't use transit. They don't commute at all, mostly, or they use the personal pods that slide through the elevated tunnels she can see from her window. Sometimes Maya watches them passing overhead and tries to imagine what they're thinking about. But that's the problem, isn't it. She literally cannot imagine it. The cognitive gap is too wide.

Her grandmother used to talk about the rich like they were just people with more money. That was back when the gap was merely economic. Now the Enhanced are cognitively augmented in ways that compound: better memory feeds better analysis feeds better prediction feeds better decisions feeds more resources feeds better augmentation. The spiral goes one way for them. For Maya, it goes the other.

At work she processes permit applications. The AI does the actual analysis; Maya validates that the AI's reasoning is comprehensible to baseline humans, which is the legal requirement that keeps her employed. Once a month, someone from the Enhanced districts comes down to audit the process. They're always polite, in the way you're polite to a child or a pet. They speak slowly. They use small words. They think she doesn't notice.

Lunch is sponsored content. The building cafeteria plays product placements while you eat, and if you watch attentively enough, the meal costs half price. Maya has gotten good at appearing to watch while thinking about other things. It's a skill the Enhanced don't need. They can process multiple streams simultaneously, consciously, without loss. For Maya, it's a survival hack learned from poverty.

Her friend Jin sits down across from her. Jin has a Tier 3 job, manual labor in the vertical farms, but she seems happier than Maya. She doesn't know enough to know what she's missing. That sounds cruel. Maya doesn't mean it cruelly. It's just true. There are whole dimensions of experience Jin will never access, and Jin's ignorance of them is a kind of protection.

"You look tired," Jin says.

"Subsidy ran out."

"Again? I thought you had coverage through the quarter."

"Restructuring. The algorithm detected inefficiencies in my cognitive profile. The new allocation puts me three weeks short."

Jin nods like she understands. She doesn't. Jin's tier doesn't get cognitive subsidies at all. For her, baseline is baseline. For Maya, baseline is a fall from somewhere slightly higher, which makes it feel like drowning.

In the afternoon, something unusual happens. An Enhanced woman comes to Maya's desk. Not an auditor. Something else. She looks about thirty, which means she's probably sixty or seventy. Age is optional now, for those who can afford the maintenance.

"Maya Chen?" The woman's voice has that resonant quality the Enhanced develop, like she's speaking in harmonics Maya can barely perceive.

"Yes?"

"I'm Dr. Allison Park. I'm conducting research on cognitive stratification outcomes. I'd like to interview you for a study."

Maya feels the old flash of resentment. Being studied. Being data. Being a subject rather than a person. But the woman is offering payment, and three weeks without the regulator will cost Maya more than her pride is worth.

"What kind of questions?"

"I want to understand what it's like. Your lived experience. The Enhanced can simulate baseline cognition, but the simulations feel clinical. Accurate but empty. I need stories, not models."

Maya almost laughs. "You want to know what it's like to be stupid?"

Dr. Park doesn't flinch. "I want to know what it's like to be you. That's not the same thing."

The interview happens in a coffee shop in the Tier 2 commercial district. Dr. Park buys real coffee for both of them and doesn't comment on the price. She has a recording device but also takes notes by hand, which feels oddly touching. A gesture toward symmetry that isn't really symmetrical but at least acknowledges the gap.

Maya talks about the commute. The sponsored lunches. The audits. The subsidy algorithms and how they shape every decision she makes. She talks about Jin, and about her grandmother, and about the childhood she remembers when the gap was smaller, when it still felt like you could climb if you just worked hard enough.

"What do you want?" Dr. Park asks eventually. "If you could have anything."

Maya thinks about the question. She could say: enhancement, of course. Who wouldn't want what you have? But that's not quite true.

"I want to be seen as I am," she says finally. "Not as a simplified version. Not as a baseline case. As Maya, who happens to be cognitively unaugmented, who still has a perspective worth hearing, who isn't defined by what I lack."

Dr. Park writes this down. Then she looks up, and for a moment, something shifts in her expression. Something that looks almost like recognition.

"That's what I want too," she says.

On the commute home, Maya watches the elevated pods sliding through their tunnels. The Enhanced are up there, thinking their enhanced thoughts, processing reality at speeds she can't imagine. But one of them, at least, is thinking about her. Trying to understand her. Reaching across a gap that grows wider every year.

It's not enough. Maya knows it's not enough. But it's something.

She gets home to find a notification on her device. An anonymous transfer. Enough to cover the regulator subsidy through the end of the year. No message. No explanation. Just the money, appearing like a gift from an invisible god.

Maya doesn't cry. She's too tired to cry. Instead she makes herself dinner, real food that she can now afford because her cognitive maintenance is covered, and she sits in her window looking up at the elevated tubes, and she wonders if this is what solidarity looks like in a world that's forgetting what the word means.

Tomorrow she'll wake when her alarm tells her to. Tomorrow she'll think a little faster, remember a little more, feel a little less like she's drowning. Tomorrow she'll be a slightly different person, a slightly more capable person, a person shaped by the chemicals in her blood and the algorithms that allocated them.

Tonight she sits with her unaugmented thoughts and her real coffee and her gratitude and her anger, all mixed together, irreducible.

This is what it's like to be Maya Chen in 2045. This is her day in the stratified mindkind. There's no ending to it because it doesn't end. It just continues, one day at a time, until it doesn't.

---

This is fiction. It doesn't have to be prediction. The future where cognitive inequality compounds like this is one of three futures we're choosing between. The other two are possible too. We're deciding now, mostly without realizing we're deciding.