Legal Citizens

In Birmingham and across England citizenship is monitored with great care. All residents are required by law to meet the requirements of proper citizenship.

Citizenship requirements

 * A registered address
 * A registered occupation or education
 * A RFID chip under the skin (covertly implanted as part of a routine procedure)
 * An Aux (a smartphone provided by the authorities) secured with their biometric data and RFID signal
 * A bank account with an approved financial body which can be monitored for all transactions
 * A citizen ID code (a continuation of the National Insurance number)

Citizen records
All records (such as suspicious activity, medical history) are tied to a citizen's ID code. Peace Officers are able to check all of this information in an instant just by being close to the citizen's registered device.

Citizen Aux
A citizen's Aux (short for Auxiliary) is with them from childhood. They must keep their Aux charged and in working order, and any faults or losses of signal will be detected and investigated. The location is constantly signaled to the authorities and the camera and microphone are constantly monitoring and will detect if they are obscured or damaged.

If taken more than 3m away from the registered user (tracked by the citizen's RFID) it will give a warning noise and if the user does not retrieve it quickly it will alert the authorities.

The Aux only permits approved apps to be installed. Email, phone, mapping and banking are standard apps which are set up with accounts automatically for each citizen. Many citizens use games or other entertainment apps which all send tracking and conversation data to the authorities.

Inner city citizens
In the inner city it is unheard of for a resident to not have full citizenship and their Aux is a normal part of their life from childhood. All citizens are entered into either an educational establishment or career and will be assigned an address as needed.

With the ability to install games and entertainment into their Aux, citizens use their Aux every day without any real awareness of all the tracking and information they are providing.

Slums citizens
Land owners have to meet many regulations to qualify as an approved address and, beside large organisations, few are able to meet these regulations. Employment also faces many regulations and self-employment and ad hoc work are not acceptable registered work. A lot of slums residents also work with Chips or old cash rather than a registered bank account.

As a result, in the slums few people are able to maintain legal citizenship. Lack of Peace Bureau resources makes citizenship practically unenforceable in the slums so there is little pressure to try to meet the requirements.

This forms part of the uneasy truce between residents and Peace Officers. The Peace Officers can easily able to justify an arrest against a resident without proper citizenship, while the residents massively outnumber them and could overpower the Officers if provoked.