The Metropolis · the proving ground
Main Layer (0)
What the STI does here
Ways in
Ways out
Doctrine
The Five Rings
Five concentric terraced mega-rings on a single planet, divided by continuous boundary walls 15 km high.
Interactive map
Ring Atlas
The rings seen from above the Sanctuary core. Select a ring to read it as a place. Select a movement to see who crosses which wall, and in which direction.
Map of the five rings seen from above the Sanctuary core.
Movements
All routes shown. Select a movement to read its rule.
Your simulated citizen, from the Trust Console
How the Gradient Works
The Five Rings are five distinct civilizational environments, each with its own economic character, social texture, institutional presence, and enforcement posture. They are not prisons stacked on top of one another. The higher the layer, the more institutional infrastructure the civilization maintains on your behalf; the lower the layer, the more private enterprise and organic social order fill that space.
In ordinary civilization, innocent and harmful people are constantly forced to share the same space. VMSS treats that as a design failure. Its core solution is behavioral separation: people who repeatedly preserve trust live among other high-trust people, and people who violate that trust are reassigned to environments built for their actual level of risk. Each layer becomes socially coherent on its own terms.
Lower layers are less regulated, not worse. Private enterprise, voluntary communities, and organic social order fill the space that institutions vacate, and a mixed population of penalized residents, elective residents, voluntary permanent residents, and cross-layer visitors gives each layer a social identity far richer than a penal colony.
Sanctuary and Main Layer share the same $10,000/month UBI, the same currency, and the same post-scarcity baseline. A working resident collecting UBI, Primary Job Subsidy, and market wages starts at $240,000–$300,000 annually, comfortably upper-middle-class before any entrepreneurial income. Sanctuary residents routinely cross into Main for commerce, dining, and cultural life, and the two relate more like neighboring boroughs of one city than separate worlds. Crossing the border changes trust infrastructure but leaves income the same.
Punitive reassignment is permanent across all lower layers. The system does not seek reintegration into higher-trust environments after a qualifying breach. Its priorities are protecting the innocent first, making consequences legible, and letting every layer become what it naturally becomes when the right people inhabit it. Cross-layer visitation flows downward: citizens may visit layers below their placement freely, arriving economically neutral in the destination environment. Some visit for research. Others visit because the inner rings, for all their safety, can feel constraining, and a long weekend in -2's rawer atmosphere is a legitimate change of pace, not a suicide mission. -3 is the exception: LP-004.2 suspends the visitor's backup vessel link at the boundary, so death inside the Freedom Layer is final for visitor and resident alike.
What Each Ring Means
+1 Sanctuary
The highest-trust environment. Harm is stopped before completion. Residents gain access to the safest, freest, and most selective domains in the civilization: 300 million residents in the primary ring, which the SADs subdivide into intimate communities of tens to hundreds of thousands, each gated by a single shared metric. These communities offer a small-town feel no metropolis can.
Main Layer (0)
The civilization's heartbeat: billions of residents, with the density, energy, and variety of a civilization at full human scale. Full life, work, relationships, and opportunity remain available. Harmful acts can complete before intervention, which makes the choices here real. Some citizens choose it consciously as a destination rather than a waiting room, having seen what lies above and below.
Together, +1 and 0 form a symbiotic upper pair. The border between them is fluid — residents who sustain high compliance ascend to Sanctuary; Sanctuary residents whose STI drops below the 85-point floor phase back to Main. Sanctuary is the highest-upkeep residency in the civilization, not a permanent reward.
-1 Noncompliance — The Balanced Layer
Partial institutional presence alongside growing private enterprise. A lower-trust stratum for non-trivial but non-predatory violations. Status and access contract, but life stays materially stable and full: the market economy, reduced taxation, and UBI floor all remain. Penalized residents live alongside elective residents, voluntary permanent residents, and visitors from above, forming a commercial district culture with its own rhythm. Placement is permanent, but STI improvement determines local standing and access within the layer.
-2 Violent Offense — The Lower Restrictions Layer
Predominantly private economy with reduced institutional presence. This ring holds people whose actions demonstrated predatory danger to others, and also voluntary residents who chose -2 for its hybrid economic character. Private security, private justice, and organic community hierarchy fill the institutional void. Voluntary-resident districts maintain genuine infrastructure and functioning markets alongside the contested zones. Punitive reassignment here is permanent, but life, commerce, and genuine social order continue on the layer's own terms.
-3 Terminal — The Freedom Layer
Minimal VMSS institutional presence: a federal floor of UBI, taxation, and federal law enforcement, with daily governance withdrawn. Largely private economy: low taxation, no regulatory infrastructure for daily commerce. These frontier conditions make some people choose this layer voluntarily. A meaningful portion of -3 residents are there by choice, not consequence. The public ledger travels with every resident, and the communities that form here develop their own internal order. The layer is complete on its own terms.
Why the Rings Matter
The ring architecture creates civilizational clarity. Every resident knows what each layer protects, what it permits, and what it costs to lose access, so moral causality is visible instead of abstract. The civilization is richer with all five layers than it would be with one, because each offers something the others cannot.
In VMSS, justice is primarily a change in the environment you are allowed to inhabit, rather than a sentence measured in years, and each environment has genuine texture, economy, and social life of its own. That shift in architecture turns law from an after-the-fact reaction into a stable social design.
For full economic structure (UBI, taxation, subsidy, and overtime premium), see Systems.