Going Raw

When a deprecated corporate employee arrives in the Dregs, their first social challenge is not finding housing or food. It is learning to speak.

“Going raw” is what they call the process of redeveloping rough, imprecise, emotionally volatile speech patterns — the kind that the Dregs’ authenticity culture requires for social acceptance. The process takes weeks to months and is consistently described by deprecated employees as one of the most disorienting experiences of their transition.

The difficulty is not performative. A smoothed person cannot simply decide to speak roughly. The Smoothing has restructured their communication architecture at the neural level — their sentences naturally form with complete grammar, optimal rhythm, and calibrated emotional register. Deliberately speaking with the imprecision, contradiction, and rawness that Dregs culture values requires actively overriding patterns that have become automatic.

It is, by every clinical measure, a skill reduction. By every human measure, it is a recovery.

The Practice

The earliest stages are the most painful. A newly deprecated employee trying to go raw sounds artificial — their attempts at directness are too clean, their casual profanity rhythmically wrong, their silences timed rather than natural. Dregs residents recognize the performance immediately. The response is not hostility but patient understanding: “Give it time. The smooth wears off.”

There is no formal instruction. No course or mentor. The Small Talk Cafes provide the closest thing to a practice environment — spaces where stilted conversation is expected, where the awkwardness of relearning social speech is understood rather than judged. Regulars at the cafes have heard every variation of the corporate-to-raw transition. They know the sound of someone trying too hard to be imprecise. They wait it out.

The timeline varies. Recent corporate hires — a year or two in the system — can go raw in weeks. Long-term employees, people who spent decades under the Smoothing, take months. Some never fully arrive. Their speech retains a ghost of corporate cadence that Dregs ears can detect years later, a faint residual polish that marks them as from somewhere else.

The Parallel

Going raw mirrors going gray. One strips enhanced cognitive processing. The other strips enhanced communication capability. Both are experienced as diminishment — slower, clumsier, less capable. Both are also, in the assessment of those who’ve completed them, forms of liberation.

Wren Adeyemi went through both. Going gray removed her augmented impatience — the cognitive speed that made unaugmented conversation feel impossibly slow. Going raw was the social recovery that followed. Eight months of rebuilding speech patterns from the ground up. She attributes the shift to firmware reversion rather than practice — the Smoothing, she claims, was downstream of the augmentation. Remove the processing speed and the communication optimization collapses on its own.

The clinical researchers disagree. They say the Smoothing and augmentation are separate systems, that going raw requires its own deliberate process regardless of firmware status. Wren says the researchers talk too smoothly to understand what they’re studying.

Where It Lives

Going raw happens in the Dregs because the Dregs is where authenticity culture enforces it. In corporate space, the Smoothing is invisible — everyone speaks the same optimized register, and the calibration feels natural because everyone around you shares it. In the Dregs, the smoothed voice stands out like a uniform. People hear it and their guard goes up.

The Small Talk Cafes are the primary practice ground. Sector 7G hosts the densest concentration of recently deprecated workers, and its cafes have developed an unspoken expertise in the transition. The bartenders, the regulars, the vendors — they have all seen the process hundreds of times. They are patient in the way that people who remember their own transitions are patient.

Corporate researchers have attempted to study the process. Their smooth, structured interview questions produce smooth, structured answers from subjects who are still mid-transition. The researchers publish findings about “communication pattern reversion” that miss the point entirely. Going raw is not a clinical phenomenon. It is the sound of someone remembering who they were before the optimization told them who to be.

What Nobody Can Explain

• Why does the same phrase — “I can hear my own voice again” — appear in every account? No one teaches it. No one models it. People who have never met each other describe the same experience in the same words.
• Wren Adeyemi says going gray caused going raw automatically. The researchers say they’re separate processes. Neither side can explain why her timeline was half the predicted duration.
• Some long-term corporate employees never fully go raw. Their speech retains a residual polish decades after deprecation. Is the Smoothing permanent above a certain threshold of exposure? Or are they choosing, at some level, to hold on?
• Children raised in corporate environments but deprecated young go raw almost instantly. The Smoothing had restructured their neural communication — but they were raw before they were smooth. The body remembers.
• The Dregs say “the smooth wears off.” But does it? Or does the person underneath just grow loud enough to drown it out?