The Deprecation
Nobody uses the word "fired" anymore. Nobody says "laid off." Nobody even says "terminated," because termination implies violence, and violence implies a choice, and the beauty of deprecation is that it doesn't feel like a choice at all. Deprecation is the corporate vocabulary of human obsolescence, and like most of the Sprawl's ugliest systems, it works by being technically accurate. A deprecated product is one that still functions but is no longer supported, no longer updated, no longer part of the roadmap. It hasn't failed. It hasn't broken. It just doesn't have a line item anymore.
"We don't terminate employees. We transition them to an unsupported lifecycle. The language matters — it reflects our commitment to dignity throughout the process."
— Nexus Dynamics Transition Services Manual, Revision 14, 2181 The Sunset Package
When a Nexus Dynamics employee is deprecated, they receive a Sunset Package — a standardized transition document delivered with the warmth and precision of a product end-of-life notice. The package includes four components, each designed to ensure the transition feels less like a dismissal and more like a natural lifecycle event.
Severance
60% of final salary for six months. Enough to prevent immediate crisis. Not enough to prevent long-term decline.
Consciousness Downgrade
Licensing drops from Professional to Basic tier. The most devastating component — the one that changes who you are.
Firmware Reversion
Neural interface reverted to civilian-grade within 72 hours. Enhanced pathways don't disappear — they go dark.
Graceful Transition Letter
Signed by a Transition Specialist trained to make the conversation feel like a gift. "We wish you well in your future endeavors."
The Firmware Downgrade
The firmware downgrade is the part nobody talks about afterward. Corporate-grade neural enhancement doesn't just add capability — it restructures cognitive pathways over months and years of use. A Professional-tier Nexus employee processes information 340% faster than baseline, holds 8–12 concurrent thought threads, and perceives time in a denser, more textured way than unaugmented cognition allows.
When the firmware reverts to civilian-grade, the enhanced pathways don't disappear — they go dark. The brain has rewired itself around capabilities that no longer exist.
Going Gray
The experience is described consistently by deprecated employees: not pain, exactly, but thinning. The world becomes quieter. Slower. Flatter. Colors look the same but feel less significant. Conversations that once felt like rich multi-threaded exchanges become linear, effortful, exhausting.
The medical term is "cognitive reversion syndrome." In the Dregs, they call it going gray.
Nexus's actuarial division has calculated that the average deprecated employee's productivity drops to 31% of their enhanced baseline within ninety days of firmware reversion. This is not a side effect. It is the mechanism. A deprecated worker who retained their full cognitive enhancement would be dangerous — they'd have corporate-grade intelligence without corporate loyalty.
The Rothwell Standardization
The Rothwell corporations adopted Nexus's deprecation framework in 2179, standardizing the language, the process, and the firmware reversion schedule across the Sprawl's consumer economy. Each corporation added its own refinements.
Guardian Industries
Adds weapons handling deauthorization. Deprecated security personnel lose access to corporate-grade armament systems within 24 hours of notification.
Helix Biotech
Includes pharmaceutical access revocation. Proprietary cognitive enhancers, metabolic regulators, and therapeutic compounds — all discontinued.
Good Fortune Financial
Includes a credit score adjustment from "investment grade" to "transitional" — a classification that doubles loan interest rates within 48 hours.
The Sensory Aftermath
The deprecation notice arrives as a neural ping — not text, not voice, but a specific harmonic that Corporate Communications designed to feel "warm and transitional." The harmonic includes a subaudible frequency that slightly elevates cortisol — not enough to cause alarm, just enough to create the alertness needed to process the information that follows. The notice is experienced as a sudden clarity, a sharpening of focus, followed by the specific digital weight of a document settling into your awareness.
After reversion, the world tastes metallic for three days. Not from the procedure — from the brain adjusting to a sensory processing framework that can no longer resolve subtle flavors. Everything is thinner. Everything is less.
The Tensions Beneath
The Cognitive Leash
Losing your position means literally losing cognitive capacity. The brain, restructured around corporate enhancement, cannot function at its pre-enhancement baseline. The Sprawl has built a workforce whose minds are corporate property in everything but legal classification — and deprecation is the moment that fiction becomes reality.
The Form Letter Answer
When machines can do everything, what are people for? The deprecation framework doesn't debate this question. It answers it — with a 72-hour timeline, a firmware reversion, and a phrase that means nothing: "We wish you well in your future endeavors." Philosophy reduced to procedure. Meaning reduced to paperwork.
Dependency by Design
The Sprawl's corporations have restructured cognitive habits around tools that can be taken away. Nobody has calculated what happens when they are — or rather, Nexus has calculated it precisely. The 31% productivity figure is not a warning. It is a control mechanism.
The Violence of Kindness
The Sunset Package, the Transition Specialist, the Letter of Graceful Transition — every element is designed to make obsolescence feel like a gift. The kindness is the mechanism. If it felt like violence, people would resist. Instead, they thank their Transition Specialist and walk into the gray.
Secrets & Mysteries
What the actuarial reports don't share with Transition Services:
- Reintegration Probability: The actuarial division tracks a metric they never share externally — the likelihood that a deprecated employee will find meaningful work within 24 months. The current average is 23%. The number has been declining by 2 percentage points per year since 2179. At current trajectory, it will reach single digits by 2190.
- The Silence Above: Nobody has briefed the executives on this trend. The executives have not asked. Whether this represents ignorance or acceptance is a question nobody inside Nexus is willing to pose.
- The Metallic Taste: The three-day metallic taste after reversion is not documented in any official Nexus medical literature. Transition Specialists are trained to describe it as "a normal adjustment period." The actual cause — a sensory processing framework collapsing — has never been formally studied, because studying it would require acknowledging what the firmware reversion actually does to a human brain.
Connections
The Deprecation exists at the intersection of corporate power, cognitive technology, and the quiet erasure of human purpose. These are the systems and places where it is most visible.
Consciousness Licensing
The tier downgrade from Professional to Basic is the deprecation's most devastating component — the moment your mind becomes a lesser product.
Competence Atrophy
Each deprecated worker is a competence node removed from the Sprawl's knowledge network. Deprecation accelerates the forgetting.
Nexus Dynamics
Nexus pioneered the deprecation framework and licensed it to the other Big Three corporations. The system bears their fingerprints.
"They gave me a letter that said I was transitioning to an unsupported lifecycle. They said it with warmth. They said it with care. They said it while the firmware countdown ticked behind my eyes — seventy-two hours until the world went flat. I thanked them. I actually thanked them. That's the part I can't forgive myself for." — Anonymous deprecated employee, Dregs community board, 2183