With long-term planning involved from the start, Lotus became the sustainable and future-proofed solution to facilitating networked interaction between all of humanity. To help ease the processing loads that the orbital servers would be subjected to, a special caste system was formed to assign permissions to the various functionalities of Lotus. New accounts from regular citizens started at the bottom, but could inherit into higher tiers if their behavior was deemed to be what the cybertheocracy wanted out of their elite. At present the system has proved to have little flaw, and has only received a few updates to rebalance the middle strata.
At the top is the immortal Glitchangel herself, who commands Lotus as if it is an extension of her soul. Nothing important happens on Lotus without her notice, and thus only happens because she allows it. It's known that the members of the second and third tier have kill switch nanomachines in their bloodstream so that they always side with the cybertheocracy in the face of instability and revolution. More chilling, but thankfully only a rumor, is the contingency that happens upon the unwilling death of Glitchangel Titania. Unverified engineer reports suggest that the orbital servers have the nuclear weapons deemed missing during WWIII, so that they can be crashed into critical points on Earth then detonated in order to poison the planet and wipe out humanity.
The Prophet caste exists at the second highest rung, only occupied by those five hundred loyal people who fought to facilitate Titania's victory in WWIII and survived long enough to receive her eternal blessing. These people have been granted immortality, and have all but the most dangerous few of Lotus' functions. Their posts are automatically tagged and pinned as religious doctrine, and to slander them is punishable by death. There is intense debate as to whether any of the original designers who built the Glitchangel still live among the Prophets, or if they were all killed long before the construction of Lotus in order to conceal the knowledge of her true nature.
The Shepherd caste is the third tier, which is given to a maximum of five thousand people at any given time. Shepherds are chosen for their loyalty and passion to work towards the stability and prosperity of the cybertheocracy. In exchange for a tripled lifespan and a weakened burden of biological needs such as sleep, they engage in discussion with the lower castes on religious doctrine and governmental policy (which, of course, are the same thing) for the purpose of guiding these citizens who might not understand the whole picture or will misinterpret specific teachings. Shepherds cannot enact large-scale changes through Lotus, but generally have complete authority over individuals and small social groups.
The Platinum caste is the fourth tier, and generally considered the highest you can go in Lotus without completely dedicating yourself to public service for the Glitchangel. These seventy thousand people are given great comfort and luxury in exchange for directly managing the different facilities critical to the world. Every resource facility, every spire of education and every residential superstructure has anywhere from five to fifty Platinums directly connected to their critical systems via Lotus. While a highly-desired tier, the turnover rate is rather intense as many Platinums quickly become complacent, their quiet blasphemies towards the Glitchangel soon detected through hidden microphones. It is a point of shame for the lower populace that the average lifespan of a Platinum is less than ten years, and thus a commandment for them to better themselves.
Then there is the Seed caste. Every newborn child is given a Seed-level account in Lotus that is secured to their biometric profile. As they grow, Lotus monitors their health and psyche while providing them continuous access to both sermon and study. There are few permissions granted to these people beyond the basic necessities provided for free by their citizenship, but they can be conditionally granted some privileges by a Platinum or Shepherd that favors them.
While Lotus has done its best to suppress it, most people have heard of, if not believe, the heretical rumor of a sixth-tier caste, Null. Spread through brief glimpses of posts by accounts that are supposed to be locked or deleted, the theory of Null posits that the human soul resides in their Lotus profile. Since their profile is deleted if they die and never rose above the Seed caste (only exceptional people are deemed to be worth archiving), this is a troubling philosophy. Further details say that such deleted souls end up trapped in a liminal space outside of reality, and blend into one superaccount called the Null. Supposedly, openly worshipping the Null will make your contribution to it far more powerful once you are executed for heresy against the Glitchangel. This has created a recurring insurrection problem as eliminating the cults that revere Null only empowers their message. The Prophets and Shepherds now spend far more of their efforts reasserting that Null isn't real, attempting to do damage control on a problem they don't know how to permanently solve.
So you have done a decent job at staying in the cybertheocracy's good graces. While you're a Seed in good standing, you haven't distinguished yourself enough to be loaned permissions from the higher castes, let alone rise among them. You don't think much about the rumors of the Null caste, but at the same time you feel disconnected from the glory of this holy empire. Until today, that is. A solar flare has disrupted the Lotus network, and you can feel the absence of its signal replaced by a new presence. So what do you do when, by speaking through a force more primal than words, the Null teaches you how to safely kill the Glitchangel?
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