Classification
Reach for the stars. That was the title of my favorite nursery book when I was a Quartling, about a young child and his parents who told him he could grow up to be anything he wanted. The child wanted to be a fire truck. At four hours and 12 minutes old, I had that child’s potential. At four hours and 13 minutes, I was Quartus.
In the hallway hangs our family constellation with myself in the center, my Quartus mother and father, their Quartus parents and so it goes. 97% of Tertia-7’s children receive the same Classification as their parents, a number that is not different throughout the Imperium. A Primus family constellation shines with Primus offspring. A Secundus glows with Secundus.
The Algorithm confirms what the bloodline predicts, and it does so with a consistency that would suggest the process is hereditary, except that the Ordo’s position is that it is not hereditary. It is providential. The Algorithm does not read your parentage. It reads your nature. The fact that your nature almost always matches your parents’ nature is, according to the Codex, evidence that the Strata reflect a genuine ordering of human potential. Children inherit their parents’ nature because the Strata are real. Nature confirms the algorithm.
Classification is a basic human right and must be performed without delay for every birth in the Imperium without exception. The colony’s Classification Tertius dawns full robes and upon arrival at the classificant, ceremonially records Form 1-Charlie with parents classification, to which is already known to the classificator. The form is submitted, and the resulting Providence is read aloud in Old Formal, a liturgical language that approximately four percent of the population speaks, and presents the documentation for parental signature.
A simpler system would assign the parents’ Stratum to the child at birth and note the rare exceptions. But that would be a clerical process, and a clerical process would imply that Classification is administrative, and if Classification is administrative then the Strata are a policy decision rather than a cosmic truth.