The Higher Echelon The higher echelon is the term given to the [[grand assembly|Grand Assembly]]'s interplanetary and interstellar traveling class, of whom tend to be more nomadic and often have ranks such as officer, captain and pilot.  Their spaceships tend to include a lot of crews of substrate and drone class, indeed becoming part of the higher echelon often requires recruitment to work on such vessels.  Most people usually work at an orbital level of movement, but some will go to other planets or even star systems if their goals center on such activities.  Mass movement between star systems may sometimes be done through world ships, but such world ships aren't the norm in the 2700's compared to prospect space where such worldships are everywhere.  The higher echelon often has more administrative and Grand strategy oriented affairs, between intelligence agencies working against the [[virtue coalition|Virtue Coalition]] and handling the Krasnikov tube infrastructure there is hardly a shortage of higher echelon work (and indeed, a whole 10% of the population engages in it on some level, which is hundreds of billions!) to keep the virtual processes flowing and the security of the grids in check.  Building power relays, maintaining them, overseeing the construction of new installations and preserving local ecologies are all tasks done by the higher echelon.  The trisemblance ideation is widespread as the worldview is more conservative than it first seems, as while they eschew the norms of industrial and agrarian age humanity in regards to gender expectations and world statism is diluted by the amount of constant interstellar travel they engage in there is a certain inflexibility to how they can imagine handling the virtues.  Aliens are also widely feared due to prospectors being notorious and the sprawl sectors being illegal to travel to due to the sentinels being known to smite someone for traveling over an improvised speed limit without warning in those sectors.  There is a paranoia simmering in the higher echelon from their acute awareness of the galaxy as a whole being much higher than the planetary drones and substrate, or even the cyborg/AGI class of systems managers of [[megapoli|Megapoli]] who often are too prideful of their high status colony to consider the bigger picture.