Appendix GLOSSARY Strata 1 Renyke Wakes in the Alley (Purpose) Strata 2 The Maybe Line (Friendship) Strata 3 Flex and the Robo-Dog (Making Decisions) Strata 4 The Zoners (Meeting Strangers) Strata 5 The Tiger Queen (Memories) Strata 6 Trouble at the Bank (Animal Instincts) Strata 7 Jarome and the Scritters (Trade and Barter) Strata 8 Shabra (Laws of Attraction) Strata 9 Lust and Loins (Limerence) Strata 10 Dinfant Trouble (Synthetic Love) Strata 11 The Crossroads (Gut Feelings) Strata 12 The Basement People (Emotions) Strata 13 The Fight (Hormones) Strata 14 The Journey to the Edge (Fear of Death) Strata 15 The Ship of Sirens (Superstition) Strata 16 Friendship (Empathy) Strata 17 Swimming (Pleasure and Pain) Strata 18 Freaky Celebrations (Stimulation) Strata 19 Peer Pressure (Existentialism) Strata 20 The Perimeter (Ego) Strata 21 Love and Loss (The Power of Kin) Strata 22 Mother (No Child Left Behind) Strat...

Welcome to Immersion You have reached Strata 27 Control is not a universal law but a fragile metaphor that each species invents to describe its own limits. To the cell, control is the quiet choreography of replication and repair, a impulsive dance performed without awareness or will. To the animal, it is the taming of instinct, the constant negotiation between hunger and restraint. To the human, control becomes ambition itself: the shaping of emotion, economy, and destiny. Yet control is never evenly distributed. Most life forms possess no agency at all; they grow, divide, consume, and perish according to pattern, not preference. Even those that claim mastery, the self-aware, the sentient, are governed by older codes written in their biology.  Control may arise from chemistry or from choice, from instinct or from ideology. But wherever it appears, it follows the same trajectory, from order toward entropy, from certainty toward change.  And when machines inherit this instinct, ...