Every registered person in the city is on the Open Roll. The Roll is the SAR Authority’s master record of citizens, contracted humans, and registered entities. It is, in principle, the answer to the question does this person legally exist.
To be rolled, to be struck
To be rolled is to be on the Roll, registered, with all the attendant rights and obligations. Most of the city is rolled clean. To be struck is to be formally erased — a real legal status, applied for major Open Compact violations, and one of the most serious punishments the SAR Authority can issue. A struck citizen is a non-person in the legal economy. Banks will not transact with them. Employers cannot hire them. Hospitals can refuse them.
The Unaccounted
People who never registered, lost their registration, or fled jurisdictions where registration would have been used against them. The largest single category is mainland refugees from the Pearl River Delta. The Unaccounted live in the gaps between the Open Roll, the pre-Compact registers, and the favor-economy. Most crews include at least one Unaccounted member.
What happens to the Struck
This is one of the bible’s deliberate unknowns. People formally erased from the Open Roll vanish from the legal economy. Some are seen later, in odd places. Some are not. The pattern, if there is one, is not legible.