Person of Interest + Amenta castes
Because obviously obscure fusions. (Thank you for contributions to d., who is great).
{Note, this is specifically borrowing the caste system, it is not currently borrowing the babies-related stuff}
[Warning some POI spoilers]
(Some background for not-POI people: Harold is a billionaire who lives on false identities who made an AI to help the government identify terrorists. It also identifies murders that are about to happen. Harold is currently trying to stop some of those. Nathan’s Harold’s college best friend and the official face of their tech company. John is an ex-CIA assassin who Harold enlists to help with the murder prevention. He has self worth issues. Carter is a police detective who gets involved. Kara was John’s CIA partner. She is not a nice person. Shaw is an ex-other-blackops assassin who before that was trying to be a doctor. Root is a hacker and worked as a murder-for-hire arranger. She is a zealot about the AI.)
Harold is purple, though basically no one knows this. He went to college as a green, and generally finds green most comfortable for himself (Finch is green in the sense that that’s what color hair he has, since not having a hair color at all stands out too much (though he might have done it the first time he met John?), and he decided to go for the comfort in picking.) A good amount of his identities are yellow, both for specific occupation reasons and because yellows tends to be less obtrusive. Wren is yellow, whoever he had at IFT was yellow. Crane is blue.
Nathan is blue (I was thinking green, because college, but I think d. correctly suggested blue.) He went to college with greens in an instance of ‘blues can do that kind of thing’. He got away with claiming to be IFT’s inventor because blue income and out of caste income cap thing, though a lot of people suspected he had a green or yellow (…what caste does do tech inventions…?) or a few he bribed to do the work and not take credit. I need a way to explain Will, who is clearly green, and Olivia is clearly blue, so possibly she is infertile and they got a (green) donor and were allowed to do this because blues and being able to promise to hire green tutors and all that. (There were a lot of suspicions that Nathan was trying to raise a replacement for his ‘secret greens’). Olivia might have a blue child from a previous marriage to make this work (for her).
Carter is grey - military, police, pretty straight forward. Taylor might be learning to be a dancer.
John is also grey (again, military). Groups like the CIA pick recruits partially based on being able to better deal with pollution, since it, well, comes up. I believe it was d’s suggestion that because this is John, it’s actually a thing that John is pretty regular pollution sensitive, he just suppresses for the job really well. (As in no one notices, not as in it doesn’t hurt him.)
Kara is properly blue, but she’s the result of an embarrassing affair type thing and was raised by yellows and expected to keep the blue thing a secret. She really hates yellow (the cultural expectations etc, not the people). She ran away and joined the circus joined the CIA.
d. suggested that Shaw is orange, which I wouldn’t have thought of but wow. This actually makes the doctor thing work better, since oranges have pretty strong expectation about emotion and care. Blackops in this verse takes recruits of all castes - expands the talent pool, good for undercover, and since they’re already doing highly illegal stuff that part doesn’t matter. She joins the ISA.
I was thinking Root is purple which is what fits her canon background. Was thinking about a version where Hanna was red. But no, I think it works better that Root is red (which, um, definitely works well with her ‘people are completely awful’ thing.) She maybe kept seeing Hanna because Hanna would leave the library around the time the garbage truck Root worked with was there (it seems canonical that red kids working can be a thing). Maybe Hanna did something nice (not touch involving) for her once. Root witnesses part of the kidnapping but doesn’t have a good way to report it and be listened to because red. She has identities in all sorts of castes.
The Machine itself does not discriminate by caste - it will produce red numbers (I presume even if reds aren’t citizens they must have some registry thing). However, Harold realized that if the ISA got a red number they would just kill the red without really trying to figure anything out (except if there might be others involved, anyway)(including if they were in fact the victim). So he programmed the Machine not to tell them the red numbers.
Root finding this out about the Machine goes to her feelings about it.
Harold is worried about the first time he gets a red number when working with John - John is grey after all. But John is, ah, not that kind of grey.