Dependent
A Confederacy Dependent is one of the Confederacy's four official classifications for humans. Any human between the ages of zero (just born) and 14 (eligible to take the CAP test is listed as the dependent of his or her Sponsor. The four categories are:
- Volunteer or Sponsor, someone past their 14th birthday who took the CAP test and passed it and volunteered to leave Earth and serve in the Confederacy armed forces,
- Concubine, someone past their 14th birthday who took the CAP test but did not earn a passing (6.5 or higher) score, but volunteered to serve a qualified Sponsor as his or her concubine,
- Dependent, everyone already born but not yet 14 years old, or
- On Earth, which the Confederacy refuses to defend, and thus not part of the Confederacy. This category includes all humans who are not eligible to volunteer as well as those who are eligible but refuse to volunteer. Either way, the Confederacy's official policy regarding the humans remaining on Earth as "Not our problem".
Humans being the way they are, almost every colony or base slowly collects a few people who don't fit neatly into any of the four categories. Rather than create a 5th category of oddballs, the AIs which actually run the Confederacy have found it expedient to simply lump those oddballs into the Dependent category. The most common source for these over-14 dependents is a pickup where, due to conditions on the ground, the extraction team took people with them who were over 14 but were not officially eligible to volunteer.
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
