An Energy-Level Band is a wrist-worn sensor array that reads the wearer's current energy — the same metric an e-hair chip produces internally. Low-grade on the band itself (a numeric readout, a colour aura), high-grade on the AR overlay everyone is already wearing. The band publishes to the social hub so other users in the same space can see your level alongside everything else the overlay is already telling them about you.
Two kinds of band ¶
E-hair bands are strap-on. They read the electrical field the chip puts off and publish that reading. A physically mundane wearable. You take it off before a shower like any other watch.
Parasite bands are plugged in. The sensor sits inside an incision on the host's body, coupled through a small biological interface to the parasite itself. It does not come off easily, because coming off is not the point — the band exists to show the host's true energy state, and the parasite's contribution to that state only registers through direct coupling. A parasite-host wearing a parasite band publishes a composite reading: the human layer plus the parasite layer plus whatever control harmonic the two are currently managing between them.
Both ¶
A person wearing one of each — an e-hair band and a parasite band — is, socially, the main person in any room they walk into. The combination is rare because the combination implies the wearer is running both a functional chip and a functional parasite without either rejecting the other. The social hub treats the dual reading as a signature. People make way.
Why it matters ¶
The bands are the social layer of the energy-physiology stack. The chips, the incisions, the cooling tubes, and the plasma swords all live inside the combat and utility registers. The band is where the registers become legible to other humans at a glance. In a society where every other major capability (compute, power, housing, transport) has been moved into shared infrastructure, the body itself is where the visible class distinctions now live. The band is how the body publishes them.