Serfs inhabit a legal space between Citizens and Indentured Servants. They have less rights than citizens, but more rights then Indentured Servants.
However, where Indentured Servants have a positive connotation, largely due to their vast role in the State’s governance, Serfs lack this and are seen as lesser by the majority of society, even as lesser than Indentured Servants. Where Indentured Servants are forks sold mostly to the State, serfs are individuals that have sold themselves to wealthy citizens, and in some cases corporations, to resell them.
As such, even if Serfs have more rights than Indentured Servants, they can be treated worse than Indentured Servants.
Some of the rights that Serfs have lost:
- Right to bodily autonomy, their cortical stack can be removed and places into a different sheath by the owner.
- Right to personal property
- Right to free association
- Right to free speech
In some cases the sheathes a Serf is meant to inhabit has hard coded limits and other modifications, as they, theoretically, retain their right to an unmodified mind state. However this is a legal gray area, as many serfs have memories temporarily suppressed and undergo extreme forms of VR training that leads to irreversible changes in personality and preferences. That neither society, not The State are willing to address this legal gray area speaks of the societal disdain leveled at serfs.
In many cases, Serfs in wealthy households are employed as servants, maids and other menial jobs, placed in bio-cybernetic android bodies designed by their owners, almost always subservient to the personal indentured servants of an individual. Still, in many cases a Serf may raise up to become a Major Domo of a household.