In the technical vastness of the future, unskilled labor is easy to come by. When you can use a gravitic tractor/pressor to lift macroscales of objects gingerly and precisely place them where you want them, "labor" is a term that almost loses its meaning. What the post-singularity world still wants, however, is brainpower and time. A single person can only do so much. as can a single mind.
A Helot has been bound to techno-slavery. They typically have very low Capabilities other than Cognitech, which can be quite high. They always have meshes. The slavery induction, however, is not a Lens. A surgical (and perhaps genetic) modification is made to their brains, called a "decision matrix bypass". This causes the brain to bypass its normal decision making process in favor of simply obeying whomever is determined to be "the master" (it could be a person, a group, a Civilization, or even an ideal). The process is lethal to the identity. A person who is made a Helot has essentially been killed and replaced by a slavish being with their intelligence and personality traits. Once this is done, a slave lens can then be applied to tell the Helot who its master is, and it will go about its life willingly, and perhaps happily, surrendering its being to someone or something else. Switch out the slave lens, and the Helot now has a new master and is perfectly devoted to that one, leaving behind all attachment to the former.
Almost nobody asks to be a Helot, and those that do are usually forced into it or simply didn't know what they were asking for. Helotry, which is to say technologically-induced slave-mastery, is illegal in every Civilization that has even minimally cordial relations with the Patent Office. Even the Logicians are offended by it, though perhaps this is because the selection criteria for a potential Helot makes the Logicians the perfect candidates. Paradoxically, the Union is the most aggressive against Helotry. They maintain that this is because every Union member has voluntarily opened their mind to the Union, and that they have not lost their power to make decisions. Most of the rest of the Civilizations believe that it's a paradoxical result of the Union's drive towards righting perceived injustice and being civic-minded. In the Union, conviction of Helotry is punishable by an immediate death sentence.
Unfortunately, there are other Civilizations out there, and some of them are less high minded. The first major slaveholding Civilization gave this "Society" its name - the Helotry of Eudaimonea. Others have appeared, and each one has been crushed under the heel of the other Civilizations. It appears to some that every time some of the Civilizations begin to consider using Helotry as a replacement death sentence or for other purposes, another slaveholding Civilization is discovered, each more vile than the last. Most recently, it was the Regal Ecstasy, an oligarchal hedonism whose treatment of their Helots bears no repeating. A few conspiratorial minds wonder if maybe the slaveholding Civilizations aren't the "aces in the hole" for the Transcendentals to keep slavery from ever catching on.
"Free" Helots aren't. Even without a slave lens, they still bear the decision matrix bypass. Reversal of the bypass won't retrieve the person the Helot once may have been (assuming they weren't born that way). It will create an entirely new person, one likely to be completely devoid of personality. Free Helots do have the advantage of being able, to some degree or another, choose the source of their slavery. All Helots, even ones with slave lenses, eventually learn ways of mitigating the absoluteness of their slavery, gaining glimmers of personal choice. However, even the most self-willed of Helots reflexively does what he is told, and isn't truly happy unless they stop questioning.
The Union refuses to allow Helots into the Union. While they will unquestioningly admit Helots as refugees, it is the Union's belief that to bring a Helot into the Union would be to simply reintroduce the slavery from which they've been freed. This makes a Helot who was formerly part of the Union a truly sad and pathetic creature.
Benefit: All Helots have a mesh. In addition, when determining their Themes and Import, Helots ignore their Cognitech scores.
Core Value: Subservience - This isn't a "value" so much as a yoke. Subservience is always towards something specific, be it an individual, a group, a Society, a Civilization, or any other clear master, and it is the desire to set aside all else to further whatever desires their master(s) might wish. Free Helots have some amount of ability to choose their master, but if put under a slave lens their Subservience is handed to them. When somebody is made a Helot, they gain this at 10, but using eliptical logic, experience, and sheer stubbornness, they might reduce it. However, even a Helot with this CV at 0 has the reflex to serve and to obey. Helots with this score above 5 (which is most of them) would have to at least consider before ignoring a request from their master to needlessly commit suicide. For a Helot with this CV at 10, there is no atrocity, no indignity, no humiliation, no brutality, and no suffering so low or extreme that it will not be gladly accepted in service to the master(s).