The trial was conducted in absentia. The plaintiff was not presently alive, yet neither could he be declared dead. The circumstances were as follows. A memory unit was discovered in an abandoned mine in Outer Zone 19. Its surface bore the name of a mining engineer, Mikael, and the date on which the record had been stored. He had died in an accident forty years before the mine was closed. At the time, medical personnel had recorded part of his brain but failed to restore him. His medical chart instructed that the record be preserved until the technology improved. After the minerals were exhausted, the residents left. When the last administrator relocated, the population was recorded as zero. The three passages, power facilities, and atmospheric facilities installed under the Declaration on the Right to Connection and the Third Passage Mandate Act were still required to remain in operation. The Energy Administration drew up a closure plan. It judged that the power consumed by the three passages would be better supplied to two nearby settlements. During the closure inspection, however, Mikael’s memory unit was found connected to the colony’s power grid. Shutting down the generators could cause the stored state to collapse. Moving the unit elsewhere would require disconnecting it from power, and there was no guarantee that this process would be safe. A detailed examination to determine whether the record inside the unit remained intact could itself damage the record. The Administration therefore assessed the possibility of restoration. Depending on the method of calculation, the figure ranged from 0.00006 percent to 18 percent. There was no test capable of determining which value was correct. The Administration decided to classify the memory unit as archival material, copy whatever information could be recovered from it, and then close the facilities. The Life Protection Coalition filed suit. Mikael was named as the plaintiff.
The Administration argued that the existence of the plaintiff first had to be proven. The Life Protection Coalition replied that it was acting on his behalf because he could not express his own wishes. The court accepted the case. It found that the possibility that Mikael was alive required judicial consideration. The trial continued for 112 years because the court waited for technology capable of reading the memory unit without damaging it. Each time testing technology improved, the probability of success and the probability of damage were recalculated. Even as the risk declined, the question of who had the authority to accept that risk remained unresolved. While the case continued, the three passages and the generators remained in operation. A temporary preservation order was issued because closing the facilities first could damage the memory unit that was the subject of the ruling. The cost of maintaining the facilities eventually exceeded the cost of the litigation, and later exceeded the entire mining revenue from the period when the mine had been in operation. The Administration proposed a compromise: move only the memory unit elsewhere. The Life Protection Coalition raised the risk of damage during transport and the question of identity after restoration. A separate trial was opened to determine whether a restored being would be the engineer who had existed at the time of the accident or a copy created after relocation. Proceedings then followed to determine whether the plaintiffs in the original trial and the new trial were the same person.
The final issue was how much probability of restoration should be required. The Administration argued that a minimum threshold was necessary. If memory units with extremely low probabilities of restoration had to be protected forever, energy that could be supplied to other citizens would become unavailable. The Life Protection Coalition replied that a person’s rights could not be extinguished merely because the probability associated with that person was low. The lower court ruled for the Administration, finding that the probability of restoration was low and the cost of maintaining the facilities was high. After the ruling, long-distance travelers and people with memory-preservation contracts began asking whether their rights could also be restricted under the same standard. Contracts with memory-preservation companies were canceled, and on some routes accidents occurred as returning travelers rushed back at once.
The higher court reversed the ruling. Its judgment created a new legal status: the “return-eligible person.” A return-eligible person was an entity with a reasonable possibility of returning as a citizen in the future even if unable to express a will in the present. The category included people preserved in memory units or cryogenic sleep, travelers lost during wormhole transmission, and passengers aboard slow ships that had not yet arrived. The higher court did not establish a numerical minimum probability of restoration. Restoration impossible with current technology might become possible to later generations. The principle of the ruling was that the fact that someone had not returned could not by itself establish that they would never return. The three passages in Outer Zone 19 were not closed.
The ruling protected actual rights. The property of travelers who had lost contact was preserved, and the citizenship of people in cryogenic sleep was recognized. Even if a memory-preservation company went bankrupt, it could no longer shut down storage devices at its own discretion. Decades later, a travel vessel believed to have been lost arrived three hundred years late because of a time difference between wormhole entrances. Without the ruling, its passengers would have had difficulty recovering their citizenship and property. Afterward, every facility-closure review was required to determine whether any return-eligible persons existed. Memory repositories in empty cities, navigation records from decommissioned spacecraft, and old cryogenic-sleep units became subjects of investigation. When it could not be determined whether stored data constituted a citizen’s memory or merely a record, the review continued. An institution seeking closure had to prove that no person remained who required protection. Storage facilities left underground, beneath oceans, and in orbit were investigated, and searches were conducted for travelers who had not yet arrived. Whenever a new record was discovered, the review began again. In some places, the energy consumed by the closure review exceeded the cost of maintaining the passage. The Administration chose to keep the facilities operating.
The mining engineer in Outer Zone 19 was never restored. For eight thousand years after the ruling, the condition of the memory unit was examined, but the assessment changed as technology advanced. At one point, the probability of restoration increased. Later, parts that had never been recorded at the time of the accident were discovered to be missing. No examination ever established that the probability was zero.