After the energy deficit and the maintenance cost of wormhole passages increased, the Central Union government set energy allocations for each region. Supply was assigned according to population, production facilities, and medical demand. In coordination with the stellar alliances, the Life Protection Coalition demanded that the count include not only current residents but also citizens in cryogenic sleep and citizens preserved in memory repositories. The Central Union government replied that the same citizen could not be counted in two places. If power was allocated to both sides because one person might be restored at the place of departure and might also return to the destination, the totals would not balance. The colonies replied that neither possibility could be excluded while it was still unknown which would become real. Energy allocation was administered according to different standards in different settlements. Some places gave priority to supplying power to people whose consciousness was currently running. Others reduced city lighting in order to preserve power for long-term sleepers and memory repositories. Both methods were based on laws intended to protect citizens.
The first conflict arose from an order to reduce the energy supplied to restoration facilities. The local autonomous governments replied that they had no authority to shut down memory units. When the Central Union government restricted the output of power facilities, local security forces occupied the facilities. Neighboring settlements either supported the occupation or opposed it in order to protect their own power contracts. As the war expanded, each region secured its own power supply first. They could not permanently close one another’s passages, but they delayed transport and gave their own regions priority in the output of power facilities. Decisions intended to preserve one region’s allocation reduced the allocation of another. The Central Union government regained control of some regions, but it could not fulfill every supply contract at the same time. By the time the peace agreement was drafted, it had become impossible even to negotiate with a single opposing side. Settlements, power networks, and memory repositories had formed separate alliances. No victor or loser could be recorded for the Fifth War. The Central Union government’s allocation orders lost their force, leaving only regional distribution systems. Later generations dated the end of the war not from the point when fighting ceased, but from the point when no institution could any longer administer the energy supply of the galaxy as a whole. After that, each region extended its survival in a different way. Some increased stellar extraction. Others moved citizens’ bodies into computational worlds. Some shut down other facilities in order to secure enough energy to maintain their passages. As each region came to define differently what counted as a citizen to be protected, the rights of travelers and the ownership of memories also changed from one border to another.
In this condition, the Alliance for the Duty of Preemptive Life Protection was formed. It was known in abbreviated form as the Goodwill Coalition. Its predecessor was the Life Protection Coalition. The Goodwill Coalition began as a loose association of ecological leagues, medical associations, rescue organizations, religious institutions, and groups representing disaster victims. It grew into a political organization as groups concerned with the right to connection, organizations protecting memory repositories, passage-safety institutions, and others joined it. Even as its political influence expanded, the Goodwill Coalition officially retained its status as a nonprofit organization. The organizations belonging to it did not all have the same purpose. Some placed priority on oxygen for citizens who were alive, some on power for citizens who had not yet awakened, and others on ecosystems of planets from which humans had departed. Yet they had one thing in common. It was the noblest value that humanity had never abandoned since its earliest days: humanism. The Goodwill Coalition demanded a single citizen registry for all regions. Its proposal was to register the status of citizens with bodies, citizens in computational worlds, people in cryogenic sleep, and those awaiting restoration, and to prevent one region from arbitrarily deleting those under protection in another region in order to reduce its own costs. Some regions accepted the proposal. A registered citizen could retain the same rights after moving to another star system. Other regions refused. With energy supplies already insufficient, recognizing memory units from outside the region as citizens would require reducing the life-support resources available to present residents.
The Goodwill Coalition stopped supplying raw materials and restoration equipment to regions that refused. It did not close their passages directly. Its stated reason was that citizens’ records could not be entrusted to autonomous governments that did not recognize their rights. The refusing regions announced that the Goodwill Coalition was blockading life-support facilities under the name of a private organization. This conflict became the beginning of the Sixth War. Both sides published lists of the lives they claimed to protect. One side counted the oxygen and heat it could reliably supply to people who were alive in the present. The other also counted beings whose chance of returning would disappear permanently if their supply was cut off. Presenting the lives omitted from the opposing side’s list became a weapon of war as effective as military occupation. The Goodwill Coalition combined the records of passage-safety institutions with citizen registries remaining in multiple regions. Star systems that recognized the registry could distribute goods and power jointly among themselves. More regions sought to enter the system, while those that refused membership found it increasingly difficult to obtain transport contracts. Fighting occurred mainly over control of power facilities and passages. One region disconnected a memory repository in order to preserve power for its present residents, and the Goodwill Coalition reconnected the facility on the grounds of the rights of the citizens stored there. As measures by both sides were repeated, power facilities were damaged. Even the side that recovered ownership of a facility could not recover the output that had been lost. The Goodwill Coalition was the victor of the Sixth War. This was not merely because the number of member regions had increased. During the war, the Coalition’s joint distribution network had taken over much of the allocation and passage-management functions lost by the Central Union government. Citizens of defeated regions also wanted their status to be recognized when they moved or were restored. After the war, the Goodwill Coalition’s registry replaced the official citizen registry of the Central Union government. Authority to determine the status of a citizen moved with the registry to the Goodwill Coalition.
After the war, the Central Union government incorporated the Goodwill Coalition’s joint distribution network and citizen registry into the official administrative system. The leadership structure of the Goodwill Coalition and the administrative organization of the Central Union government were integrated in stages, and the resulting system became known as the Goodwill Unified Government. Immediately after integration, the Goodwill Unified Government issued the Life Continuity Guarantee Decree. The decree protected the continuity of life that was presently active and life that had a reasonable possibility of becoming active again in the future. Life-support facilities and memory-preservation facilities could not be shut down merely because a citizen’s body had disappeared or their consciousness had stopped. Records whose restorability was uncertain also required a review process. The decree contained a cost provision as well. If the necessary power was insufficient, the method of energy use was to be changed first; if that was still insufficient, the rate of activity was to be reduced; permanent shutdown was to be avoided until the last possible stage. The Goodwill Unified Government could no longer balance supply by removing the citizens of one region from an allocation table, as had been done before. The decree encouraged consciousness migration in order to maintain planets with less energy. For citizens already living in computational worlds, little changed. Citizens with physical bodies questioned whether a copied consciousness was the same person as themselves. The Goodwill Unified Government prohibited forced migration. Instead, it required the full cost of maintaining the atmosphere, climate, and food supply of the physical world to be entered into the accounts of each facility. The right to remain in a body and on a planet was preserved. Citizens who could not bear the cost moved into computational worlds. At first, energy consumption fell sharply. Parts of cities and transportation systems stopped operating, and vast numbers of consciousnesses remained active in small computing stations. The possibility of returning to a body was also included among the things to be protected. The Goodwill Unified Government provided public-use bodies that citizens could use for limited periods and kept the former planets of migrated citizens in recoverable condition. Facilities capable of thawing the oceans were preserved even after the seas froze, and the throats of wormholes were narrowed but not completely closed. Despite the efforts of the Goodwill Unified Government, the number of things requiring preservation increased instead, and the energy problem remained unresolved.
A similar problem arose in computational worlds. Power could be saved if many citizens shared the same sky and city. Citizens demanded the right to live in different environments. A method that computed only what was being observed faced objections from citizens who demanded a guarantee that their memories and their world continued even while they were not looking. The courts established standards for how far computation could be simplified. Parts necessary to preserve continuity of individual experience and memory had to remain. Under those standards, many worlds were run separately. When personality copies branching from one citizen’s memory accumulated different experiences, it also became necessary to decide which of them counted as citizens. The courts protected each entity whose independent consciousness and continuity of memory could be confirmed. The amount of computation required per person decreased, but the number of protected citizens increased instead. The next measure was to reduce citizens’ rate of time. Slowing the rate at which thought proceeded in computational worlds reduced the amount of power used over the same external period. From inside, it was difficult to perceive that one’s own thoughts were proceeding slowly. For someone outside waiting for a reply, the difference was considerable. Demands arose that citizens running quickly and citizens running slowly should have equal rights. The Goodwill Coalition guaranteed every citizen a minimum rate of time and distributed any amount above that within the limits of the remaining energy. In the vote to determine the minimum, the votes of the slowest citizens arrived last. Until the vote ended, the existing differences in speed remained in place.
After the decree came into force, energy use per citizen fell sharply. The Goodwill Unified Government announced the figure as a policy achievement. At the same time, the total number of protected citizens, worlds, and people awaiting restoration increased. Total energy consumption declined temporarily, then began to rise again. Because the justification for the Sixth War had been that no one should be removed from the list of lives in order to reduce costs, the decree could not be abolished. There were, of course, countless actual cases in which rights were protected by the decree. Yet in some computational worlds, only one internal day passed during one thousand external years. The passages remained open, and power to the memory units was maintained. Many citizens were legally alive. Galactic civilization had to spend most of its remaining usable energy bringing them to their next thought. The Goodwill Unified Government left behind a single registry of life, but in the end it did not possess enough energy to maintain it.