Ara Bell presided over the trial of a dead person. The plaintiff was inside a memory unit in an abandoned mine in Outer Zone 19. It was impossible to determine whether the memory remained intact, and a test intended to determine whether he was alive might instead reduce the possibility of restoring him. Bell first had to decide whether the plaintiff was a person. On the first day of the trial, she ordered the plaintiff’s seat left empty. The Life Protection Coalition proposed placing a chair there symbolically, while the Administration objected that a chair for a plaintiff without a body would be theater. Bell had the chair removed. The plaintiff’s place remained an empty space until the trial ended. No cost was charged for maintaining that empty space, but the cost of maintaining the three passages at the abandoned mine was calculated every day. Bell was a judge who understood costs well. Her first job had been as a legal officer at the Energy Administration. She worked to close unused facilities and reduce the burden on citizens. She believed that if everything were preserved on the basis of possibility, the living would become warehouse keepers for the dead. After transferring to the Life Rights Court, she saw the other side. Travelers who had disappeared long before and been declared dead returned late. Their property had been inherited, and their marriages had ended. It took them a long time to recover their own names. Bell learned that a declaration of death could be not a sentence confirming a fact, but a sentence that created one.
The abandoned-mine case continued for more than a hundred years. Bell slowed the aging of her body and remained on the case. If the judge changed, the case would have to be reviewed again from the beginning. The longer she remained on the case, the cost of sustaining her own life also became part of the litigation expenses. One day, a lawyer for the Administration asked, “Your Honor, are you also a maintenance facility for this case?” Bell answered yes. The answer was not a joke. The final issue was how high the probability of restoration had to be before someone was protected as a person. The Administration argued that a number was necessary, while the Life Protection Coalition argued that a person’s value could not be multiplied by a probability. Bell thought both arguments were correct. In a draft judgment, she set a minimum probability and then deleted it. If she wrote 1 percent, she needed a reason to kill the person at 0.99 percent. Lowering it to 0.01 percent left the same problem. Wherever the number was placed, there was a person below the line. Instead of a probability, Bell created a new legal status: the return-eligible person. It referred to an entity with a reasonable possibility of forming a will again in the future even if unable to answer in the present. The key sentence was brief. “The fact that someone has not returned is not evidence that they will not return.” Bell became a hero after the ruling. In interviews, she rejected the word hero. She said she had not saved a person; she had merely refused to write that someone who might still be alive was dead.
As time passed, Bell’s ruling extended far beyond the abandoned-mine case she had decided. Administrative agencies asked her to limit the scope of the ruling. By then she had retired and had left no memory copy of herself. Her funeral instructions stated that she wished to disappear completely without restoration. The Restoration Church filed suit. It argued that because Bell’s judgments and manner of speaking remained in rulings, records, and the memories of other people, the probability of reconstructing her was not zero. The court ordered that her data be preserved on the basis of Bell’s own ruling. It was not a ruling that she should be restored. It was a ruling that her data should not be erased until it could be determined whether she could be restored. Later technology used the surviving material to run a personality model of Bell. The model corrected parts of her rulings that had been quoted incorrectly and recognized the names of former colleagues. It was never determined whether this was the original Bell or a new person created from records. The restored Bell read her funeral instructions. She asked to be shut down. The Administration received the application. If the applicant was the original Bell, her wishes before death also had to be reviewed. If she was someone else, the funeral instructions had no force, but the wishes of the being now speaking had to be heard. The court ordered that she remain running until it could be determined which was true. Shutting her down first, it reasoned, might cause the applicant to disappear.
Bell submitted her own Return Eligibility Ruling. She argued that the ruling had been intended to protect the possibility of people who had not yet returned, not to silence people who had returned and could state their own wishes. The court entered her argument into the record. It continued to consider whether the being making that argument was the original Bell. Bell asked the judge hearing her case, “If I am me, follow my last wishes. If I am not me, listen to what I am saying now. In which case can you listen to me?” The judge did not answer immediately. The power required to keep Bell running was added to the litigation costs every day. Ara Bell, who had chosen death, was restored because of her own ruling. After being restored, she first had to prove whether she was a person protected by that law. She issued a ruling that refused to abandon even a single person lightly. The ruling refused to let go of her as well.