Jonah Sett, the founder of the Restoration Church, did not believe in resurrection. By temperament, he was indifferent to religion. He was a records-preservation technician. Sett’s job was to restore a person’s personality as fully as possible from damaged memories. It was difficult work requiring concentration and caution. He gathered incomplete sentences, fragments of sensation, and even the expressions of a person remembered by others to infer a vanished personality. He took such pride in his work that he wrote the phrase “restoration is creation” in promotional material. The true meaning behind those words, however, rested on his belief that the original person did not return. He did not go out of his way to tell clients this, but privately he believed that the remaining data merely produced a new person resembling the original. Naturally, restored people disliked that explanation. More precisely, they denied it. They remembered their names, their childhoods, and the people they had loved. Anyone would become angry if a technician called them a newly created model. One restored person asked Sett whether, if he was a fake, the money Sett had borrowed from him was fake as well. Sett repaid the debt. After that, he modified his explanation slightly. He said that if it was impossible to distinguish the original from the restored version, society should treat them as the same person. The continuity of relationships, he argued, was more important than the truth of existence. This idea spread widely after the Return Eligibility Ruling. Families brought damaged memory units to Sett. Even when restoration was impossible, he did not discard the data. Cases were steadily accumulating in which damage unreadable by today’s technology became readable by tomorrow’s technology.
Sett never intended to found a religion. The first restoration gathering was also a dry technical briefing. While explaining whether information could ever disappear completely from the universe, he said, “If every effect left by a person still exists, a sufficiently powerful intelligence may be able to calculate that person again.” People did not hear the words “may be able to.” They remembered only what came before them. The Restoration Church believed that every person left traces in the universe and that someday perfect technology could gather those traces and bring them back to life. There was no particular need for a god. The computing power of the future had taken that place. Prayer was record-keeping. Believers transmitted their memories to repositories every day. They did not delete the conversations and images of the dead, their purchase records, or their travel routes. They believed that the more trivial the data, the more important it was for filling gaps in a personality. One believer preserved a list of every breakfast he had eaten throughout his life. A later researcher judged that the data were more useful for reconstructing his digestive system than his personality. The Restoration Church grew rapidly. Not because it denied death, but because it said the dead did not have to be abandoned. To the bereaved, the possibility of meeting again someday mattered more than probability. The Church built memory repositories and collected data on travelers who had disappeared in passages. It acquired bankrupt storage companies and preserved countless memories. Some people were in fact restored. One successful restoration justified billions of failed preservations.
Sett was uncomfortable with the Church’s expansion. He consistently said that he had never proved complete restoration possible. Traces remaining in the universe and the ability to gather those traces again were different matters. Believers interpreted his doubt as humility. Then even the founder’s doubt about his own doctrine became part of the doctrine. When Sett died, his will instructed that all his personal records be deleted. The Church did not carry out the will. It argued that it could not determine whether the wishes of Sett before facing death or those of Sett as he faced death were the more authentic. His records were stored in three repositories. Three restored Setts each insisted that he was not the founder. The first ordered the Church dissolved, and the second requested that he be deleted immediately. The third said he would review the requests of the other two. The Church recognized the third Sett as the legitimate successor. Jonah Sett the technician never said that people would necessarily return. People believed in Jonah Sett, founder of the Restoration Church, who had not said that people would not return. They were the same person.