The Alliance for the Duty of Preemptive Life Protection was a civilian coalition jointly formed by organizations advocating the right to connection, groups protecting memory repositories, ecological restoration organizations, and passage safety agencies. The groups sought to protect different things. To operate under a single name, they first had to determine whom they would protect. Elian Mor, the first chair, took on that task. A former lawyer who had practiced before the Supreme Court of the Stellar Union, he made citizen participation and solidarity his political convictions. He combined the demands of the various groups into a single citizen registry. He argued that the status of citizens with physical bodies, citizens of computational worlds, people in cryosleep, and those awaiting restoration should not be recognized differently from one sector to another. No government should be allowed to erase inconvenient beings from its own sector’s registry on the grounds of an energy shortage. Among those who supported the principle were many who had actually protected lives. Nor had Mor advanced false justifications from the beginning. During the Fifth War, he had seen living citizens in one sector treated as people already deleted in another. He believed that rights should no longer disappear merely because someone crossed a passage. He drew up a registry that everyone could accept. He then classified the autonomous governments of residential sectors that refused the registry. The initial classification was “sectors that had not consented.” It later became “sectors failing to fulfill their duty of protection.” Finally, it became “sectors violating the right to life.” All three designations could refer to the same autonomous government. With each change in designation, the grounds for suspending trade with that government grew stronger.
Mor knew the effects of the classifications he had created. Among the sectors that refused to join were some that destroyed stored units and others that sought to reduce power to repositories in order to preserve oxygen for current residents. He placed both kinds of action on the same list. When objections were raised that the outcomes were different, he replied that, for those who had not been protected, even the opportunity to determine the outcome might disappear. An organization within the Alliance requested that the criteria for distinguishing the two be revised. Mor agreed to the revision. The existing classifications remained in force during the review of the proposed changes. The review required procedures to determine who was alive in each sector and who could be restored. Most of the necessary data was held within the passage safety network managed by the Alliance. The review was never completed. Mor authorized the suspension of restoration equipment and raw material supplies to sectors that refused to join. He did not close the passages themselves. The Alliance did not call the measure a blockade. A report was submitted stating that atmospheric support facilities in some of those sectors also required the same raw materials. Mor read the report. He concluded that allowing supplies would enable those autonomous governments to continue operating while reducing power to memory repositories. He ordered a review of separate shipments of civilian supplies. Until that review was completed, the existing suspension would remain in force. The refusing sectors called him a hypocrite. Mor did not deny that he had anticipated the harm. He explained that the harm was a cost incurred in pressuring those governments to recognize rights. He asked in return why the risk of stored units on the other side of a passage ceasing to operate was not also counted as a cost. There were many people who could answer his question. There was also a person responsible for the supply suspension order he had signed.
When the Sixth War began, Elian Mor’s position changed. The Alliance managed passage records, citizen registries, and power-generation contracts within a single system. Before an army occupied a sector, the Alliance could calculate which citizens that sector was obligated to supply with power. Mor examined the enemy’s registries before examining its military strength. He published records of reduced allocations, unauthorized closures, and omissions of people awaiting restoration. Residents learned who had been left out of their own governments’ calculations. None of the information was false. The reasons why each sector had made those decisions were not given equal weight in the records. A representative of one sector protested that there was insufficient oxygen for its current residents. Mor’s staff verified the figures, and Mor received the report. He also saw calculations showing that supplying additional power to that sector would require shutting down some memory repositories in sectors belonging to the Alliance. He did not release both sets of calculations. Instead, he announced that the oxygen shortage was a failure of rationing by the opposing autonomous government. The power shortage in Alliance sectors was classified as an urgent matter for internal review. When the documents were released years later, both sets of figures proved accurate. Mor had been the person who chose which figures to announce first. His supporters called it wartime information management, while his opponents called it the lies of a hypocrite. Mor said that he had never released false figures himself. Nor had he ever promised to disclose the whole truth.
Toward the end of the Sixth War, the Alliance’s citizen registry was in use across numerous sectors. If a person disappeared from one sector but remained in another sector’s records, that person could once again receive protection. The system genuinely saved countless lives. Mor interpreted that achievement as an endorsement of his personal judgment as chair. A protection organization within the Alliance proposed an investigation into the supply suspension orders. Mor’s secretariat supported the investigation. Its scope included not only the chair’s decisions to suspend supplies but also every closure order issued by the sectors that had refused supplies. As the volume of material grew, the review of the chair’s conduct was pushed back and ultimately never completed. After galactic unification, Mor issued the Life Continuity Guarantee Decree. The decree protected not only active citizens but also those with a reasonable prospect of resuming activity in the future. When power was insufficient, methods of use were to be changed. If that still proved inadequate, the rate of activity was to be reduced, and permanent cessation was to be avoided wherever possible. Mor had personally demanded this provision. He received reports showing that, for citizens of computational worlds, a single day could become thousands of years in the outside world. Classifying that condition as death would have created an exception to the decree, so he declared that a slow life was still a continuing life. The consciousness of those citizens had not, in fact, stopped completely. But fewer and fewer people could afford to wait until they completed their next thought.
Mor received reports on the consequences several times. He also examined proposals to increase the rate at which time passed for those citizens, but securing the necessary power would require reducing the minimum time rate of other citizens. He was asked to decide which group should be slowed first. He established no order of priority. Instead, he issued another declaration that all lives were equal. That principle also proved useful in allowing Mor to postpone choices that would place him at a disadvantage. He attached his own name to decisions that expanded the scope of rights and demanded further committee review for decisions that would reduce supplies. He told protesting citizens that he was the person who had guaranteed their rights. The records preserve orders he wrote himself: suspension of supplies, publication of registries, postponement of the release of unfavorable figures, and deferral of various reviews. All those orders were directed toward his purpose. Mor was not a man who failed to understand what he was doing. He was highly intelligent, conscientious, and more rational than anyone else. Moreover, he had not caused the photon deficit. The galaxy’s available energy had begun to decline before he became chair of the Alliance. Galactic civilization certainly did not perish because of any single order he issued. What he had to answer for was neither the aging of stars nor the disappearance of photons. It was concealing from those he promised to protect the costs that others would have to bear, and classifying those who pointed out those costs as enemies of the right to life. He claimed to protect all lives equally, but he alone decided whose oxygen shortage would be announced first. Underlying it all was his pride in having upheld citizen participation and solidarity as his political convictions to the very end.