“Empty” was prohibited because it had been used not as an observation but as permission to occupy. Early colony ships recorded planets on which no life had been found as empty planets. Land without buildings or roads, star systems without communication signals, and computational regions to which no users were connected were all described as empty. What was empty was treated as having no owner. What had no owner could be used by whoever arrived first.
The settlers altered planetary atmospheres and created oceans. Minerals became cities, and the light of stars was used to maintain passages. They recorded that they had brought life and civilization to places where nothing had existed. Later investigations suggested that on those empty planets, life might simply not have arisen yet. The first cells might have emerged millions of years later, once the oceans stabilized, and beneath the ice, chemical reactions that did not meet the criteria for being called life had continued.
Colonization had not killed life that existed. It had occupied the place of life that might have existed. The courts ruled that ownership could not be granted to a possibility. If possibilities themselves were protected, no planet could be used. The same courts also prohibited calling those planets empty. The expression already contained a judgment that they were available for use. Empty planets disappeared from official maps. In their place appeared expressions such as “no currently confirmed biological activity,” “uninhabited status,” and “occupancy rights undetermined.” As the wording grew longer, annotations occupied more space on the maps than the planets themselves.
The prohibition also applied to abandoned facilities. If a city from which all citizens had departed was called an empty city, its power could be switched off. If even one copy of a citizen’s memory remained in storage, the city was judged not to be empty. Even if the memory copy was damaged and the possibility of awakening was almost nonexistent, that possibility was not zero. The city’s lights remained on. No one walked the streets, and traffic lights informed one another of the right of way. Trains made test runs, and hospitals maintained sterile rooms for patients who might return. Park maintenance systems pruned trees that no one observed. The maintenance records stated that the city was operating normally. That was because the word “empty” could not be used.
There were empty places in computational worlds as well. Enormous amounts of energy could be saved by not calculating rooms that citizens were not looking at, streets they had not visited, and futures they had not chosen. Citizens objected. They argued that a room which disappeared whenever no one was looking was not a room but a background. If the inside of a room was created at the moment someone suddenly opened its door, their world was not real. The Court of Personhood Rights ruled that even unobserved places had to continue to exist. Computational worlds began calculating empty rooms. They also calculated the drawers inside those rooms and the objects that would be inside drawers that had never been opened. To guarantee the completeness of existence, even the positions of dust particles that no one would ever examine were preserved.
A civilization that refused to recognize emptiness filled everything. It filled planets with settlements, passages with travelers, and memory devices with lives that had never been lived. As places to fill grew scarce, even spaces that did not yet exist and time in the future were registered as assets. When the last scientist created the boundary of the storage space, there were no humans there. That did not mean an empty settlement had been created. A region had been created where energy that was already leaking away could arrive. No human memories or genes were preserved within it. The intention was to leave only the differences from which life might arise. Calling that region empty space would have meant turning the absence of human inhabitants into a human right of occupancy once again.
The surviving records classified the storage space as an “Energy Preservation Region with No Designated Recipient.” In the galaxy’s final era, planets and the remains of stars still existed, but almost no differences remained that civilization could use. There was no word to record that condition. On official maps, even planets whose inhabitants had disappeared were still marked as being in use. Even after the users were gone, the maps alone remained full.