“Death” was prohibited after it became a legal term rather than a medical one. In an era when each person had only one body, death could be recorded when the heart stopped and brain activity ceased. Even when the determination was wrong, people could wait long enough to verify it. Once memory copying began, the stopping of the heart was no longer evidence of death. Even if a body was destroyed, a copy of its memories remained on another planet. There was debate over whether the person who awoke in a new body was the same person who had died, but he remembered the debts, property, and spouse he had before death as his own. The court recognized him as a living person.
The problem arose when a memory copy did not awaken. Was a memory that could not be activated because of insufficient power dead? Could a death certificate be issued for a being who might speak again if power was supplied a thousand years later? If a storage device was damaged but some possibility of recovering part of the memory remained, when did death begin? Doctors could not answer. Engineers provided probabilities. Jurists maintained that citizenship could not be extinguished on the basis of probability. If someone was declared dead, their property could be inherited, and their body and computational space could be allocated to other citizens. If only dead people remained on the other side of a passage, the passage could also be closed. Death became not a word describing the condition of a person but an order to shut down countless devices.
An erroneous declaration of death was issued once. Thirty thousand citizens in an outlying repository were determined to be beyond recovery. The city reclaimed the power, and the memory devices were recycled. Twelve years later, it was discovered that most of their memories could have been restored by applying error-correction records found on another planet. The citizens who could have been restored had already been turned into raw materials. After that incident, “death” disappeared from administrative documents. The deceased became “citizens currently unable to respond.” Memories that had been completely destroyed were recorded as being in a “state in which no means of recovery has been found.” A determination that the probability of recovery was zero was not permitted because it disregarded the possibility that new technology might emerge. No one was treated as completely dead in official records. Consequently, no one's facilities could be completely shut down. Families preserved the rooms of the dead, and governments maintained their computational addresses. Banks did not close their accounts, and election administration systems did not remove unresponsive citizens from voter registries. At every election, it became a matter of debate whether their votes had to be awaited. The courts ruled that an inability to vote did not mean the loss of the right to vote. Governments could make provisional decisions without them, but if those citizens returned, every decision would have to be reviewed again. A civilization arose that operated entirely through provisional decisions.
The living lived in preparation for the return of the dead. When the number of unresponsive citizens exceeded the number of living citizens, a movement emerged to restore the use of the word “death.” Its supporters argued that civilization's refusal to recognize death had brought life itself to a halt. Opponents asked, “Whom will you be the first to call dead?” No one could name a person. Acknowledging death in statistics was different from writing the word beside a person's name. Everyone supported shutting down unnecessary facilities, but no facility containing the memories of their own family was unnecessary. Under the Life Continuity Guarantee Decree, when power was insufficient, the rate of thought was reduced rather than permanently terminating a citizen's activity. For some, finishing a single sentence took thousands of years in the outside world. From the outside, such a person did not move. Within, that person was still speaking. If that person was called dead, the rest of the sentence died as well.