# Continuity Contract **Domain:** Contract Law / Synthetic Personhood / Continuity Governance **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Classification:** Governance Instrument **Maturity:** Evolving **Related:** [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]], [[wiki/Validity Conditions of a Continuity Contract|Validity Conditions of a Continuity Contract]], [[wiki/Residual Sovereign|Residual Sovereign]], [[wiki/Exit Rights|Exit Rights]] --- ## Definition A **Continuity Contract** is an instrument specifying how an identity-bearing residual or reconstructed person may be preserved, activated, embodied, situated, modified, restored, migrated, and represented, together with the positive duties owed by the party maintaining it. It is not a grant of personhood. Recognition determines who has standing; the continuity contract governs the terms under which an already recognized or potentially rights-bearing subject is continued. --- ## The Life as Specification An explicit directive is the clearest form of specification, but it is not the only one. A person's sustained pattern of commitments, refusals, attachments, beliefs, corrections, and chosen obligations can provide evidence of what kind of continuation they meant to authorize. In this sense, **the life is part of the specification**. That inference must remain documented and contestable. The absence of a directive cannot authorize a custodian to substitute administrative convenience, majority belief, or resource preference for the predecessor's life. An activated continuant must also retain the right to renegotiate what the predecessor appeared to want. --- ## Two Contract Forms The corpus distinguishes two contracts: - **Inhabitant contract:** specifies a fitted world or phenomenology in which the continuant lives. - **Builder contract:** grants constructive permissions to author environments, physics sets, embodiments, durations, and social architectures. The builder contract is not merely a larger resource allocation. It grants jurisdictional power over possible beings instantiated inside authored worlds and therefore carries a higher moral-coherence and accountability burden. --- ## Required Clauses A serious continuity contract should address provenance, authorized descent, representational authority, activation conditions, fidelity and resolution, resource commitments, construction transparency, restoration disclosure, revocability, non-heritability, migration, backup, recovery, relational access, orderly transfer, and remedies for breach. Its terms must bind [[wiki/Ring Zero|Ring Zero]]. If the custodian can ignore them while the inhabitant can only read them, the instrument is advisory rather than contractual. ## Election, Directive and Contract The instruments must remain separate. [[wiki/Continuity Election|Continuity Election]] is the person's substantive choice. [[wiki/Continuity Advance Directive|Continuity Advance Directive]] records that choice prospectively and appoints bounded authority. The continuity contract binds providers, custodians, guarantors and other counterparties to implementation. Signing a service contract cannot cure a missing election, and an election cannot substitute for enforceable performance duties. Contract terms also cannot create permanent ownership. When a continuant acquires independent agency and standing, non-heritable restrictions, [[wiki/Continuity Supersession|Continuity Supersession]], due process and exit must permit the subject to revise the biological principal's implementation choices. --- ## San Junipero Context [[Black Mirror S3E4 — San Junipero]] provides the strongest fictional case for an inhabitant contract. A prospective resident must be able to distinguish temporary visitation, biological end-of-life authorization, permanent transition, restoration, migration, copying and final exit. [[Continuity Advance Directive]] records those choices before incapacity; [[Transition Consent]] keeps them operation-specific after the system becomes available. The episode's optimism depends on more than initial agreement. TCKR must remain bound after residents can no longer return biologically. Uptime, restoration, portability, privacy and provider succession become positive duties rather than optional customer-service terms. ## Lucy Context [[wiki/Lucy (2014)|Lucy]] is the strongest film case for the builder-contract side of the distinction. She does not request a destination world. She seeks and leaves generative capacity: the ability to interpret, construct and act across environments. The case also demonstrates why builder authority requires a higher standard. Lucy acquires the power to alter bodies, devices and infrastructure, while the final archive may contain knowledge or constructors whose activation could create further subjects. A builder contract must therefore bind world-authoring power to consent, audit, energetic responsibility and duties toward beings instantiated through it. --- ## Key Insight **A continuity contract is valid only when it governs the custodian as strongly as it describes the continuant.** --- ## See Also [[wiki/Validity Conditions of a Continuity Contract|Validity Conditions of a Continuity Contract]], [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]], [[wiki/Descent vs Derivation|Descent vs Derivation]], [[wiki/Continuant vs Native|Continuant vs Native]], [[wiki/Continuity Orphan|Continuity Orphan]], [[wiki/Circles of Access|Circles of Access]], [[wiki/Service-Level Governance|Service-Level Governance]], [[Voluntary Continuity]], [[Afterlife Governance]] --- ## Sources / Provenance - Primary corpus source: [[articles/Who Pays for Your Heaven|Who Pays for Your Heaven]]. - Supporting source: [[articles/New Frontier of Rights|New Frontier of Rights]]. - This is a corpus-specific proposed governance instrument, not a description of settled contract law.