# 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. --- ## 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]] --- ## 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.