On the Eternal Tier · Post-mortem

The Eternal configuration, priced "on request" and only available through direct manufacturer-issued invitation, extended the apparatus's service contract beyond the biological cessation of the occupant. The manufacturer's published guidance was that the Eternal contract included "estate transfer protocols" and "post-mortem data continuity" — phrases which, in the period's commercial vernacular, signaled the persistence of the occupant's productivity-feedback record and their consumer-preference profile beyond the occupant's death.

The literal architecture is recoverable from the surviving contract templates. The occupant's installed C-ID (the federal Consumer Identity assigned at biometric registration in the same period's lifecycle administration; see the parallel archive on the Office of Human Continuity) persisted in the apparatus's ledger for ninety-nine standard fiscal years after the occupant's death. During that interval, the occupant's preference profile remained an active datum for the manufacturer's brand partners. The occupant's adult inheritors did not own the profile; they were assigned the obligation to maintain the chair against eventual reactivation.

The Eternal tier's most striking feature, retrospectively, is that it was sold. There is no record of an Eternal contract being refused on grounds of repugnance. The configuration cleared regulatory review in every jurisdiction in which the OLS was approved for distribution. The reason, on the surviving evidence, was structural: the regulatory frameworks of the period adjudicated harms to the living. The Eternal tier was the manufacturer's wager that no framework would assess the harm of being administered after death.

The dead consumer was the only consumer who did not complain.