Among the astronaut and rescued cast, only the astronaut's eligibility is confirmed in these comparisons. Other registered complements and clinic patients already exist within the proposed fiction. Exclusion says nothing about another person’s loss or immunity; local rescue, abort and Sent rules remain. Eligibility needs a decision only when a scene offers a named, consenting person registration, admission or assignment.

**Return and resources.** Docking fixes this vessel as the return address; a protected casualty channel stabilises and retrieves the astronaut’s current body and carried possessions at death. Berth service repairs that same body and returns both person and carried property to the fixed address. Resources already consumed remain spent, while objects deliberately dropped or installed outside the carried set stay where they were left. Current memory stays with the body; ship telemetry preserves records. Ordinary route-power changes cannot disable this channel.

Old complements retain active registration after vanished or improperly departed vessels. The comparison's selected story completion gives some of them a quarantine warrant and a fitted containment device: recovery restores both the body and coercive defensive control. Unwarranted stranded complements can remain coherent; human and alien crews explain different forms. The astronaut's registration has no warrant. This imposes no death-count deterioration or hidden future transformation. Cancelling registration stops future recovery but neither erases living creatures nor safely removes control. A prior biological contamination was considered as an alternative; this comparison uses quarantine so its moral and evidence costs are explicit.

**Repair and deeper continuation.** Repairing the ship and clearing the fault behind its distress state earns departure clearance; service remains until undocking. Departure clearance does not cancel active registration. Authorised final departure closes the astronaut's registration; cancelling an old registration is a separate operation. Later client filings reveal that blanket cancellation stops new returns for coherent stranded complements as well as controlled crews. The deeper action becomes a berth-by-berth decision: restore a valid destination with a consenting receiving vessel, cancel future recovery, or leave an uncertain registration active. A destination change is not automatically a safe removal of its quarantine control. These choices change future returns and horde sources without erasing what already walks the station.

Sent survivors are not in the docking-time complement. A concrete later offer to register one would require owner choice because it changes who can return; absent that scene, no global loss rule is reopened.

**Decisive clue.** *Observation:* before one old registration is cancelled, an addressed creature killed in ordinary combat triggers a recovery transaction; after cancellation it does not, while a still-active control registration does. *Testimony:* Dorn saw service carriages cross one junction, but did not see their contents or destination. *Inference:* active registration causally gates person recovery. The rival is a historical register merely observing another cause; the differing post-cancellation result weakens it. Tagged material traced from service transfer into berth treatment can support the transport path, not exclusive causation or metaphysical identity.

**Return and resources.** Refuge workers secretly installed an appropriated alien recovery unit on this ship. A protected wreck-side anchor retrieves the astronaut’s actual current body and carried possessions from their individual casualty tag; the serial-addressed unit repairs and revives them aboard. Neither half works alone. Resources already consumed remain spent, while equipment deliberately dropped or installed outside the recovery envelope stays where it was left. This explains return aboard **this** ship and why the station contains the answer.

For the strongest complete version, an outside sponsor selected the test craft and engineered its failure and route back. This replaces coincidence with employer conspiracy and makes the opening less accidental; choosing coincidence instead would weaken causality but reduce predestination. The separate containment disaster retains human responsibility. Protected anchor transfer avoids a finite biomass counter.

**Repair and deeper continuation.** Repair plus navigation-lock removal earns escape; remaining docked preserves revival. Project orders and alien relay records reveal which hidden refugee groups are exposed. The player alters their route, warns them to stay hidden or exposes the controller. Sent people stay aboard. Final departure ends the link; earlier prototype shutdown is optional, not baseline.

Coverage follows an individual casualty tag, not mere presence aboard a fitted ship. Only the astronaut currently has one. Installing or reassigning a tag in a named emergency would be an owner choice and must state what happens to the astronaut’s eligibility.

**Return and resources.** Protected triage arrests damage, retrieves the actual body through service routes, resuscitates it and delivers it to the manifest vessel. Triage bags and returns the astronaut's carried possessions with the patient. Resources already consumed remain spent, while objects deliberately dropped or installed in the station stay where they were left. Nothing stores or recreates a person; suit telemetry preserves records.

|---|---|---|---|---|

| Appropriated unit | Coherent with individual tag and two-part recovery | Arranged landing, sponsor conspiracy and joint alien/human chain | Lock removed / protect refugees and confront project / depart | Install or reassign one casualty tag |

The direction choice does not also decide loss of revival, where the deeper action occurs or whether survivor eligibility expands. The companion article identifies both alien languages' distinct origins and uses, bounded survivor knowledge, and these apparent/deeper/final actions. They are coherent story proposals ready for an owner comparison, not adopted central answers. The owner’s central choice is among the strongest concrete stories; mortal continuation or a specific survivor exception should be presented separately only if worth adopting. None of this establishes fun, readability, feasibility or duration.