Categories of life

The categories of life was a system temporarily used by governments and health authorities to classify people on Earth during the months immediately after Miracle Day in 2011, when people stopped dying. Badly injured people, Categories I and II, were taken to overflow camps. Those in Category I were secretly taken to modules and burned alive. This seemed the only way humans could die after the Miracle occurred. In theory, the category system was necessary because the global situation was thought of as an epidemic where victims' bodies would be burned en masse. The bodies of Category I individuals would otherwise remain eternally alive but legally dead under the new laws, and potentially infectious.

Even after the Modules became common knowledge, they were still used. Governments gave law enforcement special powers to search premeses without a warrant if there was suspicion of an unlicensed Category 1 held there.

In reality, the line between the categories was tenuous. A Category I could become Category II, should they recover; Rex Matheson should have been killed when he was impaled by a rebar, but healed over time. Likewise, a Category II could slide into Category I if they did not receive proper treatment, and individuals such as Geraint Cooper (who lapsed into a deep state of unconsciousness after suffering a stroke) were lumped into Category I along with the truly brain-dead.

Esther Drummond jokingly referred to Jack Harkness as "Category Jack" when he became mortal, as opposed to the rest of the planet's immortality.

Slang developed for the concept. "Cat Ones" was used to describe those in Category I (TW: The Middle Men) Also, as death no longer existed on Earth, some replaced the term, "kill", with, "category I" as a verb. (TW: The Blood Line)

The use of the categories of life was presumably abandoned (along with the camps) after the Miracle Day effects were removed and death returned to Earth. (TW: The Blood Line) The political and societal impact of the categories has not yet been chronicled.

Category I
Those people designated as Category I were brain dead or otherwise unable to function. In the overflow camps, Category I patients were designated with a red clothes peg and sent to the modules to be burned.

Category II
Category II were those with non-fatal but permanent injuries. Though Category IIs might be severely injured, they were not brain dead and could function with a degree of independence. In the overflow camps, Category II patients were identified with a blue peg.

Category III
Category III referred to anyone who was completely healthy. It referred to anyone not in Categories I or II. (TW: The Categories of Life)

Category 0
Category 0 was a proposed category that would consist of anyone, of any category, deemed fit for the Modules for moral reasons, such as criminals who would have received the death penalty prior to the Miracle. (TW: End of the Road) Rex Matheson unwittingly predicted this category after learning of the Categories. He believed that after starting with the category ones, it would move onto convincted felons and illegal immigrants, "hell, anyone we don't like." (TW: The Middle Men) Oswald Danes later learned from Jilly Kitzinger that he had been classified as Category 0, after which he went underground; Jilly implied that the category had been specifically created with Oswald in mind. (TW: End of the Road)