Addendum 7

Scope

Addendum 7 is an amending instrument of uncertain parentage, cited variously as an addendum to the Third Addendum, to the Seventh Addendum to the First Concordance, and — in a single surviving sheet held at Floor 4,812 — as an addendum to a Concordance that has not otherwise been catalogued. Its operative subject is the reassignment of custodial authority over floor-level inventories during what it terms an "extended sealing," a condition it defines only by reference to itself.

The Addendum comprises nine clauses, of which Clauses 1 through 4 are legible in all recensions. Clause 5 exists in two non-convergent versions. Clauses 6 through 9 are reproduced from the Addendum on Procedural Degradation with the pronouns altered, a practice the Scriptorium of the Fourth Annex considers forgery and the Scriptorium of the Ninth Annex considers scholarship.

Text and recensions

Three recensions of Addendum 7 are in circulation. The Alpha recension, held at Floor 1,204, is the oldest and the most damaged; its Clause 3 is missing a width of 41 mm, which successive copyists have variously restored as "the Librarian on duty" and "the Librarian under protest." The Beta recension, produced by the Scriptorium of the Ninth Annex in the winter of Cycle 891, silently omits Clause 5 altogether. The Gamma recension is the only one to carry a seal, and the seal does not match any device in the Register of Seals current at the time of its affixing.

The Scriptorium of the Fourth Annex has ruled that only the Alpha recension may be quoted in determinations. This ruling has been cited in eleven subsequent determinations and ignored in nineteen.

Clause 5

Clause 5 is the reason the Addendum is discussed at all. The Alpha version reads, in full:

"Where a floor is sealed for a period exceeding one inventory cycle, custody passes to the office that last recorded the floor's absence."

— Addendum 7, Clause 5 (Alpha recension, Floor 1,204)

The Beta text reads: "custody passes to the office that last recorded the floor's presence." The difference is not adjudicable, because no office maintains a register of absences, and the register of presences has been described by its own custodian as "a list of things I was told to stop writing down."

The dispute over Clause 5 has been open since Cycle 893. It has produced two rulings of the Concordance and one retraction of a third. Under Addendum Kappa, the question is classed as a recursive anticipation — the Addendum's operation depends on a record whose existence the Addendum itself would create — and is therefore deferred rather than decided.

Extended sealing

The condition of "extended sealing" named in Clause 1 has never been formally bounded. The Seventh Addendum to the Third Concordance implies a duration of three cycles; the Addendum 7 to the Seventeenth Concordance, an unrelated instrument frequently confused with the present one, implies thirty. Practically, sealing is declared by the Librarian of the affected floor and recorded by the Office of Seals, which does not acknowledge having received the declaration until after the sealing has ended.

Floor 2,667 was sealed in the winter of Cycle 899 under circumstances the record describes only as "the corridor was no longer answering." Custody was asserted by four offices over the following eleven weeks. The matter was settled when all four offices discovered they had been recording the absence under different floor numbers.

Related instruments

Addendum 7 should not be confused with Addendum 9, which governs the sealing of contents rather than floors, nor with Annex VII of Addendum 9 to Concordance Iota, whose numbering shares the numeral but no procedural ancestry. It is cited, as of the current compilation, in thirty-one Concordances, four of which do not otherwise acknowledge one another's existence.

Visitors to Floor 1,204 may read the Alpha recension under supervision. The floor permits one reader at a time; the supervision consists of a Librarian sitting with their back to the desk, which the Scriptorium of the Ninth Annex has repeatedly requested be recorded as a condition of access rather than as a courtesy.