Administrative Protocol 707-B

Administrative Protocol 707-B is a routing instrument of the Division of Precedent & Protocol, enacted in the winter of the year recorded as 4119 and never substantively amended since. It governs the disposition of documents entering the Tower's logistics network that begin with a standard introductory phrase but contain no verifiable body text. Under its terms, such documents are removed from ordinary circulation and consigned to Floor 208, where they are shelved, counted, and left to mature. The Protocol is short — four clauses and a schedule — and is widely regarded within the Contradiction Warrens as the cleanest piece of drafting to come out of the Division in that century, which its critics do not intend as praise.

The originating incident

Prior to 707-B, documents that opened correctly and then failed to continue were handled ad hoc by whichever registry counter received them. The practice was inconsistent: some counters returned them to the sender, some filed them under their opening phrase, and some, on the reasoning that an empty document was a category of document rather than a defect, assigned them shelf marks and defended those shelf marks in correspondence for years. The precipitating case is conventionally dated to the eleventh of Frostmonth, 4118, when a courier submitted a sealed and correctly docketed instrument bearing only the words On the matter herein described followed by eleven blank leaves. Four offices claimed it. The resulting dispute ran through three recensions of the Protocol Inquest before the Division intervened.

The Division's finding — that the document had not failed to arrive but had arrived without having been written — established the principle on which 707-B rests. A blank document is not an error in the network. It is a holding awaiting content.

Clause 2 and the definition of verifiable body text

Clause 2 is the operative provision and the source of nearly all subsequent litigation. It defines lack of verifiable body text as the absence of any passage "capable of being read, disputed, or amended by a second party" (707-B, cl. 2). The word disputed carries the weight. A document of pure pleasantry, containing no statement anyone could reasonably contest, has been held on five occasions to fall within the clause; a document of pure abuse has been held on two occasions not to, on the reasoning that abuse is eminently disputable.

The clause also catches a class of document its drafters appear not to have anticipated: the perfectly formed instrument whose body has been lost in transit. These arrive at Floor 208 indistinguishable from the never-written, and are shelved alongside them. Protocol 8099 Alpha requires that such documents be marked with a small marginal cross, but marking is discretionary and in practice is performed only by clerks with time to spare.

Floor 208 and the holdings

Floor 208 is a long, dry gallery with shelving on three sides and a north window that does not open. Its holdings are inventoried quarterly by the Provisional Logging Protocol, which logs each document by opening phrase, leaf count, and seal condition. The inventory for the fourth quarter of 4512 records the following categories, which are representative:

• Instruments opening Be it known to all — 4,119 items, the largest single class.
• Instruments opening The purpose of this document is — 2,706 items.
• Instruments opening with a salutation and no further address — 881 items.
• Instruments opening correctly and closing correctly with nothing between — 44 items, of which six have been examined twice.

Shelf marks on Floor 208 run from 208.1 to 208.4,119. The gallery has no reading room. The north window does not open.

Dispute: the Protocol Insulation question

Scholarly disagreement centres on whether 707-B is properly insulated from the Provisional Logging Protocol. The Division of Precedent & Protocol holds in its commentary that the two instruments operate in sequence — logging first, routing second — and that no insulation is required. The Contradiction Protocol holds the contrary: that because logging itself enacts the provisional status of a holding, a document logged before routing has already acquired a provisional existence, and 707-B then routes something rather than nothing. On this reading, Floor 208 contains only documents that were never quite empty, and the clause 2 definition is incoherent.

"A document cannot be provisional and absent at once. The Division has routed the same nothing twice and called it a sequence."

— Contradiction Protocol, Memorandum 14, appended recension

The Division has not answered the memorandum. Protocol Insulation has been invoked twice in the dispute's history, once by each side, and on both occasions the invocation was later found to have insulated the wrong instrument. The matter remains open.

Later rulings

Two refinements are worth recording. In 4287 the Division ruled that a document consisting entirely of its own title, repeated, is not a document lacking body text but a document of unusual emphasis, and is to be returned to circulation; the ruling has been applied four times and ignored considerably more often. In 4402 a clerk of the fourth counter, one Anselm Vey, submitted a ninety-leaf instrument arguing that 707-B was itself a document beginning with a standard introductory phrase and awaiting content, and therefore fell to be routed to Floor 208. The Division commended the argument, declined the routing, and transferred Vey to the inventory. His quarterly counts are considered the most accurate on the floor. Documents submitted to the fourth counter must be docketed before the bell.

Related instruments

707-B is frequently cited alongside Protocol 13-A, which governs the return of misrouted instruments, and Administrative Protocol 707-B is sometimes mistakenly grouped with the General Administrative Protocols proper. It is a subsidiary instrument of the Division, not of the Protocols, and its numbering is coincidental — a point the Division has seen fit to state in three separate annexes.