Annex C: The Operational Protocol

Annex C: The Operational Protocol is the third annex to the Primary Operational Protocol Delta and, by most reckonings, the shortest document of standing in the entire annex series. It runs to a single clause of nineteen words, is bound in grey board, and is kept in the Reading Room of Uncontested Instruments on Floor 44-C, where it may be consulted without appointment. It is the only annex in the Delta series that has never been amended, which its custodians regard as a mark of perfection and its critics regard as a mark of nobody having read it.

The text, in full, reads as follows:

"The Protocol, where it operates, operates as written; where it does not, refer to Annex C."

— Annex C: The Operational Protocol, sole clause

Origin and Recension

Annex C was drafted in the winter following the so-called Rectification of the Twelve, when the Academy of Archival Protocol observed that subordinate clauses throughout the Delta series referred to "the operational protocol" without ever stating which of the forty-odd instruments bearing that general description was meant. The Academy referred the matter to the drafter Jeren Osp, then junior annexer of the third scriptorium, who submitted four candidate drafts over nine days. Drafts one through three attempted to enumerate the instruments in question. Draft four abandoned enumeration and stated the principle instead. The Academy accepted the fourth draft on the reasoning that "a rule which names everything will be wrong by spring; a rule which names nothing will be wrong never" (Minutes of the Academy of Archival Protocol, sitting of 11 Frost).

Osp was paid for four drafts and received the thanks of the Academy on three occasions, once posthumously. He is recorded as having asked, at the close of the sitting, whether Annex C was to be considered part of the Operational Protocol or merely adjacent to it. The question was minuted as "noted" and never answered. Osp's grievance on this matter is preserved in his Personnel File (Floor 202), where it occupies eleven pages and is the longest document Osp is known to have produced.

Interpretive Dispute

The difficulty of the sole clause lies in its second conditional. Where the Protocol operates, the reader is returned to the Protocol, which is unsurprising. Where it does not operate, the reader is directed to Annex C — which is the document already being read. Whether this constitutes a closed loop, a delegation, or a nullity has been argued before the Manor of Adjudicative Protocol four times since the annex entered circulation.

The Third Concordance holds, at Annex 4, that self-reference in a subordinate instrument is "permissible where the subordinate instrument is itself sound" — a formula that the Academy has twice declared circular and twice been overruled for declaring circular. The Eleventh Concordance, at Annex β, takes the contrary view, treating any clause that refers to its own annex as inoperative by default. Because both Concordances are cited in the Delta series' front matter, the question of whether Annex C is operative on a given floor depends on which Concordance that floor's Librarian has most recently cited. On Floor 719-β the answer is recorded as "no" for the years 3 and 4 of the current reckoning, "yes" for years 5 through 8, and is currently under review.

Application in Practice

In ordinary use, Annex C appears not as a rule but as a citation of last resort. Protocol 308-Delta, an auxiliary volume of some 300 pages, cites Annex C eleven times in its margins without once explaining what the citation is meant to accomplish. The Containment Directorate of Floor -17, Annex Theta cites it once, in a footnote to Containment Protocol Theta, in a context the Directorate has since described as "typographical." The Wing of Superseded Function, whose scope is defined by the Protocol of Dormant Utility, maintains a standing instruction that Annex C is not to be consulted by staff below the fourth grade, on the grounds that its reading "produces questions the Wing is not funded to answer" (Protocol of Dormant Utility, Schedule 3).

The annex has been reproduced in three recensions, of which only the second includes Osp's marginal notation vide supra; the third omits it and adds a printer's fleuron. No recension differs in the clause itself. Copies circulating on Floors 88 through 91 are of the third recension and have been rebound at least twice in covers stamped with the seal of the Chamber of Unspoken Directions, which has no authority over the Delta series and has never claimed any.

Inventory of the Reading Room of Uncontested Instruments

The room where the original is held keeps a small fixed stock, catalogued in a hand of the ninth century and unchanged since:

• One table, oak, scarred, with the annex chained at its centre.
• Two chairs. Visitors are asked not to move the second chair.
• A lamp, tended hourly by the room's attendant.
• A brass weight, 200 grams, whose purpose is not recorded.
• A register of consultation, of which the last forty pages are blank.

Status

Annex C has never been repealed, suspended, or superseded, though it has been "held in abeyance" by three successive officers of the Delta series, each of whom discovered on taking office that the abeyance was itself undocumented. A proposal of 6 Thaw to renumber the annex as C-1, on the model of Protocol Delta/7, was withdrawn after the Academy ruled that renumbering would require the clause to be re-read, and that re-reading might alter its operation. The matter rests there. The brass weight remains on the table.