Annex H to Ordinance 4, Annex C

Annex H to Ordinance 4, Annex C, known almost universally within the Tower as the Chen Protocol, is the body of procedure governing the reception, authentication, and disposal of documents that arrive without provenance. It is the shortest annex attached to Ordinance 4, Annex C and by common consent the most frequently invoked, having been cited in the settlement of no fewer than four hundred and six recorded disputes since its formal designation during the Metathesis of the eleventh recension.

The Annex exists to answer a single question: what is to be done with a document that no one will admit to having written? Its answer — that such a document is to be held, read aloud to two witnesses, and then assigned a provisional floor — has proven durable precisely because it resolves almost nothing.

Origin and designation

The procedures now collected as Annex H were drafted by Clarifier Chen of the Ninth Spiral in the winter following the collapse of the Ink-Scriptorium Supply Line's eastern run, when unsourced documents began arriving at the Central Annex at a rate of roughly ninety a day. Chen's office was at that time operating under the proximate authority doctrine established by Ordinance 4, Annex C, which permitted any Clarifier to act on an ambiguity within sight of it. Chen acted.

The draft was circulated as a working paper for eleven years before being formally designated Annex H. The delay is usually attributed to the Office of New Supports, which objected that the Protocol's witness requirement created an unfunded obligation on the part of the receiving floor. The objection was withdrawn after Ordinance 14,142-Gamma assigned the cost to the floor of origin, a solution that merely relocated the dispute to those floors that could not establish an origin.

The three readings

Under the Protocol a provenance-less document is read aloud three times: once by the receiving clerk, once by a witness drawn from the same floor, and once by a witness from a floor at least forty levels distant, whose function is to confirm that the document sounds the same at a remove. Chen's commentary on this third reading is the Annex's most-quoted passage:

"A document read only where it was found is a document that has never travelled. Read it forty floors off and see whether it still wishes to be a document."

— Chen Protocol, Commentary 3

The third reading is waived during Marking, as detailed in Ordinance 17, Annex B, and during any period in which the distant floor is unavailable for reasons of stairwell closure.

Provisional floor assignment

An authenticated document is assigned a floor number drawn from the Annex VII register. The number is provisional for one hundred days, during which any Librarian may contest it by filing with the Central Annex of Resolved Disputes. In practice the provisional number is almost never contested, not because the assignments are sound but because the register is consulted so rarely that most floors learn of their new holdings only when shelving arrives.

Annex B of the Ordinance provides that cross-references from a receiving floor to any annex other than its own are aspirational and not binding. Receiving floors have made extensive use of this provision. The Bay of Receding Conclusions alone has declined to shelve one hundred and twelve Protocol documents on the grounds that its cross-references to Annex H were merely aspirational, and a further eleven on the grounds that the documents did not sound the same at a remove.

Dispute over the second witness

A persistent scholarly disagreement concerns whether the second witness — the one drawn from the receiving floor — must be a Librarian. Third Concordance, Clause 11, Annex Gamma holds that the witness need only be "a person under the seal of some floor," which has been read to include copyists, porters, and the floor's registered cat. The Ordinance of Tacit Acclamation implies the contrary, since its silence on the matter is held by some commentators to exclude non-Librarians by omission.

The question was put to the Central Annex in the case of the Ordinance of Stillness, where a floor's entire clerical staff was absent and a porter was obliged to witness the same document twice. The Annex resolved the matter without ruling on it, holding that the second reading had in any case been waived and the point was therefore moot. The Right to Cessation was subsequently invoked by the porter, who has not witnessed a document since.

Known failures

The Protocol's most celebrated failure occurred on Floor 2,144 in the winter of the ninth recension, when a document assigned provisionally to that floor was read aloud three times, authenticated, shelved, and then discovered to be a duplicate of a document already held on the same floor under a different number. The two holdings could not be reconciled without amending the register, and the register cannot be amended without a quorum of the Central Annex of Resolved Disputes, which cannot convene while a floor's holdings are in dispute. Both documents remain shelved nine inches apart. A notice affixed between them reads: Do not read consecutively.