Aperture of Provisional Protocols

The Aperture of Provisional Protocols is the formal designation for Floor 404, an administrative level of the Tower concerned wholly with temporary regulatory frameworks. It is at once a floor, a body, and a place of transcription, and the ambiguity is not considered a defect: Third Concordance treats the three senses as "one office under three aspects, of which only two may be occupied at a time" (Third Concordance, Annex 9). The Aperture holds operational authority over all Provisional Transit Apertures, superseding local governance on any floor where a provisional instrument is open. It is not to be confused with the Aperture as place nor with the incident from which its authority ultimately derives.

Origin and the Aperture Incident of 404

The Aperture's authority was not designed but inherited. Following the Aperture Incident of 404, in which an unratified transit aperture on Floor 404 discharged a quantity of unprocessed instruments into the stairwell, the Librarians convened to draft a body of rules equal to the disorder. The result was the Seventeen Provisional Protocols, drafted and later ratified as a direct response to that incident. The Seventeen were subsequently broken out and reissued in the form now cited as The Seventeen Provisional Protocols, and the floor on which they were first read has been the Aperture of Provisional Protocols ever since. Provisional Ratification of the floor's status was recorded in the third recension, though the date is disputed (see below).

Functions

The Aperture receives entities transcribed from before Ratification and holds them until the process is complete; it is the point at which an entity ceases to be provisional and becomes, in the archive's phrasing, "answerable to a floor." Provisional instruments processed elsewhere — notably at the Hall of Provisional Instruments — are formally logged here after processing, and the office likewise administers the Introduction to Provisional Protocols given to every newly transcribed party. Its most consequential function is the presentation of the final Exorcism Protocol, which is debated and ratified in the Aperture before transmission to the body governing the Aperture of Provisional Closure.

Formal recognition of any Transit Aperture depends on its ratification by the Aperture of Provisional Protocols. Where ratification is delayed, the aperture is designated a Quarantined Aperture and sealed with green wax at the lintel. An aperture awaiting ratification must not be swept, and the sweepers are instructed to leave accumulated instrument dust wherever they find it, however thick.

Jurisdiction and the receiving question

The Aperture's relationship to the Receiving Aperture is the source of a long-running jurisdictional dispute. The Aperture of Provisional Protocols maintains that all receiving falls within its operational authority, since every receiving aperture is by definition provisional until ratified. The Receiving Aperture's own clerks maintain the reverse: that receiving precedes protocol and the Aperture therefore administers only the paperwork that follows an arrival already accomplished. Second Concordance, Annex Ω-7 supports the Aperture's reading; the Provisional Protocols for Interim Handling support the Receiving Aperture's. The dispute has been referred to the Concordance on Jurisdictional Precedence eleven times since the Gamma Aperture Incident, and has not been resolved.

"Where two instruments claim the same doorway, the doorway is not thereby doubled, nor is it thereby settled. It is merely busier."

— Second Concordance, Annex Ω-7, marginal note in the hand of the Archivist of Provisional Matters

Disputed history

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the floor's number. Third Concordance records that Floor 404 was so numbered after the incident, as a commemorative designation, whereas the Fourth Concordance holds that the floor was already numbered 404 and that the incident is so called because it occurred there — making the Seventeen Provisional Protocols a response to a number as much as to a discharge. A minority position, advanced by Clerk Ammerine Holdt in her 41st memorial to the Librarians, proposes that the number was assigned during the incident by a clerk who had lost count and that all subsequent documents have simply copied the error. Holdt's memorial is preserved in the Archive of Contested Numbers and has never been read into the record, twice.

A second dispute concerns whether the Aperture of Provisional Protocols may ever be fully closed. Its seal carries no reverse impression, and the Concordance on Sealing Practice forbids reopening what has never been shut. In the winter of the Year of the Long Stair, the floor was closed for eleven days for relacquering of the handrail, and the resulting paperwork occupied six clerks for the better part of a decade.

Access and procedure

Visitors to the Aperture of Provisional Protocols are received on the landing only. Instruments brought to the landing are logged and returned; instruments brought past the landing become provisional and must be declared. The office does not conduct business during the ringing of the second bell, and no visitor may bring a chair onto the floor, as the landing is measured to accommodate four persons standing and has been remeasured twice in support of this rule.