Apocryphal Annex

The Apocryphal Annex is a supplementary schedule maintained by the Department of Cartographic Anomalies, recording jurisdictional claims over spaces that cannot be shown to lie within any floor. It is not a place, strictly speaking, nor a document, though it has been filed as both. Under the definitions set out in Apocryphal Set Theory, the Annex is the working example most often cited when a clerk wishes to demonstrate a collection whose membership is ontologically uncertain; the standard illustration in the departmental primer is the Annex itself, which readers frequently mistake for a joke.

The Annex was opened in the winter of the year the gallery numbers were re-copied incorrectly, when Floor 700 submitted claims to four stairwells, two vestibules, and a stretch of approach corridor that no survey team could place on any register. Rather than adjudicate each claim — a process expected to take eleven years and, as it happened, a process that took fourteen — the Department consolidated the disputes into a single schedule and gave it the name Apocryphal.

Structure and numbering

The Annex is numbered in the manner of the Kappa schedules, by entry rather than page, and entries are added at whichever position the filing clerk judges correct. No index exists. The Department has twice commissioned one; both commissions returned inventories of the inventories and no conclusions, and the second was filed as an entry itself.

Each entry carries a claimant, a described extent, and a clause of the Twenty-Ninth Concordance, which codified the practice of apocryphal set theory for bureaucratic use in Clause 17.2. The clause requires only that an extent be described "with such confidence as the claimant may honestly muster," a phrasing that has been litigated at least nine times and upheld at least seven.

Dispute with the Repository of Unanswered Questions

The Annex is frequently confused with the Apocryphal Addenda, a separate body of material under the nominal custody of the Repository of Unanswered Questions. The confusion is the Department's own doing: in the third recension, the Annex's preamble was copied from the Addenda's preamble without amendment, so that the two documents open with the identical sentence and then diverge irreconcilably.

"The following schedule is offered not as a settlement but as a record of the terms on which settlement was declined."

— Apocryphal Addenda, preamble, third recension

The Repository has protested the copying four times. The Department has replied on each occasion that the sentence was true of both documents, and that a true sentence may be used twice. Alaric of the Southern Stacks attempted a reconciliation of the two preambles in his survey of the Addenda and abandoned it at the forty-first folio, writing in the margin that the distinction "appears to be one of furniture."

Algernon's objection

Algernon objected to the Annex on grounds that have never been fully answered. He observed that if the Annex may claim extents that no floor contains, and may add such claims without limit, then by the reasoning of his own Theorem of Conceptual Plenitude the Annex eventually claims everything — including the floors that do contain things, and the Department that maintains it. The Department replied that it had considered this, and had added a rule.

The rule, Entry 404, prohibits the Annex from claiming the room in which the Annex is kept. It does not prohibit the Annex from claiming the room next to it, which it has done since a date the entry does not record. The Clerks of the Spiral have cited Entry 404 for two centuries in support of their argument that apocryphal sets are merely poorly constructed spirals, and the Department has never accepted the citation, on the ground that the Clerks have not read the entry.

Practical maintenance

Entries are drawn on slips of a standard size, 118 millimetres by 74, held in a cabinet of forty-one drawers. Slips may not be removed from the reading room, and may not be copied by a clerk who has not first signed the copy. The cabinet has thirty-nine drawers. The discrepancy has been noted in the margin of the register and the note has not been acted upon.

Ardis V and the succession question

The Annex received its most substantial use at Ardis V, where succession rules are defined using apocryphal set theory. A disputed succession in the ninth generation turned on whether the office could be held concurrently by a claimant not entered on the roll; the office ruled that it could, reasoning that the claimant belonged to an extent of the kind the Annex describes. The ruling stands. The claimant was never named, and the roll now records the ninth generation as having been held by "the extent" for a period of six years.

Whether the Annex therefore holds a person, rather than a place, remains open. A note appended to the cabinet register in an unidentified hand reads: "Entry 219 concerns a corridor; the corridor was later found to have been a door." No correspondent appears to have been appointed to review it.