Archive of Unspoken Verbs

The Archive of Unspoken Verbs

The Archive of Unspoken Verbs is the collective designation for those floors of the Western Annex devoted to the conservation of actions that were never performed and, in a strict grammatical sense, never could be. Its principal and best-attested component is the Vestibule of Unspoken Verbs on Floor 3071, a Primary Vestibule and administrative nexus; from this seat the Archive governs a scattered chain of subordinate floors, of which the Scriptorium of Latent Verbs is the largest and the least visited. The Archive holds no books in the conventional sense. What it shelves are verbs: infinitives, chiefly, catalogued by the likelihood that someone, at some point, intended to do the thing they name.

The Archive is not to be confused with its near neighbour, the Archive of Unspoken Sounds, which is answerable to the Guild of Phoneticists and concerns itself with noise. The distinction is old and has been litigated. A bell not rung belongs to the Sounds; a bell not rung in order to summon someone belongs to the Verbs.

Governance

The Archive is administered jointly by two offices, a division of authority that has been described in the Concordances as "deliberate, and if not deliberate then settled." The Clerk of Infinitives exercises operational oversight of cataloguing and admission; the Warden of Participles exercises oversight of everything in transition, including verbs that have been begun, abandoned, and resumed on a different floor. Neither office may overrule the other. Disputes between them are resolved by citation of the earlier instrument, which in practice means that whichever office reaches the relevant Concordance first prevails for that day.

Admission to the collection requires validation against the Master Index of Unuttered Action, housed at the Annex of Unspoken Consensus and consulted under conditions the Scriptorium describes as "mildly inconvenient and entirely necessary." A verb is admitted only if the Index records at least one credible non-occurrence: a documented occasion on which the action was intended, prepared for, and then not done. Verbs that nobody has ever meant to do are classed as speculative and shelved facing inward.

The Crisis of Attenuated Meaning

The Archive's history is dominated by the Crisis of Attenuated Meaning of Epoch 11,207, a procedural and philosophical upheaval that originated at Floor 3071 and was felt, in attenuated form, throughout the Western Annex. The crisis began as a disagreement over whether a verb admitted during a period of administrative closure could be said to have been "held" — and therefore whether it had been unuttered by neglect rather than by choice. Under Ordinance 14,142-Gamma, associated with the Guild of Final Verbs, the prevailing view had been that admission was complete upon shelving; the Clerk of Infinitives maintained that admission required the utterance of a refusal, which the closure had made impossible.

Matters were not improved by the discovery that the Index had been maintained in duplicate since Epoch 11,190. The two copies agreed on every entry but one, and the discrepant entry — an infinitive rendered in the record only as "to defer" — could not be assigned to either.

"The Index does not err. Where it appears to err, it is because two things have been indexed as one, and the fault lies with the reader who expected a single thing."

— Bureau of Unspoken Context Notations, folio 2,209

Holdings

The Archive's inventory is periodically recopied, and the recensions do not agree on totals. The most recent complete inventory, sealed in Epoch 11,341, lists the collections as follows:

• The Latent Infinitives, approximately 44,000 entries, of which 61 are without a recorded subject.
• The Abandoned Subjunctives, held under seal, pending a ruling on whether a mood may be archived.
• The Conditional Stack, unshelved since the crisis and stored in the corridor.
• The Inventory of the Inventory, compiled by the Scriptorium against its own objection.

The Index of Unspoken Conclusions is sometimes thought to belong here; it does not, and the misapprehension is corrected at least twice a year.

Scholarly dispute

There is no agreement on the Archive's founding date. The Third Concordance places it in Epoch 8,904, following the partition of the unspoken materials between the Sounds and the Verbs. The Seventh Concordance, written later and amended more often, assigns the founding to Epoch 8,881, on the grounds that a collection existing for twenty-three years without a founding document is itself an unshelved verb and had to be regularised retroactively. Both Concordances are in force.

A quieter dispute concerns the Manuscript of Unspoken Alphabets, which the Scriptorium holds on deposit and which many readers assume to have been written there. The Scriptorium's position is that it received the Manuscript already written, and that "unspoken" in the title refers to the alphabets, not to the writing. This has not settled the matter.

Access

Consultation of the Latent Infinitives is permitted to holders of a Western Annex reading token. Visitors are reminded that no verb may be removed from the Archive in any form, written, spoken, or attempted, and that the stairwells between Floor 3071 and the Scriptorium are closed to readers between the fourth and sixth hours for cleaning. Requests to consult a verb whose subject is unknown are referred to the Clerk of Infinitives, who has never yet been found in.