Aris Reclamation Protocols

The Aris Reclamation Protocols are a body of regulations governing the recovery, attenuation, and disposal of materials judged to have outlived their usefulness, drafted and instituted by Scribe-Captain Aris between 1845 and 1851. Though their title identifies them as a single instrument, the Protocols survive in eleven recensions, of which four are held to be authoritative and the remainder to be "in force but inadmissible," a distinction maintained by the Bureau of Recensions without explanation it has ever committed to parchment. The Protocols are administered by the Department of Reclamation and verified, where verification is required, by the Department of Verification.

Their central innovation was the Truth Recovery Procedure, by which the "essential truth" of a subject is extracted prior to reclamation, so that what is discarded may be discarded with a full record of what it had been. The Procedure is described in the Manual of Intrinsic Reclamation at length and applied, in practice, unevenly.

Origins

Scribe-Captain Aris came to the reclamation question from acoustics. As a junior scribe he had dissented in writing from the findings of the 1803 Acoustic Anomalies survey, which had concluded that the anomalous echoes recorded on Floor 2211 and the adjoining landings were "an artefact of the stairwell and not a resident of it." Aris's minority report held that a thing which returns a sound it was not given is owed the ordinary courtesies of a thing that exists, beginning with a record and ending, when the time came, with a proper accounting. The report was filed, ignored, and later bound into the first recension of the Protocols as a preamble, where it remains and is read aloud at the inauguration of every Reclamation Tribunal.

The Protocols were instituted over six years, in response to the Interminable Refuse Inquiry of 1844, and were extended to intangible materials only later and only partially. Clause 4 of the Protocols, as amended in 1849, explicitly excludes from the Truth Recovery Procedure any material designated intangible by Waste Reclamation Directive 88. The exclusion is the single most litigated sentence in the entire body of reclamation law.

The Procedure and its difficulties

In outline, the Truth Recovery Procedure requires that a subject be questioned, that its answers be witnessed by two scribes of the Third Scriptorium, and that the resulting deposition be filed in the Vault of Disposed Particulars no fewer than thirty days before disposal. In outline it is orderly. In practice, subjects have answered questions the scribes did not ask, declined to answer the questions they were asked, or — in the celebrated case of the Borrowed Hour recovered on a lower landing in the winter of 1862 — answered a question that would not be posed for another four years. The deposition in that case was filed twice, once prospectively and once retrospectively, and the two copies disagree.

The Procedure's defenders hold that a deposition which contradicts itself is still a deposition. Its critics hold otherwise. Prefect Aris Thorn observed before the Fourth Concordance that "a truth recovered twice at different times is not one truth recovered twice but two truths recovered once each, and the Vault is not large enough for the difference" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 4). The remark is quoted at the head of the Department's standing instructions and has never been satisfactorily answered.

Relation to Directive 88

Because Waste Reclamation Directive 88 mandates a seven-stage attenuation sequence for intangible refuse, and because the Protocols' Truth Recovery Procedure cannot lawfully reach intangible material, the two instruments overlap in a region neither claims. The Department of Reclamation has long asserted that the overlap is governed by the Protocols' general spirit, while the Department of Verification has asserted with equal confidence that a general spirit is not a schedule and cannot be enforced. Atmospheric Reclamation Station 7, established under Directive 88, is held by the first party to fall within the Protocols' custodianship by way of Annex 7-G of the Manual, and by the second party to fall outside it entirely.

The dispute has produced at least one procedural accident. In 1908 a consignment of discarded epithets was processed at the Station under the Truth Recovery Procedure in error, and recovered its essential truth, which was found to be "unflattering." The deposition was returned to the Department by the Verification clerks with a note reading, in full: Not our stage. No one has since been able to establish which stage it was.

Contested status of the recensions

Scholars of reclamation law remain divided on whether the eleven recensions represent one instrument amended ten times or eleven instruments that happen to resemble one another. The Concordance of Instruments holds the first view; the Seventh Concordance, Annex 12, holds the second, and adds that the distinction has no practical consequence, which the Concordance of Instruments has formally contested as "itself a practical consequence." Neither body has been able to produce the original fair copy, which was last seen on Floor 114 in the custody of a clerk named Oris Vane, who filed it and then could not recall the floor.

The practical result is that a reclamation may be lawful under one recension and unlawful under another, and the Department of Reclamation is obliged to satisfy both. It has done so since 1911 by performing every Procedure twice, once under each of the two recensions most recently amended, and reconciling the depositions where it can. Where it cannot, the subject is retained indefinitely in the Holding Gallery of Unresolved Subjects, which now occupies four floors and part of a fifth stairwell.

Standing instructions

The Protocols are administered from a reading room on Floor 77, open to scribes of the third grade and above. Visitors are asked not to address the subjects awaiting recovery, as the Procedure regards any question put to them as a formal deposition and requires two witnesses. The reading room keeps its own witnesses for this purpose; they are not permitted to sit.