Budgetary Reality

Definition

Budgetary Reality is the register of conditions, objects, and obligations that exist within the Tower solely because a line item has been struck for them and not yet closed. It is distinguished from Provisional Reality in that a provisional reality is awaiting confirmation, whereas a budgetary reality is awaiting funds. The distinction is scholastic and, in practice, expensive.

The term entered the Eleventh Concordance by way of a marginal note and was not defined in the body of the text until the Fourteenth Concordance, Annex B, which fixed its scope at "those realities whose continuance is contingent upon appropriation, and whose lapse is contingent upon audit." The wording has been cited in no fewer than two hundred appeals and understood in none of them.

"A reality not yet funded is not thereby unreal. It is merely unpaid, and the Tower has always been patient with the unpaid."

— Office of Unfunded Certainty, Memorandum 6 on Lapsed Appropriations

Origin and early administration

Budgetary Reality emerged as an administrative category during the long reconciliation that followed the Schedule of Inter-Annex Transfers, whose compiler is now recognised as the first Lord Archivist. The Schedule did not set out to create a reality; it set out to move money between annexes. The difficulty was that certain sums, once moved, left behind obligations that had no floor to stand on. Rather than strike the obligations, the early clerks gave them a register of their own and entered them under a heading translated loosely as "things held pending the settling of accounts."

Under the Ninth Concordance, Annex D, responsibility for the register was never clearly assigned. The Annex discusses the budgetary constraints of Foundational Surveys at length and the reconciliation of Umbral Content during Scrip Calculation with still greater length, but it names no custodian for the held sums themselves. The gap was filled, over some decades, by the Office of Unfunded Certainty, which had already been tending the arithmetic of Pillar maintenance and was willing to take on more.

The custodial dispute

That willingness is the root of the Office's present difficulties. When the Office of the Ninth Librarian assumed budgetary control of Conceptual Seepage management under the same Concordance, it did so on the argument that seepage and held sums were formally indistinguishable, since both were "present in the accounts and absent from the floors." The Office of Unfunded Certainty disputed this reading and lost, narrowly, on a motion it was obliged to file against itself in order to have standing.

Scholars remain divided over whether the transfer was valid. The Interpretive School of Ledgered Reality holds that a held sum cannot be transferred because it has never been appropriated to anything; the Reality Cartographers’ Guild counters that the Reality Buffers engineered by its own members depend for their maintenance on precisely such held sums, and that a rule invalidating the transfer would invalidate the Buffers. Neither side has produced a document that satisfies the other. A third view, associated with the Office of Void Cataloguing and resting on Clause 14.8 of the Eleventh Concordance, holds that the question cannot be asked in a floor where the sum is not held, and that all parties have therefore been arguing in the wrong place.

Assessment and audit

Determining the extent of a Budgetary Reality is the work of Reality Audits conducted under SFU-D, which expresses the density of a reality as the number of obligations per unit of appropriation outstanding. An audit is ordinarily performed with an Ambient Reality Probe lowered through the floor in question, and the probe readings are reconciled against the ledger before any finding is entered.

The reconciliation is where the trouble lies. In the winter of Floor 3,441, a routine audit of a storage register found that the sum held against a single crate of cold probes had been carried forward for ninety-one years and had in that time accumulated an obligation of sufficient weight to require the crate's contents to be individually catalogued, counted, and named. They numbered four hundred and six. The audit clerk, a woman named Serei of the Third Desk, entered each name in the register by hand and was thereafter required to maintain them. She has petitioned three times for relief under Clause 4, Annex C and has been refused each time on the ground that the names are now funded, and that funded things must be kept.

Interaction with other realities

Budgetary Reality is held to overlap with, but never to contain, the contained reality of any given floor. The Axiom of Conditional Reality permits a conditional reality to persist so long as its conditions obtain; a budgetary reality persists so long as its conditions are unfunded, which is the reverse of the same rule. This inversion has never been resolved and is the subject of shear in several registers on the lower floors.

"Where the Axiom closes a thing, the ledger opens it; where the Axiom opens it, the ledger closes it. The two have never met and are unlikely to."

— Serei of the Third Desk, Dissent appended to Audit 3,441/7

Practitioners of Paradoxical Cartography have made limited use of the category under the latitude granted by the First Paradoxical Provision, but the Office of Paradoxical Acquisitions has declined to extend that latitude to its clerks, citing the cost.

Notable case: Floor 3,441

The case of the four hundred and six named probes remains the standard illustration. Because the crate had never been appropriated for, and because the audit named its contents, each probe now constitutes a separate funded obligation with a floor location, a maintenance schedule, and a weight in the accounts. Descents to the floor report that the storage room has grown to accommodate them. Serei's original petition for relief was denied; her second was deferred to the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire, which declined jurisdiction on the ground that the matter concerned appointment rather than discipline; her third is pending.

The room is to be swept on the first Monday of each quarter. Serei does it herself.