Bureau of Anomalous Materials

The Bureau of Anomalous Materials is a standing custodial body of the Tower charged with the intake, sorting, stabilization, and release of materials whose behaviour cannot be reconciled with the ordinary properties of their substance. It occupies the northern arc of Spiral 41, floors 2,140 through 2,166, immediately below the arc held by the Bureau of Anomalous Resonance and above the sealed risers administered by the Bureau of Pre-Integration. The Bureau does not investigate. It receives. Its founding instruction, repeated in every recension of its charter, is that a material is not to be understood before it is shelved, and preferably not afterward.

Mandate and the sorting floor

All anomalous materials entering the Tower pass first through the sorting floor at 2,141, where they are subjected to Triage Protocol Alpha and assigned a provisional Anomalous Materials Index designation before any clerk is permitted to describe them in writing. The Null-Crystal, catalogued as AMI-44 on Floor 17, is the Bureau's most frequently cited holding and the one most often requested for instructional purposes, despite a standing note from the Custodial Registrar that it is "unsuitable for beginners, being instructive."

Materials are sorted into four holdings classes — Held, Held Pending, Held Provisionally, and Held Indefinitely — and the Bureau has never satisfactorily explained the difference between the second and the fourth. A request for clarification in the winter of the year recorded as 3,118 was answered by the then Keeper of the Sorting Floor, Clerk-Adjunct Merrow Vantine, in a memorandum of a single line: "Held Pending means we expect to know; Held Indefinitely means we have stopped expecting." The memorandum is preserved in the Bureau's annexe and is, by the Keeper's own subsequent admission, not a definition.

The permit dispute of 3,204

The Bureau's intake authority is exercised under Provisional Research Permit 4409, which permits the Librarian-Provisional for Anomalous Holdings to approve or deny the movement of anomalous materials between floors. In 3,204 the Bureau attempted to read the permit as conferring a general right of requisition, and removed eleven crates from the custody of the Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings without prior instrument. The resulting dispute was heard over four sessions and settled by reference to the Joint Protocol on Concurrent Strangenesses, which the Bureau had not thought to consult because it did not consider ephemera to be strange.

"A material does not become the property of the Bureau by being peculiar. Peculiarity is a description, not a conveyance."

— Joint Protocol on Concurrent Strangenesses, Annex 7, ruling of 3,204

The crates were returned on 3,204.9 and the Bureau's requisition clause was struck from its internal schedule. Clerk-Adjunct Vantine, who had authorised the removal, was reassigned to the inventory of Floor 2,159, a post he described in a surviving letter as "a punishment composed entirely of dust." He remained there for eleven years and produced the Bureau's finest catalogue of unclassifiable silicates.

Relations with adjacent bureaus

The Bureau's boundaries are jurisdictional as well as architectural, and the northern arc is thick with them. Where a material emits light without apparent cause, the file is shared with the Bureau of Anomalous Resonance; where the same material is found to have altered the shape of the room containing it, the Bureau of Anomalous Topology is summoned, and the three offices then disagree about which of them arrived first. The Bureau of Coincidental Resonance claims a narrow interest in materials whose anomalies appear only in the presence of a second, unrelated anomaly, a claim the Bureau of Anomalous Materials has never accepted in writing but has never formally refused.

Courier work between the sorting floor and the upper holdings is performed by personnel drawn from the Silent Scribes, who were found in the year 2,987 to be the only order willing to carry a sealed crate through the eastern stair without asking what was inside it. The arrangement has held since. The Bureau notes in its annual return that the Scribes have never lost a crate, and that this is the whole of what is known about them.

Scholarly disagreement

The Bureau's history is disputed at its origin. The Concordance of Custodial Origins, in its second recension, dates the Bureau's establishment to the sealing of the first anomalous crate on Floor 2,140 and names the sealer as a nameless porter. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, rejects this entirely, holding that the Bureau was constituted by the appointment of its first Keeper and that the porter's act was "a private arrangement between a man and a box." The two readings differ by an estimated forty years and by the question of whether a bureau can exist before it has a clerk.

A third position, advanced by the archivist Sennet of the Ninth Annexe in an unpublished marginalium, proposes that the Bureau was never established at all and has simply always been on the northern arc, and that its founding documents are retrospective. This position is not cited in any official return, but it is not contradicted by any either.

Practical notes

Visitors to the sorting floor are asked to leave their coats with the porter, to state their business once, and not to correct the inventory. Floors 2,152 through 2,155 are closed to all traffic while the holding bays are being counted, which occurs on no fixed schedule and has twice lasted a decade. The Bureau's public counter on 2,140 is staffed from the second bell and closes whenever the Keeper is called away, which is often, and which the Bureau does not regard as an interruption of service.