Bureau of Pre-Integration

The Bureau of Pre-Integration is a preparatory office of the Directorate of Concordant Integration, charged with the assessment of materials, persons, and floors that have been proposed for integration but not yet admitted to it. The Bureau does not integrate anything. Its function is to determine what an integration would consist of, and to certify that the question has been asked in the correct order. It has held Floor 1140 (the Antechamber of Held Questions) since the Concordance of 1140, and its seals appear on the secondary face of most integration documents, beneath those of the Bureau of Cyclical Integration and to the left of those of the Bureau of Latent Significance.

Origin and separation from Cyclical Integration

The Bureau was carved out of the Bureau of Cyclical Integration in the winter of Year 907, following the so-called Stairwell Inquiry, when it was established that the Cyclical Bureau had been reconciling linear processes with non-linear temporal models before the processes in question had been entered into any register at all. The resulting recension of the Manual of Vertical Integration inserted Article 12(b), which provides that "no office shall reconcile what has not yet been stated," and established the new Bureau to make the statement.

A measure of friction survives. Kael, Chief Integrator of the Cyclical Bureau, has twice declined to countersign pre-integration certificates on the grounds that they anticipate reconciliations his office has not yet performed, and in Year 1102 had a footnote to this effect printed in the margin of the Manual of Resonant Integration. The Bureau's answer, recorded in its own standing note 4, is that a reconciliation may be anticipated without being performed, "as a stair may be seen before it is climbed."

The four holdings of assessment

Materials under assessment are held in one of four states, distinguished not by their properties but by the number of offices that have agreed about them. A holding is stated when first entered; held when a second office concurs; double-held when a third objectswithin the prescribed interval of forty days; and released when the objections have been answered or have lapsed. In practice most holdings pass from stated to released without the intervening stages being recorded, a circumstance the Bureau attributes to haste and the Office of the Provisional Census attributes to the Bureau.

"The interval of forty days is counted from the date of the seal, not the date of the entry, and not the date on which the entry is remembered."

— Standing Procedures, § 19

Pre-Screening and the referral of conflicts

The Bureau conducts the first pass of Pre-Screening for Autological Conflict, though the substantive examination belongs to the Bureau of Referential Integrity and the Bureau of Spatial Integrity, which conduct it jointly and disagree about which of them conducts it first. The Bureau's own contribution is the referral sheet, on which the assessing clerk states in a single sentence why the matter cannot yet be resolved. Referral sheets are limited to one sentence; this is the only length restriction in the Tower that is enforced by the scriptoria rather than by the Concordances.

Clerk Ondra Vell, who held the referral desk on Floor 1140 for eleven years, developed the sheet into what colleagues called the long single sentence, extending in one instance to four hundred words across a fold-out leaf, and was instructed in Year 1188 to divide it into smaller sentences. Vell complied by numbering the subdivisions. The Bureau retains his sheets as a model of compliance and a warning.

Dispute over priority of the pre-audit

Substantial scholarly disagreement attaches to whether the Pre-Audit Documentation administered by the Bureau of Latent Significance precedes or follows pre-integration assessment. Annex E of the Integration with Annexes places the pre-audit first; the Third Concordance, Annex 4, places it second and adds, unhelpfully, that "the order of these offices is not a sequence but a preference." The Directorate's Integration Committee has declined to resolve the question on three occasions, most recently in Year 1204, when it found that the two offices had been conducting their work simultaneously for so long that any ruling would retrospectively invalidate sixty years of seals on both faces.

A minor consequence: items assessed under simultaneous procedure carry two dates on the primary face, neither of which is authoritative. The Bureau of Reverification will pre-stamp an inventory to resolve such discrepancies in favour of the departure floor's inventory, which it does without inquiry.

Floor 1140 and points of practice

The Antechamber of Held Questions consists of a single corridor of assessment desks, lined on the north side with cupboards for pending holdings and on the south with the seals of the Bureau's predecessors, retained for comparison. The corridor does not open onto a stairwell; access is by request, and requests are received at the door. Visiting assessors from other floors are asked not to lean on the cupboards, which have no backs.

The Bureau publishes nothing. Its findings are circulated in the form of the referral sheet, and its history is reconstructed chiefly from the marginalia of offices that received them. The Bureau of Coherent Truths has twice proposed a retrospective digest and been refused on the grounds that a digest would constitute an integration, which is not within the Bureau's remit.