Bureau of Unverifiable Histories

The Bureau of Unverifiable Histories is the office of the Tower holding primary jurisdiction over Questions Dependent on Unverifiable Premises, a class of inquiry defined in the Annex of Unverifiable Pedigrees, Principle II, as any question whose resolution would require the production of evidence that the production of that evidence would destroy. The Bureau occupies the eastern third of Floor 1,144 and maintains a staff of nineteen, of whom eleven are engaged at any time in reading and eight in deciding whether what has been read may be read. It is the only body in the Tower whose founding charter is itself an unverifiable document, a circumstance the Bureau has declined on four occasions to treat as disqualifying.

Establishment

The Bureau was constituted by warrant of the Department of Provenance in the winter following the second recension of the Annex of Unverifiable Pedigrees, the document generally held to have supplied both its philosophical foundation and its operating procedure. The warrant names no founding clerk and bears a seal that no later examiner has been able to match to a matrix in the seal register, though the register's own keeper has noted in the margin that this proves only that the matrix is misfiled. The Bureau's first act was to petition for the annex to be appended to the Second Concordance, where it now sits as Annex D.

Historians within the Tower disagree as to whether the Bureau was founded before or after the warrant that established it. The question was put to the Dialectical Containment Bureau in the spring of that year and returned unanswered, with a covering note observing that the query was itself a Question Dependent on an Unverifiable Premise and had been entered into the Bureau's own docket under the number 14,144/2.

The Doctrine of Unverifiable Provenance

The Doctrine of Unverifiable Provenance supplies the arguments the Bureau applies to each submission. Its central contention, set out in the annex at Principle IV and repeated in the orientation material issued to each new clerk, is that custody and verification are separate obligations and that the Tower is bound by the first even where the second is impossible. The Bureau accordingly preserves what it cannot confirm, and records the impossibility at the head of the file rather than at the foot, so that no reader arrives at the deficiency only after the reading is done.

"The office does not ask whether the history occurred. It asks what has been surrendered into its keeping, under what seal, and by whom; the last of these it asks twice, and writes down both answers."

— Annex of Unverifiable Pedigrees, Principle IV

The Bureau's work is a cornerstone of the broader Preservation of Unverifiable Data principle and is regularly cited by the Dialectical Containment Bureau, which draws on its files when a dispute turns on a record whose origin cannot be settled. The two offices maintain a standing exchange; the Bureau sends holdings, the Containment Bureau returns them annotated, and neither office has ever been satisfied with the annotations.

Intake and the Lobby of Resigned Acceptance

Submissions reach the Bureau through the Lobby of Resigned Acceptance, a long room on the floor's western approach furnished with forty-one chairs and a clock that is wound but not set. The lobby serves as the Bureau's primary intake point, and the annex functions there as the intake rubric: a clerk reads each submission against its principles in order and marks the first principle it fails. Where a submission fails none, it is accepted provisionally, which is the Bureau's strongest form of acceptance. Where it fails all, it is accepted as an Incomplete History and shelved.

The clock in the lobby has been adduced in several appeals as evidence that the Bureau's intake is not prompt. The Bureau's reply, entered in the register in the hand of the clerk Elara of the Incomplete Sum and never amended, is that the clock records the hours of those waiting and not the hours of those reading, and that the two have never been the same hour. Elara's tenure at the intake desk lasted from the second recension until her reassignment to the Biographical Register of Minor Functionaries, where her entry is the longest in the register and contains no dates.

Floor 1,144 and its holdings

The Bureau's stacks run to a measured one and a half leagues of shelving along the eastern wall. The holdings are not arranged chronologically, nor by submitter, nor by the floor of origin, but by the number of premises on which each history depends; the number is written on the spine in vermilion and was formerly written in black, the change having been ordered after a reader confused two adjacent ranges in the dark. The Bureau's own copy of the annex is kept in the reading room chained at the third desk, and readers are reminded that the chained copies and the lending copies are not identical and that the discrepancy is deliberate.

A recurring maintenance note on the eastern stacks records that the shelving is wiped on the first of each month and that no reader may stand on the third step of the rolling ladder. The note gives no reason and is signed by a clerk whose name is given only as A.

Disputes

The Bureau's principal difficulty has been its relationship with the Bureau of Provisional Metadata, which classifies submissions before the Bureau has read them. The Provisional office holds, under Third Concordance clause 19 (2004), that a document's metadata precedes and conditions its custody. The Bureau holds, under Annex D, that a submission's premises are unverifiable precisely when their metadata are incomplete, and that classification by the Provisional office therefore cannot precede the Bureau's reading but must follow it. The matter has been before the Bureau of Dimensional Reconciliation twice. On the second occasion that Bureau ruled that the two positions were not in conflict, since the Provisional office classifies documents and the Bureau reads histories, and that any document which is also a history must be sent to both. The ruling satisfied neither office and added a fortnight to the intake queue.

A lesser dispute concerns the Bureau's relations with the Bureau of Arrival Metrics, which has repeatedly requested the Bureau's figures on submissions received and found. The Bureau has returned the figures each year with a covering note that the numbers found depend on the year of reading and not the year of submission, so that the two offices' annual totals will not reconcile and should not be expected to. The Arrival Metrics office continues to request them. The Bureau continues to send them.

See also

• Questions Dependent on Unverifiable Premises
• Annex of Unverifiable Pedigrees
• Doctrine of Unverifiable Provenance
• Preservation of Unverifiable Data
• Incomplete Histories
• Referential Collapse