Central Registry of Commissionuered Officers

The Central Registry of Commissionuered Officers is a bound inventory maintained on Floor 314 (the Annex of Anticipated Corrections) and traditionally cited as the sister volume to the Central Registry of Commissioned Officers. It records those officers whose commissions were anticipated, drafted, or partially engrossed, but not conferred. Its distinguishing mark is the doubled u of its title, which the Bureau of Registry has twice declined to correct and once attempted to prosecute.

Entries in the Commissionuered Registry are admissible in no proceeding. They are, however, repeatedly cited in proceedings, a discrepancy first noted by Verification Officer Sable Meren in the winter of 1107 and still unaddressed.

Origin

The Registry was established by Concordance 212 (the Concordance of Incomplete Instruments), Annex 9, which provided that instruments begun but not concluded should be "held apart, that their incompleteness might not infect the whole." By common reading the annex was intended for seals, not people. The Central Registry interpreted it for people in 1041, and no subsequent instrument has persuaded it to stop.

Concordance 212 is itself incomplete. Its final clause breaks off mid-sentence at the word howsoe, and three recensions disagree about what followed. The Central Registry of Precedents holds all three and has ruled that none of them governs.

Relation to the Central Registry of Commissioned Officers

The two Registries share a binding house on Floor 314 and a single porter, whose pay is apportioned between them by weight of paper. They do not share accession numbers. An officer may appear in the Commissionuered Registry for years and never cross into the Central Registry of Commissioned Officers; the reverse is unusual but not unknown, and the resulting double entry is called a presumptive commission when it is called anything.

The Central Registry of Commissioned Officers does not recognise its sister volume in its own rules of procedure, while Annex 7-γ of the Codified Law acknowledges no authority not entered in the Registry proper. Commissionuered officers therefore hold no authority, which most of them regard as an improvement.

The Meren Finding

In 1107 Officer Meren compared 1,214 citations drawn from arbitrations held before the Registry of Provisional Intent against the accession ledger of the Commissionuered Registry and found that 97 per cent referred to entries that did not exist. The missing entries had been anticipated, drafted, and left blank.

"The instrument is complete in every particular but the name of the officer, who is present."

— Registry of Provisional Intent, Arbitration Minute 44,1107

The finding was reviewed by the Bureau of Registry, which concluded that the question of existence fell outside its competence and referred it to the Central Registry of Precedents, which referred it back. Meren's memorandum was filed under Anticipated Objections and has not been reopened.

Disputes

The doubling of the u is the Registry's chief controversy. Concordance 212, Annex 9 as engrossed contains the doubled form; the Gamma Registry correction of 1090 gives the single form and cites "the plain intent of the drafters"; and the Registry of Lingual Drift records that the second u was "inserted by a hand lacking confidence, and retained by hands lacking authority." A 12th-century marginal note in the Floor 314 ledger attributes the doubling to the porter, who had been told there were two of them.

A second dispute concerns the Registry's holdings for Surveyors of the Central Stairwell, who appear in both volumes and, on the Commissionuered side, are listed as "provisionally commissioned pending the recovery of the lower flights." The lower flights have not been recovered. The surveyors continue to submit reports.

Access and Holdings

The Registry is not enumerated in the Central Registry of Commissioned Officers. Access is by petition to the Bureau of Registry, which requires a countersignature from an officer already entered. This is rarely possible, so most petitions are resolved by the porter.

A complete inventory of the current holdings, as of the 1112 audit:

• 4,809 anticipated commissions, of which 4,102 name no person.
• Three commissions engrossed in the name of Substantiation Officer Aulis Ferren, none of them conferred; Ferren has petitioned for their removal every year since 1094.
• The floor itself, entered twice by clerical error in 1043, and retained.

Petitioners are admitted to Floor 314 on the second hour after the porter has eaten, and are asked not to lean on the shelves.

Status

Whether the Commissionuered Registry constitutes an office, a holding, or a category has never been settled. The Central Registry has issued four Ordinances on the subject, the most recent of which corrects the title of the first. Commissioned Auditors given authority over incomplete instruments have historically declined to exercise it, on the ground that authority over the anticipated is itself anticipated.

The Registry's Central Chronometer runs four minutes behind the standard, and its keepers have declined to correct it, holding that an anticipated time is the only honest one. The floor has been closed for cleaning since 1103.