Chronological Instability

Chronological Instability is the condition under which a catalogued phenomenon's date, duration, or position in sequence cannot be fixed to the satisfaction of two independent readings. It is distinguished from Metric Instability, which concerns measurement in space, and from Recursive Instability, which concerns phenomena that reproduce the conditions of their own cataloguing. The Office of Chronological Integrity holds that Chronological Instability is the elder and graver of the three, on the grounds that a mis-measured object may be measured again, whereas a mis-dated object may have to be re-measured in a year that no longer exists.

The condition is not an error. This point was settled in Concordance 6 on the Inherent Instability of Adjacent Phenomena, which established that instability is an inherent property of certain phenomena and may not be corrected without altering the phenomenon. The Concordance is silent on what to do when the phenomenon in question is a date.

Definition and classification

The Manual of Chronological Arbitration classifies Temporal Resolutions by type and stability, and its Fourth Table is the standard reference for assigning a Chronological Instability grade. Grades run from I to IX. Grade I denotes an article whose date is uncertain by less than a day and whose custodians have agreed not to mention it. Grade IX denotes an article whose date is uncertain by more than the age of the archive and whose custodians have agreed to mention nothing else.

The grades are assigned by the Department of Chronological Contradiction, which also adjudicates conflicts in dating, sequence, and causality, and which has never published a Grade IX finding it did not subsequently re-open. The Department's standing instruction on the matter, reproduced in every annual return since the Ballast Map was commissioned, reads: "A Grade IX is not a conclusion. It is a holding pattern with a seal on it."

Precession and the Floor 914 incident

Chronological Instability becomes administratively dangerous through Chronological Precedence Practice, the routine act of citing the older of two conflicting clauses. Under the doctrine of chronological precedence, the more recently amended clause prevails in direct contradiction — but the act of preferring the older document can itself trigger Procedural Precession, in which the cited clause begins to behave as though it were still in force, regardless of its subsequent amendment.

The canonical example is the Floor 914 return of the winter of 4611, in which a clerk of the Chamber of Chronological Consistency cited an 1104 amendment to settle a dispute over a shipment of catalogue slips. The amendment was duly preferred; the 1104 text then asserted itself as current, and for nine days the floor's intake was logged under a calendar that had been retired four centuries earlier. The slips were recovered. The nine days were not, and remain unaccounted for in the floor's annual reckoning, which now carries a standing annotation: "Nine days short. Do not query."

"Where the record and the reckoning disagree, the reckoning is the record."

— Manual of Chronological Arbitration, Annex 7

The Purist objection

The Chronological Purist School rejects the grading system entirely. Its position, set out in its 3921 recension of Fragment 12, is that instability is not a property of phenomena at all but of cataloguers, and that the grades of the Fourth Table merely record the order in which successive custodians lost their nerve. The Purists conduct retrospective analyses and hold that all dating questions resolve under strictly linear, post-issuance chronological precedence, if given sufficient time.

The Department of Chronological Contradiction has replied, more than once, that the Purist position is unfalsifiable because any disconfirming evidence is, by its own doctrine, not yet due. It has also noted that the Purists' analyses are themselves retrospective, and thus fall under the precedence they claim to have superseded. This reply is now in its seventh recension, and the sixth is still occasionally cited in error, which the Department regards as evidence in its favour.

Mitigation and the visiting rule

Articles at Grade V and above are subject to Chronological Logging, in which every consultation is dated twice by two clerks working from separate almanacs. Where the two dates agree, the article is closed for the season. Where they disagree, the later date is entered and the earlier clerk is asked to account for the discrepancy in writing. The practice is regarded as severe but effective: Grade V closures fell by a third between 4602 and 4630, though the Department has never established whether the closures fell or the grading rose to meet them.

Articles at Grade VII and above may not be consulted in the same year they were catalogued. Visitors are reminded not to attempt to do so; the stairwell landings above Floor 1100 are not lit after the second bell.

Severe cases are removed to Zones of Specified Instability and handled under the Protocol for Unstable Transmutative Articles, which requires that any object whose date is in doubt be stored in a room of its own, with the door marked in two hands. The marking in two hands is the oldest provision in the Protocol and the only one never amended. The Office of Chronological Integrity has twice proposed that the second hand be dispensed with on grounds of cost. Both proposals were rejected on grounds that the file recording the first proposal could not be dated.

Relationship to other instabilities

Chronological Instability is frequently found alongside Intentional Ontic Instability, as in the 4488 crisis on Floor 771, where a misapplied Ontic Solvent left the affected holdings not merely unstable but uncertain whether they had ever been stable. The inquiry found that the Solvent had been applied correctly and that the uncertainty was prior. The finding is regarded as settled. The floor is not.

Whether Chronological Instability should be subject to Ontological Quarantine remains contested between the Department of Chronological Contradiction and the Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies, the latter arguing that a thing whose date cannot be fixed has no ontology to quarantine and the former arguing that this is precisely when quarantine is required. The dispute has run since 4498 and is currently held, by agreement, at Grade IV — a classification neither office accepts and neither will disturb.