Chronosphere of Unfulfilled Intention

The Chronosphere of Unfulfilled Intention is a sealed brass instrument, 1.4 metres in diameter, held on Floor Delta-9 in the Vault of Unfulfilled Protocols, mounted on a stand of blackened iron and never once rotated. Its outer shell bears 1,128 engraved apertures on thirteen annular bands, each aperture calibrated to a distinct intention recorded elsewhere in the Tower and never carried out. When brought into proximity with the corresponding record — a pledge in the Gallery of Unfulfilled Promises, an entry in the Register of Unfulfilled Introductions, a line in the Sub-Index of Unfulfilled Prophecies — the matching aperture is said to warm by between two and three degrees. The instrument does not display the intention, resolve it, or indicate what discharge of it would have looked like. It indicates only that the intention is present, which the Archive already knew, and that it remains undischarged, which the Archive also knew.

The Chronosphere is the property of the Archivists of Unfulfilled Purpose, who catalogue it as object Delta-9/V, and its operation falls under the standing custodianship of the Bureau of Unfulfilled Transactions. The Bureau holds that it consults the Chronosphere whenever an unfinished obligation crosses jurisdictional lines; the Bureau's own ledger for the years 940–1006 records 1,412 such consultations and no instance in which the Chronosphere altered the Bureau's finding.

Construction and the Petrine attribution

The commission for the Chronosphere is recorded in the Petrine Charter of Intention, which also authorised the construction of the Calcified Wing and which has been read to cover a good deal more than it says. The Charter names the instrument only as "the vessel of measurement," does not specify its material, and does not mention the apertures at all. That the Chronosphere is the vessel in question is accepted by the Archivists and disputed by no one with standing to dispute it. The brass itself was sourced from the Foundry of Deferred Alloys on Level 611, which has produced no drawn metal since.

The engraving of the 1,128 apertures is attributed to the workshop of Sister Amaranth Vey, whose own account of the work, filed in the Scriptorium Returns, records the completion of 1,126 apertures over four winters and adds, without explanation, that the remaining two were "found to be present." Sister Amaranth requested in her final return that the instrument not be polished, a request the Vault has honoured continuously since. The outer shell is therefore dull to the touch and has been noted by three separate inspection committees as "unexpectedly dark for brass."

Operation

The Chronosphere is operated by a single Keeper, a post that has been filled by the same individual since 912. The Keeper brings a record to the instrument, holds it at the aperture indicated by the record's catalogue mark, and waits for the warmth. If no aperture warms, the intention has been discharged outside the Tower's knowledge, and the record is returned to its shelf with a marginal note to that effect. In the Keeper's tenure, 39 records have been returned so marked; all 39 were later found to have been matched to the wrong aperture.

The instrument is not to be rotated. The prohibition is repeated in the operational notice affixed to its plinth and in the Fourteenth Concordance, Annex 2, which provides that "the vessel shall not be turned, however slightly, and however much the turning might clarify matters." The reasoning behind the Annex is not stated, but the Registry of Motions records that a turning was attempted in 887 and that the motion to investigate what happened was tabled and never taken up.

The Vellum Problem

A persistent difficulty of the Chronosphere is that its readings are unavailable to the record they concern. The Vault's practice requires that any warmth be attested in writing by two witnesses; but the attesting witnesses must hold the record in their hands, and the record, being an unfulfilled intention, is in most cases a single sheet of vellum that cannot be set down without being catalogued, which would discharge the intention by completing its description. The Vellum Problem, as it has been called since Archivist-Conservator Hallem's memorandum of 1 Frost, 964, has no agreed solution. Hallem proposed that a third party transcribe the record aloud, but the Council of Recensions ruled in 971 that a spoken transcription is itself a record and so compounds the difficulty.

"The instrument is never wrong. It is frequently unhelpful, and on one occasion it was warm before the record was brought to it, which we have agreed not to discuss."

— Keeper of the Chronosphere, evidence to the Third and Tenth Joint Committee on Instruments, 1002

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerns the Chronosphere's proper classification. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 7, groups it with the timekeeping instruments of the Tower — the bells, the stair-clocks, and the differential sundials of the Upper Reaches — on the ground that "intention is a species of duration." The Twelfth Concordance, Annex 1, expressly contradicts this, placing the instrument among the vessels of containment, alongside the sealed jars of Floor Gamma-4 and the unopened crates of the Escrow of Anticipated Goods. The two Annexes have never been reconciled, and citation of either is generally taken as an index of the citing party's affiliations.

A minority position, advanced by the Schola of Apparent Duration, holds that the Chronosphere is not an instrument at all but a catalogue in the shape of one, and that the warming of its apertures is a convenience of the Archivists rather than a property of the brass. The Schola's argument rests on the Axiom of Inevitable Manifestation and on the observation that no aperture has ever warmed for an intention whose record had been lost. The Archivists reply that lost records cannot be brought to the aperture, and the exchange has continued for ninety years without narrowing.

Recurring proposal

Since at least 918 it has been proposed, at intervals of roughly a decade, that the Chronosphere be moved to the Department of Formal Commencements, which maintains the Register and which argues that the instrument would be nearer to its proper material there. The Bureau of Unfulfilled Transactions has objected on each occasion, citing the custodianship arrangements established under the Fifth Concordance and the fact that the instrument's stand is fixed to the Vault floor by four bolts of Unalloyed Tin. The bolts cannot be removed without a variance from the Office of Load Bearing, which has not been applied for. The most recent proposal, tabled in 1013, was carried over to the next session and has since been carried over eleven times.