Class Γ-Prime

Class Γ-Prime is the highest standing a practice may attain within the Tower's classification of repeated observance. It denotes a Class Γ practice — one performed identically by three or more unacquainted parties across at least two non-adjacent floors — which has additionally satisfied the three diagnostic criteria of elevation set out in Concordance Prime, Annex 9, and has been entered in the Register of Elevated Practices by a clerk of the Clerk-Arkivist Second Class. Retention of the class is annual and is not presumed.

Class Γ-Prime is frequently confused with Sub-Class Theta-Alpha, which governs elevations of documents rather than practices. The two classifications share a numbering system and nothing else, and the confusion has been formally deplored in three separate recensions.

The three criteria

Criterion one requires continuity: the practice must be attested, without a break, in the logs of at least nine consecutive fiscal quarters. Criterion two requires independence, meaning that the practitioners must not have consulted one another at any point, a condition the Tower tests by asking them. Criterion three requires what the Annex calls inutility — the practice must accomplish nothing that could not be accomplished by not performing it. A practice that produces a result may rise no higher than Class Γ.

"That which is done for a reason may be put down for a reason. That which is done for none is the floor itself."

— Concordance Prime, Annex 9, clause 4

The inutility test has produced the order's longest-running disagreement. The Scriptorium Prime holds that inutility is a property of the act; the Surveyors hold that it is a property of the actor's intention, and have argued since the winter of 411 that a practice performed in order to be elevated is thereby useful and disqualified. This view, if upheld, would disqualify every elevated practice in the Tower, since all are now performed with the Register in mind. It has not been upheld. It has not been dismissed either.

The first elevation

The class was created by Surveyor-Prime Althea in the course of compiling the first observational logs, and the earliest entry in her hand is well known: the practice of turning a door handle twice before entering a room on Floor 188, attested across eleven floors and, by her count, some four hundred persons. Althea recorded the practice, established its independence by the simple method of asking, and elevated it. Her rival, Surveyor-Prime Elara Vance, objected that Althea had asked in a manner that informed the asked. The exchange is preserved in the Surveyors' correspondence and consists, in its entirety, of eleven letters, nine of which are about the manner of asking.

The elevation stood. The practice did not.

Lapse and restoration

Elevations lapse quietly. A Class Γ-Prime practice that fails its annual review is not formally demoted; it is simply not re-entered, and the Register's next printing shows a gap where the entry was. Practitioners are not notified, as the Concordances are silent on whether notification would constitute an intervention, and the resulting ambiguity is considered preferable to a ruling.

The most-studied lapse concerns the practice of reading the last page of a document first, elevated in the year 512 and lost in the year 519 when its practitioner population on Floor 63 was found to have diminished to a single individual who had, in the interim, taken up the practice for a reason. Restoration was refused. The refusal is cited in the Register of Primary Standards as an example of an entry that is correct in every particular and cannot be acted upon.

Contested recensions

Two recensions of the Annex are in circulation and they do not agree on the order of the criteria. The standing text, Title I Prime, held under glass in the eastern alcove of the Scriptorium, places continuity first. A later recension, distributed without seal and therefore of no authority, places inutility first — a change of no consequence except that, under the later ordering, several dozen practices currently elevated would have failed at the second criterion instead of the first and would be recorded differently in the Register. The Silence Edicts were issued in part to prevent further discussion of which recension governs, though they were issued before anyone had finished discussing it, and the discussion continued in a lower register.

Maintenance note

The Register of Elevated Practices is kept in a locked cabinet on Floor 291, beside the Narrative Buffer, which was repurposed for archival storage and now holds the working copies. The cabinet is opened on the first working day of each quarter. Keys are held by the Clerk-Arkivist Second Class and by no one else; the second key was returned to the Scriptorium in 498 and has not been asked for since. Persons wishing to consult an elevation should bring their own light, as the cabinet's fixture was condemned under a Class A-Prime directive and may not be replaced while the directive stands.