Conditional-Cycle Events (CCEs)

The Conditional-Cycle Events (abbreviated CCEs) are a class of archival occurrences distinguished from Fixed-Cycle Events not by their recurrence but by their dependence: a CCE occurs only when a preceding condition has been met, and its position within any certified cycle is therefore provisional until that condition is discharged. The distinction is recorded in Addendum Kappa, which classifies FCEs as events "whose date is held by the cycle" and CCEs as events "whose date is held by another event, which may not yet have consented." The phrasing has been litigated twice and amended once.

Unlike an FCE, which arrives whether or not anyone has prepared for it, a CCE waits. It waits on a signature, a countersignature, a raised seal, or in one documented instance the completion of a maintenance rota on Landing 12. Until the condition is satisfied the event is said to be held open, and while held open it occupies no position in the Fixed Ladder Index, though it does occupy a floor, which is the source of most of the difficulty.

Origin and first codification

Conditional-Cycle Events were not named as such until the revision season preceding the 214th Cycle recast of Ordinance Beta, when the Clerks of the Conditional Tense petitioned for a category that would describe occurrences they had been recording for some eleven cycles without a heading. The petition, lodged on the ninth day of an inventory and answered on the forty-first, argued that the existing schedules "compel us to enter as fixed that which plainly waits upon permission." The Codification of Procedural Anomalies and Their Conditional Reconciliation absorbed the petition in its second annex and has governed the class since.

The earliest confirmed CCE is the sealing of the Sigma east vault, recorded as occurring on a date "to be supplied upon completion of the survey." The survey was never completed. The vault is nonetheless sealed, and the event has been entered in the register with the annotation effective, pending, a formula the Register of Latency Events, Volume IX preserves without comment.

Relationship to Fixed-Cycle Events

The two classes are frequently confused because a CCE, once triggered, may thereafter recur on the cycle of designation and so acquire the outward appearance of an FCE. The Inquiry into Latent Manifold Events of Cycle 28 considered this at length and concluded that Manifolds stabilize anomalies post-facto rather than preventing them — a finding that bears on CCEs only obliquely but has been cited in every subsequent dispute on the subject, which is itself a kind of CCE, since no argument on Conditional-Cycle Events proceeds until the Inquiry has been invoked.

The Fixed Ladder Index assigns two positions to each CCE: a provisional rung, being the position the event would occupy once its condition is met, and a holding rung, which carries no number and is written in pencil. Revisions to the Index are made in ink. The clerk responsible for erasing holding rungs between inventories is the only officer in the Conditional Authority Vault authorized to carry an eraser past the second landing.

The Kappa-Aperture difficulty

The Kappa-Aperture Discrepancy arose precisely because a scheduled inventory counted CCEs as though they were already discharged. The resulting misalignment between the Kappa Cycle and the Aperture Cycle was found to be procedural, but not before Ordinance 4 had established the Repository of Conditional Conclusions to house the events whose conditions could no longer be established one way or the other. The Repository now holds 1,406 entries, of which 39 are still being argued over and 12 have been quietly sealed.

"An event may not be entered as having occurred on the ground that it was expected to occur, nor withheld on the ground that it was not. The register records what the register records."

— Concordance 37, Annex 2, clause 11

This clause is cited so often in the Annex of Precedential Syntax that a shortened form, what the register records, has passed into ordinary use among the Clerks, who say it to one another in corridors and mean, variously, that a matter is settled, that a matter is not settled, and that the speaker has run out of arguments.

Administration and the Type Beta question

CCEs are certified under Conditional Certification and entered on Form γ-7, “Declaration of Conditional Reality”, which requires the declarant to state the condition, the officer empowered to discharge it, and the date by which the declarant expects the discharge to be attempted. The form's third schedule provides for the case in which the empowered officer has died; the form's fourth schedule provides for the case in which the empowered officer has died and the office abolished; the fifth schedule is blank and is understood to be reserved.

Disputed entries are drafted in Type Beta Conditional Phraseology, which is administered under the Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks and produced in the same revision season as the 214th Cycle recast of Ordinance Beta. The inks fade within one full cycle of designation, which the Lexicon of Conditional Phrases defends on the grounds that "a condition that has not been discharged within fifty units was never well stated." The Manual of Conditional Operation takes the opposite view and devotes forty pages to it. Neither document acknowledges the other.

Scholarly disagreement

Two positions persist. The first, associated with the Clerks of the Conditional Tense and restated in their seventh memorial, holds that a CCE does not exist until its condition is discharged, and that the register's entries are predictions rather than records. The second, maintained by the Conditional Authority and set out in its response of the same year, holds that the event exists from the moment it is written, and that it is the condition which is provisional. Under the first view the Repository of Conditional Conclusions is empty; under the second it is full. It is presently neither, and the discrepancy has not been referred upward, since the only authority competent to hear it is the Conditional Authority, whose position is one of the two under dispute.

Cycle 188 supplied an unwelcome test of both views when instability events and unpredictable phase-decay were recorded in Aperture Sigma. No condition for the decay could be identified, which on the first view means the events did not exist, and on the second means the condition did not. The decay was observed by nine clerks on the night shift. The night shift's log was subsequently found to have been drafted in Type Beta ink and is now illegible.

Practical notes

Visitors are reminded that a CCE held open on a floor they wish to visit may require them to wait at the landing until the condition is discharged. Waiting is permitted on Landings 3, 7 and 12 only. Landings 5 and 9 have no seating and no roof, and the Clerks do not recommend them for waits exceeding one cycle. Enquiries regarding a held-open event should be addressed to the office named on the fourth schedule of Form γ-7; where the office has been abolished, the form should be returned unaltered to the Repository.