Containment Phase — The Tower

The Containment Phase is that portion of any Tower procedure during which a phenomenon is held in place rather than examined, moved, or released. It is defined in Concordance XII, Annex 1, as "the interval in which the object's position is the operative fact and its nature is not," and it is distinguished throughout the archive from the examination intervals that precede and follow it. The Containment Phase has no fixed duration. It ends when it is superseded, which is not the same as when it is concluded, and the distinction has occupied three separate recensions of Concordance XII and one grievance file that has never been closed.

Definition and scope

Under Concordance XII the Containment Phase begins at the moment custody attaches and ends at the moment custody is formally transferred elsewhere. Custody attaches in different ways depending on the procedure: through Phase Alpha Identification Amp Containment for phenomena that have cleared isolation but have not entered the opening of the Notification Amp Sequestration Phase Alpha cycle; through Containment Protocol Theta during the quarantine phase of the Selvage Protocol; and through Phase 2 Retrieval Amp Quarantine where designated ephemera are recovered from active Stasis Quarantine fields. In each case the containment itself is identical in form and differs only in the instrument that authorises it.

The practice is frequently confused with the Stabilization and Containment process, which contains a containment stage but does not consist of it. Stabilization Assessment, the formalized second phase of that process, is an examination, and the archive has ruled twice that an examination is not a containment even where the object has not moved for eleven years.

Instruments and requisites

Containment is effected by instrument, never by instruction alone. The standard instrument is the physical sleeve; Delta-phase containment sleeves are mandatory for all physical specimens of Delta-phase variable materials, which by their nature cannot be held by other means. Non-physical phenomena are contained by attestation, that is, by registration against a floor and a number, and the archive notes that attestation is the weaker instrument but the only one that has never failed.

Authority for sequestration during any containment interval derives from Concordance VII, Annex 2, which states that no phenomenon shall be released from Phase Alpha Identification Amp Containment prior to the execution of its Initial Containment Amp Description. The Description is registered against the subject during Notification Amp Sequestration Phase Alpha, and clerks are reminded that a Description executed after release is a record of what was released, not a containment.

The dispute over commencement

Two readings of commencement persist. The first, maintained by the Secretariat of Bounds, holds that the Containment Phase begins when the subject crosses the threshold of the containing floor. The second, maintained by the Office of Prior Custody, holds that it begins when the intent to contain is entered in the day-book, which may be as much as four days earlier.

"A threshold is crossed once. An entry is made once. The Tower does not require that these be the same once."

— Concordance XII, Annex 6, note to the fourth recension

The practical consequence is that a phenomenon contained on a Tuesday may be recorded as having been in containment since the preceding Friday, and returns filed under the earlier date. The Bureau of Indexed Openings has declined to correct the resulting confusion, on the grounds that the confusion is stable and the correction would not be.

A minority reading, advanced by Librarian Ospren Vey in a marginal note of 4 Frost, 981, proposes that the phase begins whenever the object ceases to be interesting. The note is preserved and has never been cited in a ruling.

Floor 1,142 and the winter of 981

The longest recorded Containment Phase was held on Floor 1,142, where a phenomenon of uncertain category was contained under Theta for the whole of the winter of 981. The quarantine radius was drawn at nine paces and repainted each fortnight, and the floor's heating ducts were rerouted to pass outside it. The phase was superseded on 2 Thaw, 982, by consolidation, and the object was found to be a door. It remains in containment under consolidation, as doors are not released without the countersignature of the Directorate of Field Verification, and the Directorate's preliminary scan has not yet been scheduled.

Relationship to adjacent phases

The Containment Phase is bounded by the Operational Phase before it and the Integration Phase after it, though the boundaries are administrative rather than observed. Where an incident has occurred during containment, the phase is extended through the Post-Incident Review and only then released to cataloguing. The archive maintains that containment, triage and cataloguing are three intervals and not one interval described three times, and has reissued the point in every recension of Concordance XII since the ninth.

Phase 3: Initial Assessment may run concurrently with containment, as may Inscriptive Actualization, and the coexistence of the two has never been reconciled with the single-interval rule. The Librarians issue standing instructions governing that overlap and amend them more often than they are read.