Department of Perpetual Motion

The Department of Perpetual Motion is a standing body of the Tower charged with the review, classification, and safe custody of motion that does not stop, and of motion that has not yet been shown to stop. It occupies Floors 1188 through 1214 and is administered under Concordance 102 and the perpetual-motion clauses of the Ordinance on Rotational Infrastructure. The Department does not claim jurisdiction over motion that has already stopped; that matter falls to the Department of Anomalous Durations, a distinction the two bodies have litigated eleven times and interpreted identically never.

Establishment and structure

The Department was constituted in Cycle 94 by the Concordance of Standing Departments, which granted it "all corridors, annexes, and turning rooms necessary to the pursuit of motion without rest." That phrase, written in a single afternoon by a scrivener who is not named in the recension and is presumed to have been in a hurry, has since been cited in support of the Department's claim to fourteen corridors it does not occupy and cannot enter, and in one instance to a stairwell that runs the wrong way.

Its work is divided among three sections. The Section of Continuous Rotation maintains the registering equipment. The Section of Sub-Classified Drift monitors the substances and phenomena that sit outside the Almost-Perpetual Motion Device standard, including Perpetual Creep. The Section of Appendices, added in Cycle 131, exists to keep the Department's annexes in the order the Concordances specify rather than the order in which they were attached.

The Department's head clerk is styled the Registrar of Unresting Things. The office has been held since Cycle 203 by Emeric Vaunt, who has petitioned three times for its abolition and once, in the winter of Cycle 211, for its renaming. Both petitions were received and filed, which the Department regards as a resolution.

Annex VII and the resonance incident

Annex VII is a chamber on Floor 1201 with a single north-facing aperture and no furniture that may be described in the register as "a table." It was there that the schematic for the Kinetic Page-Turner was held under review, and there that the resonance incident occurred. On the fourteenth day of the eleventh month of Cycle 197, an apparatus under examination began to advance its own pages at a rate the examining clerk could not record and the room could not contain. The incident lasted nine minutes. The record of it required four hundred pages.

The Department's report on the incident attributed the cascading motion to a misconstrued winding instruction in the review protocol, and the protocol was amended in Cycle 198 to require that any apparatus brought into Annex VII be wound once, clockwise, by a clerk of at least the rank of Sub-Registrar, in the presence of a witness who has read the instruction aloud first. No apparatus has since been brought into Annex VII. The amendment remains in force.

The catalogue dispute

The Department's most consequential entanglement began when it attempted to classify certain borderline devices as perpetual by accumulation, and the Bureau of Sanctioned Motion objected that accumulation was not a motion but a habit. The resulting Catalogue of Perpetual Motion dispute ran for two cycles and ended with the codification of Taxonomic Series 44.312.07, which now governs the Department's classifications and which the Department did not draft.

Scholars disagree about what the dispute actually settled. The Third Commentary on the Catalogue Dispute holds that the Bureau conceded the principle of accumulation and quibbled only over its measurement; the Department's own recension of the proceedings, Registrar's Note on the Two Cycles, holds that the Bureau conceded nothing and that the codification was imposed on both parties by the Librarians in a single sealed sitting. The two accounts agree on every date, every name, and no conclusion whatsoever. A third account, Annals of the Turning Rooms, asserts that no dispute took place and that the records of it are an artefact of how the minutes were filed; this account is catalogued, cited, and not read.

Relation to adjacent offices

The Department's standing with the Department of Perpetual Pending is formal and courteous. The Pending Department administers the Type 2: Perpetual Pending classification over matters that have not concluded, and the Motion Department administers matters that cannot conclude, being in motion. Where an object is both pending and in motion — a screw sent for review that is still turning — the two Departments exchange it on the last day of each accounting quarter. A stamp on the transfer slip records the day and hour of the exchange and the fact that it was made. The stamp is required in triplicate.

The Department also maintains standing correspondence with the Sub-Department of Perpetual Registries, which holds the File of Turning Things, and with the Department of Sanctioned Melancholy regarding the disposition of apparatus that has stopped in front of a witness. Nothing in the Department's holdings is recorded on the Vellum of Perpetual Reckoning; the Department maintains that its own registers are sufficient, and the question has never been put to the Librarians because no one has thought of a way to put it that does not sound like a complaint.

Inventory of Floor 1209

Floor 1209, the Department's principal storage level, was surveyed in Cycle 214 and found to contain the following:

• Four hundred and six unwound springs, each in its own labelled drawer, none of which is labelled.
• The travelling-frame prototype of the Kinetic Page-Turner, catalogue number 44.312.07/3, under a cotton sheet.
• Seventeen sealed jars of Perpetual Creep, held at the request of the Section of Sub-Classified Drift.
• The Department's second-best table, which is not to be described in the register as a table.

The Department's founding charge requires that every floor under its administration be walked at the start of each shift, so that any motion begun in the night may be noted before it is classified. The walk on Floor 1209 takes forty minutes. The Department has requested that the charge be read as applying only to floors where motion has previously been noted, and this request is under consideration by the Bureau of Recursive Affairs, where requests of this kind are said to be considered thoroughly.