Environmental Survey

Environmental Survey is the first stage of Vector Alpha and the Tower's formal procedure for ascertaining the condition of an enclosed space before any determination is entered against it. It is distinguished from Environmental Monitoring by direction: monitoring watches a place over time, while surveying inspects a place once, records what it finds, and closes the scope. A survey that continues past its stated closing date must be re-registered and, if the space has changed in the interim, begun again. Most do.

The procedure is governed by Environmental Control Ordinances, and the authority to declare a space surveyed rests with the Department of Environmental Consistency, which records the result on Form DEC-9 where an irregularity is found. Where no irregularity is found, no form is filed, and the absence of a form is itself accepted as the record of a clean survey — a convention that has caused difficulty since the practice began.

Stages and the Closing of Scope

An Environmental Survey proceeds through reconnaissance, platework, and what the Ordinances call closure of scope. Reconnaissance establishes the boundaries of the space; platework produces the Survey Plates that accompany every survey file; closure fixes the date beyond which observation is no longer part of the survey.

Scope is not permitted to expand once closed. Survey Scope Delimitation, issued under Ordinance 4.γ, states the rule plainly: "A survey shall not be reopened on the ground that something has since been found in it." Clerks have repeatedly attempted to evade this by declaring the newly found object a separate space requiring a separate survey, a practice the Department has neither endorsed nor successfully suppressed.

Survey and Absence

Environmental Survey is chiefly concerned with spaces in which absence is pronounced. Empty floors, sealed shafts, and rooms whose contents have been catalogued but not located are subject to Aperture Alpha protocols, which are invoked at this stage and at no other. The protocols require the surveyor to record the shape of the absence rather than to search for what is missing — an instruction that reads as mysticism and functions as bookkeeping.

Surveyors carry a graduated rod, a register of prior surveys of the same floor, and a stub of chalk for the marking of surveyed thresholds. The chalk is returned at the close of each shift and is not to be carried out of the survey.

The Kestrel Floor Surveys

The longest-running Environmental Survey on record concerns a suite of eleven rooms on the floor catalogued as 4,118, known in the survey files as the Kestrel Floor. The first survey was opened in Year 47 of the Fifth Chronology and closed, clean, after nine days. It was reopened eleven times before Year 52, each reopening justified by the discovery of a room not present at the previous survey, and each reopening contested by Survey Scope Delimitation.

The disagreement turned on whether a space that becomes present is a new space or an old one returning. The Department of Environmental Consistency declined to rule, noting that a ruling either way would invalidate its own earlier filings. The floor remains under annual survey. Its current register lists nineteen rooms.

Disagreement over the Standing of the Survey

Whether an Environmental Survey has any force beyond the record it creates is disputed. The Environmental Stewards of the Annex maintain that a survey establishes nothing but a description, and that describing a space as anomalous does not make it so — a position they have advanced in every recension of their submission since their founding. The Department, by contrast, treats a survey finding as sufficient to trigger an Environmental Contingency where the finding meets the threshold set in Form DEC-9.

"The survey is not evidence of the condition. The survey is the condition, as far as this office is concerned, and the rest is argument."

— Department of Environmental Consistency, memorandum of Year 58, Box 14, item 6

The Directorate of Environmental Coherence has proposed that surveys be conducted under a subordinate procedure issued by its Bureau of Climatic Equilibrium, which would have the effect of routing findings through a second stage of review. The proposal has been before the Concordance since Year 59 and has not been read.

Relationship to Inversion

Environmental Survey is the usual means by which instances of Environmental Inversion are first recorded, though the survey does not classify them. Classification falls to Ordinance 7.β, which places inversion at Tier-III, and to the Department, which has the adapting of procedures for inversion in hand. Surveyors are instructed not to enter an inverted space until it has been surveyed from the outside, and not to survey from the outside for longer than one shift without relief, on the ground that the relief clerk may not be the same person who began.

The Third Survey Expedition carried the full survey apparatus to the regions above floor 9,000 and returned with sixteen crates of plates and no conclusion, as recorded in The Partial Survey and in the summary volume, Findings from The Partial Survey.