Expansion Protocols

The '''Expansion Protocols''' are the standing body of instruments, schedules, and customary readings by which the Tower authorizes an increase in its own archival holdings. They are not a single document. The Protocols comprise some forty-one Concordance annexes, eleven schedules of measurement, and an accumulating register of precedents held at the Office of Vertical Affairs, and they are amended more often than they are consulted. Their purpose, stated in the preamble to the earliest recension, is to ensure that any enlargement of the archive is "enlarged knowingly, measured twice, and recorded before it is inhabited" — a formula repeated in nearly every subsequent instrument and honored in perhaps half of them.

The Protocols are distinct from the phenomena they regulate. A Silent Expansion, for instance, may occur without any instrument being issued at all, and the Protocols exist chiefly to determine, after the fact, whether such an event should be entered as authorized, tolerated, or referred.

Origins and the Fourth Concordance

The foundational protocols derive from the Fourth Concordance, which established the general obligation of archival expansion and the principle that new holdings must be attested by two offices before they may be cited. The Concordance did not specify which two. This omission was not corrected until 12 Meton, Aris 33, when Annex VII was ratified to standardize lower-floor expansion procedures and, incidentally, to fix the attesting offices as the Archivists and the Guilds of the Tower. The Quarrymens' reading of the same clause — that the second attestation belongs to whatever guild physically opened the floor — remains on the books and has never been withdrawn.

Earlier precedent had already complicated matters at Aperture Delta 7, where spatial contraction was first documented in 1903. The protocols drafted in response to that event assumed expansion and contraction to be distinguishable by direction. They are not, and the schedules have been quietly revised five times to accommodate the fact.

Types of authorization

The Protocols recognize three broad instruments. A Formal Variance Request authorizes a named enlargement of stated dimensions on a stated floor, and is the ordinary instrument of Descents and of the Expansion of the Lower Axial Stacks. A Standing Tolerance permits unspecified growth below a stated ceiling and is renewed annually; it is the instrument most often cited in Inter-Guild Relations disputes, usually by the party who was not consulted. A Retroactive Entry, finally, records an expansion that has already occurred and cannot now be prevented, and is the only instrument in the Protocols whose preamble contains an apology.

The three are not mutually exclusive. Floor -122 carried a Standing Tolerance, a Retroactive Entry, and a pending Formal Variance Request simultaneously between 14 and 19 Neven, Aris 51, a condition the Bureau of Ledgers later described as "administratively crowded."

The problem of recursive expansion

The Protocols have never satisfactorily addressed expansions that generate their own authorization. Tier Beta protocols are the standard example: cataloguing a new holding creates new referential surface, which requires cataloguing, which is itself an expansion requiring authorization. Concordance 41, Annex C was drafted to contain this difficulty and instead formalized it, providing that recursive expansions may be authorized by the expansion they authorize, subject to review. Review of such chains is conducted by the Office of Vertical Affairs and, by its own admission, lags the chains by an average of eleven years.

The practical consequence is that a recursive expansion, once begun, is generally treated as authorized unless someone objects in writing. Objections are filed at the third sub-landing of the Office and must be submitted in person.

Scholarly disagreement: the Meton question

A persistent dispute concerns whether the Protocols bind expansions that occur in materials rather than in spaces. The Pulsatory Expansion/Contraction reading holds that a concept's rhythmic swelling is neither an expansion nor a contraction but a motion, and therefore lies outside the Protocols entirely. The opposing reading, advanced at length in the Fifth Concordance and never retracted, holds that any increase in a concept's zone of influence is an expansion "however it is spelled," and that the Type-B reading is a category error dressed as a measurement.

"The distinction between a thing that grows and a thing that moves while growing is a distinction without a schedule. The Protocols apply to both, and to the clerk who must write them up afterwards."

— Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, marginal note attributed to the Recorder of Schedule Eleven

The Infinite Regress of Detail school has entered the dispute on neither side, observing that the question of which expansions the Protocols govern is itself an expansion of the Protocols, and filing accordingly.

Record-keeping and known failures

Every instrument issued under the Protocols is entered in the Inventarium within one working day and sealed within three. The seal is a formality; the entry is not. Expansions that go unentered are held to have occurred, for legal purposes, on the date they are eventually entered, which has produced at least one expansion dated after the floor it describes had been fully catalogued and twice abandoned.

The best-documented failure remains the winter of Aris 47, when a Formal Variance Request for the lower vestibule was approved under Schedule Eleven but entered in the register under Schedule Four, whose ceiling was nine feet lower than the work performed. The resulting discrepancy was resolved by the simple expedient of recording the vestibule as two vestibules, one of which has since been found to exist and the other of which has not. The Referential Sprawl arising from the second is still being contained under Concordance 41, Annex C, and the clerk who made the entry, one Ovren Shall, was reassigned to the measurement of stairwells, where the numbers are at least permitted to disagree with one another in private.

Current practice requires that the schedule number be written on the instrument before the instrument is written. The requirement was introduced in Aris 48 and has prevented four misfilings and caused, by the Office's own count, sixty-one delays.