Fade Assessment

Fade Assessment is the formal determination of the degree to which a catalogued holding has undergone Perceptual Fade, together with the accompanying paperwork by which that determination becomes citable. It is distinct from Fade Assessment Amp Restoration, which is the treatment; Fade Assessment only measures, certifies, and files. Practitioners insist on the distinction with some warmth. "The Amp restores," reads the standing instruction posted in every assessment alcove between Floors 1104 and 1109, "the Assessor merely says how far gone it was."

Assessment is carried out under the Manual of Perceptual Hygiene, which assigns each holding a Fade Index on a scale of nil to four, expressed to one decimal place and never rounded upward. A holding at nil is fully perceptible to any clerk of ordinary senses. A holding at four is recoverable only through archival reference and is, for practical purposes, a citation of itself.

Procedure

The assessor works from the holding's Initial Assessment sheet and its Substrate Assessment record, both of which must be current to within one Spiral. The assessor then attempts perception of the subject in the presence of a witness, records what is seen, and records separately what the assessor believes ought to have been seen. The gap between the two columns is the assessment. Where both columns are empty, the holding is presumed to be at Index 4.0 and is forwarded to the Office of Preliminary Assessment for confirmation.

The witness requirement has never been waived, though the Ninth Concordance permits a witness to be "of the assessor's own selection, provided the selection is recorded before the assessment begins." This provision was tested in the winter of Spiral 22, when Assessor Maren Quillon of Floor 1106 recorded her selection as "whoever is standing there," and completed two hundred and eleven assessments in a single night. The resulting batch was struck by the Bureau of Registry on the ground that the witness had not been identified, only located. Quillon's appeal, in which she argued that "standing there is a form of identification," is preserved in the Registry annexes and is still read aloud at assessor inductions, for instruction and for morale.

Competing scales

Scholarly disagreement over the Fade Index is old and unembarrassed. The Academy of Perceptual Absences holds that the four-point Index is an ordinal scale only, and that the decimal places are an affectation of the Registry scriptoria with no measurable referent. The Academy's position paper, Notes on the Fourth Degree, argues that an assessor who reports 2.6 has in fact reported "more than two, fewer than three, and wishes to seem careful."

The Bureau of Registry answers that the decimals are not measurements but averages: an assessment of 2.6 is the mean of successive assessments taken at not less than one hour apart, and the decimal exists precisely to record drift. This is disputed by the Office of Volumetric Assessment, which maintains that drift is a property of holdings and therefore belongs to Volumetric Assessment, not to Fade. The dispute has been before the Concordance twice. The Seventeenth Concordance assigned decimal drift to Fade; the Addendum to the Seventeenth Concordance reassigned it to Volumetric, then reassigned it back in a marginal note whose authorship is unrecorded. Assessors are instructed to report the decimal and to say nothing about who owns it.

"Where two offices claim a decimal and neither will yield it, the decimal is to be recorded in the ordinary way and the dispute referred upward. Do not settle it on the stair."

— Manual of Perceptual Hygiene, §41(c)

The Western Aperture ruling

Fade Assessment became litigious in the closing years of Spiral 17, after the Permanent Fade left a batch of Lysander Parch inscriptions permanently visible and threw every standing assessment into question. The Whispering Atlas Petition followed, and the ruling on it — which accepted Petition Slips as primary evidence — is now cited in all proceedings involving Perceptual Fade or non-standard sensory data. Its effect on assessment was immediate: an assessor may now submit a slip in place of a perception, provided the slip was filed while the holding was still perceptible. The Registry holds
eleven thousand such slips, sorted by floor and not by date, a filing decision of 17 Spiral 30 that no one has seen fit to revisit.

Difficulties concentrate near the Western Aperture, where ontological fade is known to make routes themselves unstable, and where an assessor may find that the room in which the assessment was begun is no longer the room in which it is being concluded. Assessment teams working the Aperture are issued chalk and instructed to mark the doorway before entering. Nothing further is required of them, and nothing further has ever helped.

Records and quiet incidents

Completed assessment sheets are filed in triplicate: one to the floor of origin, one to the Bureau of Registry, and one retained by the assessor. The assessor's copy is often the only surviving record, as floor collections are periodically consolidated, and consolidation is not always documented. The Office of Preliminary Assessment has twice reported holdings whose Fade Index appeared to improve after consolidation, a result the Academy attributes to clerical optimism.

Assessors are permitted to carry a lamp, a rule, and one sealed inkwell. They are not permitted to carry a second inkwell, following the Incident of the Nine Inkwells on Floor 1107, in which an assessor's spare supply was mistaken for a set of holdings and catalogued, assessed at 3.1, and restored to visibility before the error was noticed. The spare inkwells remain in the collection. They are assessed annually. They have never faded.

Assessment of a holding does not alter its Index, and assessors are reminded of this in writing at each induction. The reminder is not always effective. Quillon, asked near the end of her service why she had assessed the same corridor on Floor 1106 forty times in a single Spiral, replied that she had hoped to catch it at nil.