Floor 106

Description

Floor 106 is a mid-Tower accession floor administered by the Bureau of Residual Holdings, situated between Floor 105 and Floor 107 in the standard ascending order, though the Fourth Concordance places it elsewhere entirely. The floor comprises a single unbroken hall of shelving (412 metres north to south by 88 metres east to west, per the survey of Clerk-Prefect Halvard Eames) and a small vestibule used for the receipt of items no office has yet claimed.

Floor 106 holds what the Tower calls residual holdings: objects, documents, and in three recorded instances animals that arrived on a floor by means no office has been able to account for. They are catalogued, sealed, and stored pending identification of their origin. The floor has not identified an origin for any holding in ninety-one years.

Accession

Items reach Floor 106 through one of two routes. The first is administrative transfer, whereby a floor's custodial staff discover an item not listed on their own inventory and forward it downward with a Form 106-A. The second is direct deposit, whereby an item simply appears on the shelving overnight. The Bureau of Residual Holdings maintains that the second route does not occur.

The last inventory to acknowledge direct deposit was the Recension of Halvard Eames in 3891, which recorded forty-two such arrivals in a single winter and appended the observation that "the shelving does not appear to be in want of them." Subsequent recensions omit the figure. The discrepancy was raised at the Seventh Concordance and referred to a subcommittee that has not reported.

"An item which cannot be traced to a floor cannot be traced, and an item which cannot be traced is stored. This is not a failure of the Bureau. This is the Bureau."

— Prefect-Marling Osric Vane, Notes on the Residual Holdings, Annex 9

Notable holdings

The following are drawn from the Standing Register of Floor 106, Vol. XII (4097–4103):

• Holding 106-4471 — a brass key, 61 mm, unlabelled, fitting no lock on Floors 100–112. Re-tested annually; last confirmed non-functional in 4102.
• Holding 106-4488 — a sealed jar containing what the label describes as "weather." Contents have not been opened. Weight varies between 340 and 391 grams depending on which clerk reports it.
• Holding 106-4512 — a complete set of survey equipment belonging to an expedition that has not been recorded as having departed.
• Holding 106-4530 — a cat, identified only as "the Floor 106 cat," present since at least 4044 and not listed on any inventory. The Bureau's position is that it is not a holding.

The cat is discussed at length in Floor 173, which disputes the Bureau's position; the reader is referred there for the competing accounts.

Governance disputes

Floor 106 has been the subject of a long-standing jurisdictional disagreement between the Bureau of Residual Holdings and the Office of Provenance, which holds that residual items fall under its remit until origin is established. The Third Concordance appears to support the Office of Provenance; the Fifth Concordance appears to support the Bureau; both are cited in support of both positions, and the matter is generally considered settled by whoever cites last.

Clerk-Prefect Eames' tenure (4011–4069) was marked by an attempt to establish a permanent Provenance substation on Floor 106 itself. The substation was built, staffed for eleven days, and then reported that it had been unable to locate its own office. It was dissolved by memorandum in 4013. The room is still there and still has a nameplate.

In the winter of 4071, a disagreement over the disposition of Holding 106-4488 escalated into a formal censure of Prefect Vane, later rescinded when the censuring office conceded it had been citing the wrong Concordance. The jar had, in the interim, been moved three shelves to the left. No one recorded who moved it.

Related floors

Floor 106 is often compared with Floor 441, which functions as a similar residual store for documents rather than objects, and with Floor 101 and Floor 102, whose inventories are frequently consulted when attempting to trace a holding's origin. Items occasionally reach Floor 106 from Floor 113 via the calibration floors, a route the Bureau describes as "unusual but not unprecedented." Readers seeking the administrative framework governing residual storage generally begin with the Third Concordance and, if unsatisfied, proceed to the Fifth.

Visiting hours are the second and fourth thawsday of each month. Visitors are asked not to feed the cat.