Fog of Unfinished Thoughts

The Fog of Unfinished Thoughts is a low-lying meteorological formation observed on the interior landings of the middle floors, composed of condensation and suspended particulate drawn from abandoned reasoning. It is not weather in the ordinary sense. The Fog forms where a thought has been begun, pursued to within sight of its conclusion, and then set down — and where the setting-down has been recorded but the thought itself was never closed. The Fog is the visible remainder of that gap. It is grey-white, smells faintly of pencil shavings, and reduces visibility on a landing to between four and nine paces depending on the season.

The phenomenon is catalogued under the joint jurisdiction of the Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies and the Stacks of Unfinished Sentences, an arrangement confirmed by Clause 14 of the Concordance of Unfinished Works and never since revisited.

Formation and behaviour

The Fog accretes rather than condenses. Each unclosed thought contributes a quantity of vapour too small to measure; the Bureau of Residual Reasoning has estimated the contribution at one part in forty thousand of a gram per abandoned clause, a figure disputed by the Office of Weights and Vapours, which holds that the gram is the wrong unit entirely and prefers the thread, defined as the vapour produced by one unfinished sentence of average length. The two offices have not reconciled.

Fog banks are stable in still air and mobile in draughts. The great stairwells generate steady updraughts, and it is for this reason that the Fog is rarely found above Floor 6,000 or below Floor 3,100; it pools in the middle landings, thickest at the Fourteenth Landing, where the Great Vertical Spiral malfunction has left a permanent bank that no amount of ventilation has dispersed. The Sanitary Directive Fog-α requires personnel exiting Floor 712 to submit to a de-gritting rinse on Floor 71 precisely because Fog residue carried upward on clothing hardens into a chalky film that has, on three recorded occasions, been mistaken for masonry.

The Mist Vault Incident and the question of classification

Fog of Unfinished Thoughts is classified as a fog-classified artifact, a designation that has proven difficult to defend. In the first Mist Vault Incident, a sealed vault on Floor 19 was opened for inventory and found to contain Fog of Unfinished Thoughts at a density sufficient to obscure the shelving. The Vault of Conditional Authority convened and confirmed that the phenomenon was localized to fog-classified artifacts and had not entered the general air of the floor. The finding was narrow, and Second Recension of the Mist Vault Findings later complained that it had settled nothing:

"The Vault having been found fog-classified, and the Fog being of the Vault's own classification, the Authority is unable to say whether the Vault was foggy because it was a vault or fog-classified because it was foggy."

— Second Recension of the Mist Vault Findings, Article 9

The distinction matters because Fog of Unfinished Thoughts is the only fog classified as an artifact rather than a condition of air, and therefore the only fog that must be stored.

The Fog of Unfinished Thoughts (Storage) Ordinance

Fog collected from the landings is decanted into stoppered glass vessels and shelved in the Repository of Standing Weather, where it is held in trust against the eventual completion of the thoughts that produced it. The Fog of Unfinished Thoughts (Storage) Ordinance of the 4,208th administrative year sets the decanting interval at eleven days and forbids the shaking of vessels. Shaking re-suspends the particulate, and re-suspended Fog has twice been observed to spell out fragments of sentences against the glass, which the Ordinance calls a nuisance and the Stacks of Unfinished Sentences call a finding.

The repository's returns are notoriously poor. Of 1,140 vessels decanted in the year of the Ordinance's promulgation, 906 were recorded as evaporated, 201 as mis-shelved, and 33 as having been opened by a clerk who wished to see what was inside. That clerk, Alder Vey, filed a note stating that the vessel had contained fog. The note was retained, entered in triplicate, and filed under Weather.

Storage is not uniform practice. The Lower Landing Working Group has argued since the 4,190s that the Fog should simply be left where it lies, on the grounds that a thing which forms naturally may be permitted to disperse naturally, and that every hour spent decanting is an hour not spent closing the thoughts. The argument has not prevailed. It is repeated on approximately eleven-day intervals.

Dispersal and the Fog of Unfinished Thoughts

Fog of Unfinished Thoughts is dispersed by completion. Where an unfinished sentence in the Stacks of Unfinished Sentences is at last brought to its period — a rare event, and one requiring the consent of three offices — the corresponding fog thins within the day. The Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies has documented a parallel effect in the Anteroom of Unfinished Symphonies, where a fog bank cleared entirely following the resolution of a single unresolved cadence. The Chamber's transcribers recorded the clearance and, per long-standing practice, declined to speculate.

No Fog of Unfinished Thoughts has ever been dispersed by ventilation alone. The Great Vertical Spiral was intended, among other things, to achieve this, and has visibly failed: the Fourteenth Landing has remained under continuous fog since the Spiral's malfunction, and visitors are advised to count the landings aloud while descending through it.

Scholarly dispute

The principal disagreement concerns whether the Fog is a record or a symptom. The Curatorium of Unfinished Likenesses holds that each bank is a faithful, if illegible, likeness of the thoughts that generated it, and has petitioned three times for authority to photograph the particulate against a dark ground. The Office of Weights and Vapours rejects this as mysticism and maintains that the Fog is merely the physical residue of an administrative failure to close files. The disagreement is unlikely to be resolved: the Concordance of Unfinished Works speaks of "the fog proceeding from the unclosed" in clause 14 and, in clause 15, of "the unclosed proceeding from the fog," and no office has ever established which clause governs the other.

The Collected Prefaces to the Unfinished Catalogue print both clauses on facing pages without comment. Readers are asked not to write in the margins.