Forensic Dossier

The Forensic Dossier is the evidentiary instrument by which a completed Dossier of Existence is subjected to adversarial reading. It is not itself a Dossier of Existence, nor a variant of one; the distinction is maintained with some heat by the Dossier Scriptoria, which accept no Forensic Dossier for filing and have done so consistently since the Ruling of the Ninth Annex. A Forensic Dossier comprises four parts — the Recension, the Objection Schedule, the Vantage Clause, and the Seal of Unresolved Matter — of which only the first three are required to agree with one another.

The instrument emerged from the reorganization of Applied Forensic Ontology under the Three Precepts of Causal Integrity, whose second precept holds that a record unopposed is a record untested. Forensic Archivists were accordingly instructed to assemble, for each Dossier they traced by means of the Sequential Causality Mapper, a parallel file in which every claim of the original was formally contested by a reader appointed to lose no argument. The earliest surviving exemplar, the Forensic Dossier on the Hermetic Dossier Tube (Binder 44, fols. 12–19), contests fourteen of the Tube's nineteen claims and concedes five "with reluctance and without prejudice."

Composition

The Recension is a verbatim restatement of the parent dossier, altered only where alteration can be shown to be necessary. Alterations are recorded in the margin in red, initialled by two clerks and countersigned by a third who is not told what the alteration concerns. The Objection Schedule lists the objections raised against the Recension, numbered by the aperture system in use on the originating floor. The Vantage Clause states from which floor the Dossier was read; this is not a formality. The Ledger of Established Vectors records that a claim in Dossier Alpha 707 was upheld from Floor 88 and overturned from Floor 86 in the same afternoon of the winter of the fourth recension, and the Vantage Clause exists to prevent a repetition.

The Seal of Unresolved Matter is affixed in grey wax and is unique among Tower seals in that it denotes nothing concluded. It may be broken once, by the filing clerk, on receipt. A second breaking voids the Dossier entire. The Chrono-Forensic Audit procedures routinely require the Seal to be broken twice, and the resulting standoff has generated more procedural correspondence than any other matter in the archive; the standard compromise is an MVD opened on the spot and immediately closed unexamined.

Procedure and its failures

The procedure proper is described in the Fourth Recension of the Concordance of Evidentiary Sealing, annex 6, as "the orderly opposition of a record to itself, conducted in a fixed place, by named persons, at a stated temperature." The temperature requirement derives from the deterioration of grey wax above the fourteenth vertical of the eastern stairwell.

"No Forensic Dossier shall be sealed in the presence of the party who compiled it, nor within sight of the parent document, nor by a clerk who has read both."

— Concordance of Evidentiary Sealing, Fourth Recension, annex 6, clause 3

The restriction is not always observed. In the matter of the Iota Triad Dossier, Clerk-Adjutor Pellin Morve sealed the Forensic Dossier while in possession of the parent, within sight of it, and having read both, and defended the irregularity on the ground that the rule as written applied only to Dossiers "held to be live," whereas the Triad had been dead since the second recension. The adjudicating committee found for Morve, then amended clause 3 to cover dead Dossiers, then found against Morve retroactively. Morve's subsequent memorandum — "On Being Correct and Afterwards Wrong" — is preserved in the Academy of Procedural Anomalies and is read aloud each year at the opening of the autumn term.

Scholarly dispute

The principal disagreement concerns whether a Forensic Dossier can possess a status of its own. The Dossier Scriptoria maintain that it cannot, since status is conferred only through the Gate Dossiers and their dependants. The Cross-Reference Dossiers, by contrast, cite in their preface a lost amendment to the Second Concordance under which any document sealed in grey wax acquires "the standing of the matter it contests, held in suspense." The two positions have never been reconciled, and the practice has settled into a compromise nobody defends in writing: Forensic Dossiers are filed in the stack between the Gate and Cross-Reference holdings, in a shelf of their own, and are not indexed.

A minority position, advanced in the marginalia of an anonymous Assessor and never formally published, holds that the Forensic Dossier is the only honest document the Tower produces, all others being "the same claims, unopposed, and therefore asleep." The Chrono-Refractive Spectroscope Adjudication Committee has ruled the marginalia inadmissible and has declined to say why.

Inventory of a sealed Forensic Dossier

• Recension (red-inked, two clerk's initials, one countersignature);
• Objection Schedule (numbered by aperture);
• Vantage Clause (floor of reading, temperature, hour);
• Seal of Unresolved Matter (grey wax, broken once);
• Filing slip (unstamped, by rule);
• One blank leaf, required, on which nothing is ever written.

The blank leaf is the subject of the Ordinance on Required Emptiness (clause 2: "a page that must remain empty is a claim in itself"), and is replaced, not removed, whenever a Dossier is rebound.

Access

Forensic Dossiers may be consulted on production of a written objection to something. The objection need not concern the Dossier requested, and in practice most readers bring the same one twice. Reading is conducted in the Reading Room of Contested Claims, which is unheated, and which the Librarians describe in their standing notice as "adequate."