Form S-7

Form S-7 is a two-leaf administrative instrument held in the Registry of Provisional Holdings and classified under Sixth Concordance, Annex 14, as a "form of last resort, to be produced only after all other forms bearing on a matter have been produced and found insufficient." It carries no designated purpose. This is not an oversight; the instrument's schedule of fields was deliberately left incomplete at its first printing in the Winter Recension of 1194, and four subsequent revisions have declined to complete it.

Form S-7 is filed roughly eleven thousand times each year, which is widely regarded as the central problem in the literature.

Structure and the Empty Fields

The form is printed on paper of a weight reserved for instruments of final disposition, and is bound in the grey card stock used throughout the Registry of Provisional Holdings. Its first leaf is conventional: a box for the filing office, a box for the date, and a ruled line of eleven centimetres for the name of the matter under consideration. The second leaf consists of fields 4 through 19, all ruled, none headed.

Librarian Ottiline Marrow, whose 1302 survey of the form remains the standard reference, recorded that filers respond to the unheaded fields in three broad habits: they leave them blank; they enter the words "not applicable" repeatedly, sometimes to the bottom of the leaf; or they complete them with material they cannot place elsewhere, which is how the great majority of the surplus attached to Form S-7 filings accumulates.

"The form does not ask. This has been taken, by nearly everyone, as an invitation."

— Librarian Ottiline Marrow, Survey of the Grey Instruments, fascicle 3

The Custodial Dispute

Because Form S-7 properly accompanies nothing, two offices claim the right to receive it. The Form Genesis Division holds that an instrument without a designated purpose falls within the Primacy of Form doctrine and must be deposited with the Division, by analogy to the treatment of Form C-1 and Form γ-7. The Directorate of Form and Symmetry holds the opposite: that a form which accompanies nothing is by definition symmetrical and therefore belongs to the Directorate, and has cited the custody of Form N-12 as precedent.

The dispute hardened in the winter of 1287, when a runner of the Bureau of Registry Docket Form Ir 9 was instructed by both offices to deliver the same consignment of S-7s in the same afternoon. He delivered half to each and was reprimanded by both. The reprimands were eventually withdrawn under Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, but the withdrawal notice took four years to find him, by which time he had transferred to the stairwell survey and declined to be found.

Neither office has ever asserted that it knows what the form is for. Librarian Ottiline Marrow notes this with some dryness: "The question of custody has been pursued with vigour for a century and a half. The question of purpose has not been pursued at all, and the two offices agree on precisely one thing, which is that it is not their business" (Survey of the Grey Instruments, fascicle 3).

The Empty-Field Incident

In the winter of 1341, the whole of Floor 4004 — the floor whose name is given in the register only as Provisionally Assigned — was found to contain nothing but Form S-7. The forms were stacked to a uniform height of 1.4 metres across every room, and each was completed in a single hand, now unidentified, with entries in every unheaded field. The entries were dates. The dates ranged from 1194 to 1341 and were not in order.

An investigation under Inquiry Form L-17 established three things and no more: that the dates corresponded to no known filing event; that the paper was of the Winter Recension stock, which had not been milled for a hundred and forty years; and that the forms had been delivered to the floor by someone with legitimate access to the grey stock, which is to say, by nearly everyone.

The floor was cleared over nine days. The finding was recorded as inconclusive. Two clerks who assisted with the clearance later reported that the forms had been warm to the touch, and this detail was struck from the record by the Bureau of Registry Docket Form Ir 9 as "not within the competence of the instrument to establish."

Filing Practice

The form may be filed at any registry counter, provided that the second leaf is not turned face down at the moment of submission; a face-down S-7 is returned unfiled and the filer is asked to reconsider, though no reason for the rule is given and no clerk is authorised to supply one.

Filing is free. Retrieval is not.

Contested Interpretation

Sixth Concordance, Annex 14, clause 9 provides that a Form S-7 filed with all unheaded fields blank "shall be read as complete." Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, clause 4 provides that such a form "shall be read as not yet begun." Both annexes are in force. The Directorate of Form and Symmetry observes the Sixth; the Form Genesis Division observes the Eleventh; and the Registry of Provisional Holdings, which must shelve the things, maintains a third position — that the question is one of interpretation and therefore outside its remit.

Filers who require a determination may submit Form 33-Δ, which in practice implies a Notice of Contested Interpretation and adds, by the Registry's own count, between two and nine years to the disposition of the underlying matter. The Registry's standing advice is that most matters do not require a determination.

Where an S-7 accompanies a document the filer wishes to have declared void, the companion instrument is Form M-7 'Declaration of Nonexistence'; where it accompanies nothing at all, the companion is a second Form S-7, and the practice of submitting the pair — known informally as a doubled grey — is tolerated but not endorsed.