Formalization of G-44

Formalization of G-44 is the recorded process by which the irregular category-designation G-44 was received into the standing registers of The Tower as a recognized class of catalogued object, together with the three recensions of the procedural dossier that attended it. It is cited less for the objects it governs than for the manner of its reception: G-44 was the only designation in the modern record to be formalized before anyone had determined what it designated.

Background: the open numeral

The letter-and-numeral designation G-44 first appears in the intake ledgers of the Provisional Acquisitions desk in the winter of the year recorded as 3,118, in an entry consisting of the designation, a floor reference (Floor 44, which does not appear on the departmental stair register for that decade), and the phrase one (1) further object, condition unrehearsed. The intake clerk, Clerk Ombra Vey, noted in the margin that the object had been received and immediately mislaid, a sequence she recorded without comment as though it were the ordinary course. Every subsequent attempt to inspect G-44 produced a different description of it, none of which agreed, and two of which described the inspecting officer.

Under ordinary procedure the entry would have been struck from the ledgers as a clerical artifact. It was not struck, because the Bureau of Unspoken Context objected to the strike on the ground that the designation itself, once written, had acquired a context that the Bureau was obliged to keep unspoken. The objection was upheld by the desk on procedural grounds and G-44 entered a forty-one-year period of what the ledgers call suspended standing.

First recension and the Ninth Concordance

The first formalizing recension, submitted by the Codification sub-desk under seal 9-C, sought to give G-44 the status of a specified null: a category with one member which could not be examined. This was challenged at once under the Ninth Concordance, whose strictures prohibit premature formalization. The sub-desk argued that G-44 had been standing unformalized for four decades and that no further prematurity was available to it; the challengers replied, citing Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, that prematurity is a property of the formalization and not of the delay, and that a designation can remain premature indefinitely provided no one agrees what it means.

"A category shall not be closed on the ground that it is overdue. That a thing is late is no evidence of what it is."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, clause 7

The first recension was accordingly not adopted but endorsed in part, a distinction of the Codification of Stalemate Procedure which allows a document to be cited without being obeyed. It has since been cited more than nine hundred times.

Second recension and the Incompatibility Theorem

The second recension, drafted by the Guild of Theoretical Mechanics in collaboration with a hydraulics assessor, attempted to describe G-44 by its behaviour rather than its content. The assessor, working within Impossible Hydraulics, had observed that objects placed on the intake shelf alongside G-44 acquired the designation's instability and could no longer be weighed twice in agreement. The recension proposed that G-44 be formalized as a category of objects whose measurements do not reconcile, and that any holding failing two successive weighings be entered under it by default.

This proposal was defeated by the Algernon Incompatibility Theorem, which had already been instrumentalized against exactly this kind of assimilation. The Theorem holds that an unstable member may not confer its instability upward; to formalize G-44 by its behaviour would have been to admit, by the side door, every misweighed article in the archive. The mechanics guild withdrew the recension and, in a note dated 3,141, recorded that it had "confused a symptom of G-44 with G-44 itself, an error the Theorem exists to forbid."

Third recension and the G-44 Rule

The third and adopting recension was drafted in 3,152 by Historiographer Lys, who declined to say what G-44 was and formalized only the rules by which it might be cited. Under the recension, now carried as Annex 11 of the Formalization Amp Codification and known informally as the G-44 Rule, the designation may be used in any article provided no attempt is made to reconcile the usages with one another. The apparatus of the Codification — the Cataloguing Amp and the Ceremonial Inscription Amp Integration — was modified in 3,154 to admit G-44 entries without comparison across the register, a modification that required the two amps to be isolated from each other for eleven days and from the Tensile Braces for four.

Lys's covering note is the most frequently quoted document of the whole affair:

"The category is not unknown to us. It is merely inconsiderate. We formalize the inconsiderateness and leave the category where it is."

— Historiographer Lys, covering note to Recension III, shelf-mark F-AC/11

Dispute and later rulings

Scholars remain divided on whether the G-44 Rule constitutes a formalization at all. The School of Qualitive Negation holds that a rule for citing an object without comparing it is a formalization of the citation, not of the object, and cites in support of this position The Fading Theorem of Reciprocal Negation, which was developed during the Consolidation Period on precisely the question of whether a category can be closed around its own use. The Bureau of Unspoken Context takes the opposite view, maintaining that G-44 has been fully formal since the intake entry of 3,118 and that the recensions were merely the paperwork catching up. A third position, argued by the mechanics guild in a series of annexes, is that G-44 has never existed and that the first recension was correct in substance though defective in form.

The Librarians have not ruled on the question. They have ruled, under SP, that G-44 entries must carry a notation of the recension under which they were made, and, under Ordinance 44-E, that an entry once made may be dismissed but not corrected. Practically, this means that the mislaid object of 3,118 is still entered as received, condition unrehearsed, and that no clerk has been permitted to amend the phrase. Clerk Ombra Vey's marginal note survives unaltered in the eighth volume of the intake ledgers. The object itself has not been sought since 3,140, when a search party returned with an inventory of forty-one items, none of which was G-44 and one of which was the party's own departure record.