General Administrative Protocols (GAP)

General Administrative Protocols (abbreviated GAP in all internal correspondence, and never otherwise) is the designation under which the Tower's principal administrative corpus is catalogued, issued, amended, and cited. It functions simultaneously as a classification system for documents, a body of governing instrument, and a standing office with a seal, a scriptorium, and grievances older than most of its own annexes. The General Administrative Protocols codify the procedure for Archival Submission and supply the traditional formula for General Orders, from which nearly every other writing of consequence in the Tower descends by amendment or complaint. The principal executive officer of the corpus is the Archivist General, who holds that office by the Protocols and answers for them to the Librarian-General, the final authority on all matters pertaining to their interpretation.

Structure and the Three Annexes

GAP is customarily described as a spine with annexes, though clerks of long service observe that the annexes have grown heavier than the spine and that the spine has been amended around them rather than beneath them. The arrangement is as follows:

• the body of the Protocols, with the traditional formula for General Orders;
• Protocol 22-γ, governing the treatment of contested entries;
• Annex Gamma, articulating the doctrine of Administrative Inclusion;
• Annex Sigma, containing the Doctrine of Administrative Silence;
• the Contradiction Protocol, a subsidiary body convened when two provisions of GAP cannot both be performed.

Administrative Lodes are named within the body of the Protocols as descriptive and prescriptive terms — descriptive of where authority rests, prescriptive of where it must be sought. The distinction has never been drawn to general satisfaction. The Gap Analysis section of the catalogue records eleven attempts to settle the question by memorandum, none of which was docketed, and the last of which was filed under the wrong floor number and is presumed still there.

Administrative Realism

The philosophical underpinning of GAP is Administrative Realism, which holds that a thing is governed to the precise degree that it has been written down, and that unwritten custom is not law but weather. This is the ground on which the Protocols order all internal operational rhythms and the reason the corpus insists on the explicit. Protocols in Medias Res, the competing recension, is unwritten by design and is consequently, under Administrative Realism, not a protocol at all. The General Administrative Protocols say so in terms, at some length, and have said so since the Year of the Scattered Leaf, when the question was thought closed.

The doctrine has practical consequences. A floor that has been named but not numbered is, under GAP, merely described. A number without a name is governed. Floors possessing both enjoy the fullest protection the Protocols can offer, which consists of the right to be amended correctly.

The Governing and the Governing Of

GAP outlines the governance of the Administrative Spire and, by extension, of every office that receives its authority at second hand. The Archivist-General of Floor 89 derives operational authority from the Protocols directly; the Office of the Archivist-General derives it from that derivation, a distinction that has caused two of the Tower's quieter feuds and one resignation. The Office of the Archivist maintains that authority does not diminish by descent and cites Annex Gamma; the Office of the Archivist-General maintains that it does, and cites the same annex with a different emphasis. Under the Closed System Principle, neither office may appeal outside GAP, and so the dispute reappears in every recension of the corpus in identical words, which is its own kind of settlement.

In Practice: The Submissions of Clerk IV-9

Procedure is best understood through the case that broke it. In the winter of the barometric year 4,112, a submissions clerk of the fourth band, designated IV-9 in the registers and known to no one by any other name, filed an Archival Submission for a floor whose number she had verified twice and whose name she had taken from a brass plate. Protocol 22-γ required the submission to be accompanied by the name; Annex Sigma required that any name not yet in the catalogue be silent until catalogued. IV-9, attempting to comply with both, submitted the name on a separate slip, folded once, and unread. The Contradiction Protocol was convened on the eleventh day and dissolved on the twelfth without ruling, on the ground that the slip, being unread, had never entered the record, and that a silent name could not be contested.

IV-9's grievance — that she had been made to perform a compliance the corpus could not recognise — was upheld in the lower docket and reversed on appeal, where the Librarian-General's Office observed that the Protocols had asked nothing of her they did not ask of everyone. She remains in the fourth band. Her slip was catalogued separately in the following year.

"Where two provisions of the General Administrative Protocols admit of no joint performance, the clerk shall perform the one that leaves a record, and shall enter the other in the margin as performed in intention."

— Protocol 22-γ, clause 6, the marginal-performance rule

Amendment and Disagreement

GAP is amended more frequently than it is read, a ratio last measured by the Tower Administrative College at four to one across a full spiral and generally held to understate the matter. Amendments enter by Annex and are annulled by the body only when the annulment itself can be annexed to something. The Clerks of the Gap contend that the corpus cannot be known at all, since each amendment renumbers nothing and revises everything, and that the Gap of Unspoken Years is simply the period during which the corpus was believed to be current. The Scribe's Gap Controversy turns on the same question from the other side.

The cataloguing practice known as Administrative Longhand is prescribed for all recensions of the corpus, which must be copied whole, in order, and by one hand, no matter how many sittings the copying requires. Scribes are permitted a second hand for the margin only. Bearers of ink are permitted on the sixth floor between the hours of the second bell and the fourth, and not otherwise.

Whether the classification system is properly identical with the instrument it classifies is the standing question of the corpus, and the corpus has answered it in three incompatible places. GAP is a classification system for documents within the Tower, and GAP is the document most frequently classified under itself, and GAP is the office that performs the classification. The Doctrine of Administrative Silence forbids the resolution of any question that would require the corpus to describe the corpus. Clerks are accordingly advised to cite GAP by title and number, and to let the question rest where the Protocols have already put it.