Intake 99,997 (Preliminary Vetting)

Intake 99,997 is a Class-B secondary intake station occupying the western spur of Floor 119, the Clerk's Labyrinth. It was established by warrant of the Provisional Guidelines for Intake, Annex 9, to receive written supplications that have already been registered once and found, on first reading, to be insufficient in number. Its work is entirely preliminary: nothing vetted at Intake 99,997 is admitted to the permanent shelves by that station, and nothing refused there is destroyed.

The station's numeral is frequently mistaken for a rank. It is not. Intake 99,997 holds no seniority over Intake 1 despite its later designation, a point settled — though repeatedly reopened — by the Minute of the Western Spur (Librarian Adjutant Oresh, 11th of Thirdfrost, year unrecorded), which found that intake numerals record the order in which a station was sealed, not the order in which its findings bind.

Premises and arrangement

The station occupies a corridor forty-one paces long, bent at the twelfth pace to avoid a stairwell nobody has been able to close. Desks are arranged along the outer wall in the order in which supplications arrive; the inner wall is shelved with the return pigeonholes of the Office of Preliminary Verifications, to which Intake 99,997 is administratively adjacent but not subordinate.

Each file arriving at the station is sealed with the Provisional Sigil (Ψ), granting it temporary reality for the duration of vetting. Files that fail vetting have the Sigil struck and are returned to the Vestibule; the corridor retains a faint resin smell from the striking, which clerks on the night rotation have petitioned twice to have ventilated. Both petitions were refused on the grounds that they had not been vetted.

The counting rule

Intake 99,997 exists because supplications arrive in numbers that no single intake can confirm. The Cataloguing of Ephemera Directives, clause 14, requires that any written grievance exceeding nine pages be counted twice before shelving, and Intake 99,997 is the second count. That the station is itself counted among the intakes has never been resolved to general satisfaction. The Office of Preliminary Assessment maintains that the station's own files are subject to the counting rule and has twice attempted to have Intake 99,997 counted at Intake 99,997; the Nomenclature Oversight Conclave declined to hear the matter, noting only that the request was "not a supplication and therefore not a number."

"Where a number is required to confirm a number, the confirming number is entered in the register and is not itself confirmed, save by the ordinary operation of the register."

— Provisional Guidelines for Intake, Annex 9, clause 2

The practical consequence is that a file may sit in the western spur for as long as the second count remains disputed. The longest recorded residence is that of the Petition of the Widow Sarn, received 4th of Longmarch and released after a hold of nineteen years and two months, during which it was counted eleven times. The file is now shelved on Floor 119 with the eleven count-slips bound in, as the Directives require.

Dispute with Intake 44,121

The principal scholarly disagreement concerning the station is one of precedence. Intake 44,121 claims that all second counts performed within the Clerk's Labyrinth fall to it by right of the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which defines the vetting and ratification of Sanctioned Ledgers and which Intake 44,121 reads as extending to counts. Intake 99,997 reads Annex 4 as concerning ledgers only and cites instead the First Concordance, Addendum 7, which assigns second counts to the station nearest the file at the hour of sealing.

The Adjudicators' Guild has asserted historic privilege in vetting candidates for the committee that would resolve this, and has not yet permitted the committee to convene. The Register of Eligible Adjudicators remains contested between the Guild and the Office of Preliminary Verifications on grounds unrelated to the counts, and the dispute over Intake 99,997 has accordingly been held open for the better part of a century without either station conceding.

Vetting practice

Vetting at the station proceeds in two passes. The first pass confirms that the supplication was registered at a prior intake and that the registration number is legible. The second pass confirms that the supplication is still a supplication. This second requirement exists because of the Affair of the Weeping Annex, in which a grievance concerning a damp wall in a western stairwell was re-registered so many times that it became, by accumulation, a maintenance order; the order was then passed to the Guild of Luminal Regulators for comment and has not been returned. Clerks at the station are instructed to read each file aloud once before the second pass, on the theory that a supplication which cannot be read aloud has ceased to be one.

Sufficient but unnumbered files are sent to Intake 10,000 in the Vestibule of Provisional Tenancy; files that are numbered but insufficient are held in the spur pending the second count. A file that is neither numbered nor sufficient is copied onto a Preliminary Entry Slip and shelved flat, which is generally regarded as the least favourable outcome available to a document.

Corrections

An erratum of the Half-Processed Intake returns is filed annually with the station and is read by the Desk of Second Count on the first working day of the year. The erratum has been misfiled at Intake 44,121 for six consecutive years and read there instead.

Visitors to the western spur are asked not to count aloud while the pigeonholes are being restocked.