Intake 99,998 (Coherence Audit)

Intake 99,998 (Coherence Audit) was a Class-B tertiary intake station established in the Clerk's Labyrinth by warrant of the Bureau of Modal Coherence, charged not with cataloguing the things brought to it but with auditing the coherence of the things catalogued elsewhere. It operated for eleven years, four months and nine days before its functions were found to duplicate, and in places to contradict, those of its neighbor Intake 99,997, one bay to the west along the same corridor. Its register is held under seal at Floor 744, where the survival of its rulings is generally attributed to the accident of storage rather than to any value placed on them.

Establishment

The station was created by the same instrument that created its neighbor. The Provisional Guidelines for Intake provided at clause 19 that a second station be raised "to receive, and to test for internal consistency, materials whose intake has already been performed," and the draftsman — Clerk Alverdo Nyx, whose hand is preserved in the margin of the working copy — appears to have assumed that the second station would serve the first. It did not. Intake 99,997 was constituted as a vetted secondary station, that is, a station for vetting; 99,998 was constituted as an audit of coherence, that is, a station for checking. The two stations opened on the same morning, each believing the other to be its subordinate.

Intake 99,997 holds no seniority over Intake 1, despite being a later intake, and the same deficiency — its own record is silent on the point — left 99,998 without any settled ranking against 99,997. Both stations spent the first four years addressing one another as "the subsidiary station" in correspondence. The file is thick.

The coherence test

Materials arrived at 99,998 with their intake slips already attached, generally by way of Floor 12,004, and were tested against the Axiom of Material Coherence by a procedure the station called the Quarterly Review of Material Coherence, though in practice it was performed weekly and recorded quarterly to satisfy the Directorate of Sequence, whose observer attended to ensure chronological coherence and whose reports on the station are the principal source for its daily operation.

The test was simple to state and difficult to survive. A material was coherent if it could be described without reference to anything that had not been catalogued. Most substances passed. Certain substances failed in a distinctive manner: they could be described only by comparison to items held on floors not yet reached, and so audited as coherent in themselves but unverifiable in place. These were marked intermittent — a designation that later acquired a small literature of its own (see Intermittent Coherence) — and returned to their intake floor with a yellow tag. The tags are still made; the station that issued them is not.

The dispute with the Iterative Chamber

Trouble arrived with the Ruling on Post-Audit Authority, which held that an audit conducted after intake could not alter the intake classification, since to do so would be to audit the auditor. The Bureau of Linear Interpretation conducted a Coherence Audit of the ruling's proposed extension to cover tertiary stations and found the extension coherent; the Iterative Chamber then found the ruling itself incoherent as applied to 99,998, on the ground that a station created to test coherence cannot be tested for coherence without appeal to itself. Clerk Nyx, called to give evidence, is recorded as having said only: "I drafted it as a second station. I did not draft a second second station."

"Where a station exists solely to certify the coherence of other holdings, the question of its own coherence is not a question the station may answer, and no other station has been constituted to answer it."

— Iterative Chamber, Ruling 3,112, appended to the Ruling on Post-Audit Authority

The Chamber accordingly suspended the station's audit function pending a full Operational Audit, which required a clean coherence record, which the station could not issue. The suspension lasted twenty-six months. During this period the station continued to receive materials, tag them, and stack them, and the tag room filled to the ceiling of bay four. A note in the station log for the winter of that second year reads, in Nyx's hand: Ladder required. Requisition refused as an improvement to the fabric of a station under audit.

Closure and holdings

The station was closed by Concordance amendment in the year following, an economy measure that also closed two stairwells and a font. Its register — nine volumes, of which the eighth is water-damaged and the sixth is missing — was transferred to Floor 744, where the inscription above the intake desk preserves the shortest surviving formulation of Minimal Coherence, a doctrine the Department of Stack Integrity had already preferred in practice on the ground that demanding full coherence stalls intake. Scholars who work the register note that it cites the Department's position approvingly in the margin no fewer than forty times, which suggests the station knew its own standard was unsustainable and audited to the lower one regardless.

There is no scholarly agreement on what the station was for. The received view, argued from the register's own headings, is that 99,998 was a redundancy created by a drafting ambiguity and dissolved when the ambiguity became more expensive than the station. A minority position, advanced by Archivist Sennet Vole and never answered, holds that 99,998 was in fact the only station in the Labyrinth performing genuine audit, that the coherence it failed was the Tower's rather than the materials', and that the eleven years of tags constitute the sole honest record of that failure. Vole's monograph is short and shelved with the inventories.

Inventory of the tag room at closure

The final inventory, drawn up by the Directorate observer and witnessed by Nyx, is preserved in full. It is reproduced here without correction of the totals, which do not agree with the register and never have.

• Yellow tags, issued and returned to stock: 14,602
• Yellow tags, affixed to materials since dispersed: 3,881
• Ladders: none
• Chairs: two, one repaired
• Volumes of register, bay six: missing

Intake 99,997 was consulted on the disposition of the tags and declined to receive them. The station has not been reconstituted, and the corridor between the two bays is now used for storage.