Integration Phase

The Integration Phase is the fourth and operative stage of Protocol Embedment, the procedure by which a primary document is composed, ratified, and released into the Tower's holdings. It follows the Drafting Phase and the Trigger Phase and precedes the Post-Ratification Phase, during which the completed document is examined for defects before the issue of a Certificate of Assimilation. The Integration Phase is distinguished from every other stage of Protocol Embedment by the fact that it is the only one in which the document is considered to exist in a provisional sense and may therefore be cited — though only in citations marked as provisional, and only by offices holding a Provisional Citation Warrant. Protocol Delta is the standard worked example of a primary document composed during the Integration Phase and is cited as such in nearly every manual on the subject.

The Phase is administered jointly by the Bureau of Pre-Integration, which prepares the document for entry, and the Integration Committee, which conducts the entry itself. The Manual of Vertical Integration sets out the sequence at Annex 12; the Manual of Resonant Integration treats the same sequence acoustically and, where the two disagree, the Vertical text is followed, a precedence established by the Fourth Concordance and never since revisited.

Procedure

A document entering the Integration Phase is first lodged in a Provisional Reality environment on the floor designated for its subject class. There it is seated, struck, and read aloud twice — once by the integrating clerk and once by a witness drawn from a neighbouring floor who has no interest in the outcome. The double reading is intended to expose any clause that will not survive being heard. Documents that survive the double reading are described as seated; documents that do not are returned to Drafting with a note of the failing clause.

Seating is followed by resonant alignment, conducted under the provisions of Integration for the duration of one full cycle. Where the document is a sound-based instrument, alignment is deferred to the Auditory Phase and the Department of Latent Epistemology is invited to assess its epistemological footprint before alignment resumes. Alignments falling within the seventeenth calendar's short month are recorded by the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation and dated to the following month, so that a document integrated in the short month will carry a date some eleven days after the date it was actually integrated. This is not an error and should not be corrected in the record.

The Directive of 14 Lumen

The Integration Phase acquired its present form under Integration Directive 14 Lumen, issued by the Directorate of Concordant Integration in a winter that the calendars record only once. Before the Directive, integration was conducted floor by floor at the convenience of the integrating clerk, with the result that documents of the same class were integrated into incompatible orders and could not be cited against one another. The immediate cause was a dispute on Floor 2241 between the clerks Ovin Marrow and Sestri Halden over whether a seated document could be unseated by a later reading. Halden held that it could; Marrow held that it could not; the two integrations proceeded in parallel for nine days and produced two incompatible recensions of the same instrument, both of which remain in the holdings and neither of which has been withdrawn.

The Directive resolved the dispute by fixing the order of integration across all floors and by declaring that a seated document may be unseated only by a document of equal or higher class, never by a re-reading. Marrow is recorded as having accepted the ruling; Halden is recorded as having requested the wording of the ruling be read back to her three times, which was permitted.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Phase's authority is disputed between the Third Concordance and the Fourth Concordance. The Third treats the Integration Phase as terminating at the moment of seating, holding that everything thereafter is Post-Ratification. The Fourth holds that seating is a preliminary and that the Phase extends through the Ceremonial Inscription Amp Integration to the issuance of the certificate. Both readings are in force. In practice an office will cite the Third when it wishes a document to be actionable sooner and the Fourth when it wishes a rival's document to remain unactionable longer. The Integration Committee has declined to rule on the question on eleven occasions, noting in its minutes of the ninth that the matter "has been settled by both Concordances and is therefore settled twice, which is the Tower's ordinary condition" (Minutes of the Integration Committee, 9th sitting, item 4).

"We do not reconcile the Concordances. We administer them, which is a different office, and one with better hours."

— Directorate of Concordant Integration, Circular 88

Relationship to the Stasis Quarantine cycle

The Integration Phase is not itself part of the Stasis Quarantine cycle, and the confusion of the two is the most frequently corrected error in the Tower's instructional recensions. The cycle includes Phase 2 Retrieval Amp Quarantine and concludes with Phase 5 Placement Amp Integration; the Integration Phase of Protocol Embedment, by contrast, concerns documents and is not numbered. Clerks newly appointed to the Bureau of Pre-Integration are required to state the difference aloud before taking up their desks. The requirement was introduced after an incident in which an entire quarter's intake of instruments was placed under quarantine against a practice that had never applied to them, and was not released for eleven months.

Inventory

The Phase's standard appointments, as listed at Annex 12 of the Manual of Vertical Integration:

• One integration desk, seated, with the number of the floor cut into the near edge;
• Two reading lamps, of which one is expected to fail;
• One witness, drawn as described above;
• One copy of the document under integration, marked provisional on every page;
• One Provisional Citation Warrant, surrendered at the door.

The second lamp is not to be replaced during the Phase.