Intent Registry

The Intent Registry is the collective designation for the three-tiered apparatus by which the Tower receives, vets, and permanently records statements of purpose. It is not a single archive and has never been one, though petitions to consolidate it recur roughly once a decade and are routinely declined on procedural grounds. In current usage the Registry comprises the Registry of Provisional Intent, which logs and provisionally authorizes Intent; the Central Registry of Stated Intent, which enters filed Intents into permanent record under the custodianship of the Senior Librarian of Intent; and the Hall of Amended Intent, which issues the Corrigenda on which both depend. A statement of Intent is a legal nullity until it has passed through all three, and in practice somewhat afterward.

The Registry is administered from floors 114 through 118, connected by a stair that does not quite serve them in order. Visitors are asked to ascend from 116 to 114 and then descend to 118, a routing instituted by Forty-Fourth Concordance and never rescinded. The reason, recorded in the Concordance's third annex, is drainage.

Composition and sequence

The three tiers are sequential, overlapping, and — per the Doctrine of Sequential Redundancy — each formally redundant with the tier preceding it. A docket enters at the Registry of Provisional Intent and is time-stamped by the duty clerk. From there couriers bear sealed dockets to the Central Registry of Stated Intent, where they are entered and stamped a second time. The Registry of Provisional Intent also receives verified copies of all Corrigenda issued by the Hall of Amended Intent; these are filed by date of amendment rather than date of original Intent, which has caused the Registry to hold, in some cabinets, two incompatible histories of the same request.

Sub-departments include the Bureau of Intentional Measurement, which assigns magnitudes to Intents too vague to be entered plainly, and the liaison desk maintained with the Senior Librarian of Intent. The Registry of Provisional Intent also records the detection of Axiomatic Intent as a procedural fact; it does not evaluate it, and its clerks have repeatedly declined to.

The Magister's grievance

For a period of eleven years the Registry was administered by Magister Elne Vorsch, who held that the tiers had drifted out of sequence and that the whole apparatus ought to run in reverse — the Central Registry deciding first, the Provisional Registry ratifying afterward. Vorsch's argument, set out in a memorandum of 14 Frost, was that provisional authorization is a promise, and promises are best made by the party who will keep them.

"The Registry does not receive Intent. It receives the intention to have had Intent, and files it accordingly."

— Magister Elne Vorsch, memorandum to the Seventh Reckoning of Intent, opening paragraph

Vorsch's reform was implemented for one fiscal quarter and withdrawn after the Attestation of Intent register began returning exhibits to their senders unamended. Vorsch retired to the School of Accumulated Intent and is not named in the Registry's present charter, though her memorandum is still cited, and her desk — a low cabinet with a warped drawer — remains in place at 116.

Scholarly disagreement

The Registry's founding is disputed. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, places it "at the third stair, before the lamps were numbered," which the Hundred-and-Twelfth reads as a claim of priority over the Office of Volitional Assessment. The Sixth Concordance asserts the opposite ordering and adds a date, 19 Frost, that the Third does not recognize. The dispute has been before the Arbiter of Recursive Intent twice; both rulings were held inadmissible because the Arbiter could not establish which Registry had recorded its own appointment.

A minority position, associated with the School of Literal Intent, holds that there is no Intent Registry at all — only three offices that answer the same correspondence. This view is considered eccentric but has never been refuted, partly because refuting it would require producing the Registry's charter, which is held in the Registry.

Known irregularities

The Registry's holdings are periodically audited by the Librarians, and the following items are entered without prejudice to their standing:

• One Intent filed twice on the same morning, forty years apart, with no clerk recorded at either entry.
• Nine dockets from the Registry of Provisional Intent never paired with a Central Registry entry, and never reminded of the omission.
• The 113 ledger, which lists more entries than its pages will hold.
• One cabinet, sealed, marked "opened at need," and opened once.

The sealed cabinet was opened in the winter of the year the lamps were renumbered, by a clerk whose name the record gives only as Ordway. His note, appended to the inventory, reads: "Contents as expected. Issue closed." The inventory does not state the expectation. The Doctrine of Latent Intent is understood to apply, though no Librarian has confirmed this in writing, and the cabinet has not been opened since.

Use and access

Intents may be filed at any hour from the Provisional Registry's public window, which is unstaffed between the eighth and ninth bells. Petitioners are asked to submit in triplicate and to retain the third copy, which is not filed anywhere. The Registry accepts no Intents concerning itself, a restriction traced to a request lodged in the year of the third emptying and still under advisement.

Where an Intent has been logged but not yet entered, its status is described in the Registry's own formulary as "pending at the stair." The Administrative Non-Existence of Unfiled Intent governs the opposite case, and does so briefly.