Intentional Propagation

Intentional Propagation is the deliberate transmission of an intention from one floor, office, or holding to another, together with the record of that transmission and the obligation it creates in the receiving party. It is distinguished from Universal Propagation, which occurs whether or not anyone wills it, and from the incidental seepage catalogued under Echo-Variant Propagation, which the Tower tolerates but does not license. Intentional Propagation requires a named sender, a named receiver, a sealed instrument, and a floor of receipt. Where any of the four is absent, the transmission is reclassified as drift and entered in the ledgers at reduced weight.

The practice is old; its regulation is not. Second Concordance treats propagation as a matter of courtesy between adjacent floors, while Fifth Concordance asserts that every propagation creates a debt owed to the Tower in general rather than to any particular office. The two have never been reconciled, and clerks are advised to cite whichever is nearer to hand at the moment of dispute.

Instruments and Sealing

An intentional propagation is carried by an instrument, of which the Tower recognizes four kinds: the addressed memorandum, the sealed lattice, the spoken declaration witnessed by two clerks, and the stairwell posting. Of these the sealed lattice is the most durable and the least read. Filing and Propagation holds lattices under seal and consults them only during audits, which means that a lattice propagated in good faith may sit unopened for decades while the obligation it carries continues to accrue interest in the receiving office's books.

The School of Contextual Propagation accepts readings from all four angles when measuring the integrity of a propagated instrument, but only two angles when measuring its sincerity. This asymmetry is the subject of a standing complaint from the Bureau of Implementable Abstraction, which argues that sincerity is not a measurable angle at all.

The Winter of Floor 4,112

The modern doctrine of Intentional Propagation descends almost entirely from a single failure. In the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the floor of the same number — the coincidence is noted in the ledgers and has never been explained — a clerk named Ovren Sable propagated a sealed lattice from his office to the office three floors above, intending to notify it of a change in stairwell access.

The lattice was addressed correctly, sealed correctly, and handed to a runner who took it two floors down. The receiving office, unfamiliar with the sender, treated the lattice as an unsolicited instrument and set it aside. Nine months later the change in stairwell access took effect. Eleven clerks were inconvenienced. Ovren Sable filed a grievance that runs to forty pages and is preserved in full in the annexes of the Seventh Concordance, where it is cited for the principle that a propagation is not complete upon sending but upon acknowledged receipt.

"The instrument left my hand at the third bell and did not leave my responsibility until it entered another's. Between those two moments I was, in the eyes of the Tower, still carrying it."

— Ovren Sable, Grievance of 4,112, annexed to the Seventh Concordance

Audits and the Propagation Ledger

The School of Contextual Propagation performs biannual propagation audits, at which every office must produce the receiving stubs for all instruments it has sent since the previous audit. Stubs are kept in the Propagation Ledger, a bound volume of no fixed length maintained per floor. Offices that have lost stubs are permitted to attest to their propagation by Contextual Anchoring, a practice the School introduced after the audits of 4,388 found that nearly a third of all offices had mislaid their stubs and were attesting to one another's instruments by mutual recollection.

The Axiom of Contextual Propagation is cited as authority for the Ledger's holdings, though the Axiom was written to settle a dispute about library shelves and has never been comfortably extended to stubs. Clerks who raise this are recorded as having raised it, which is generally the end of the matter.

Relation to Intentional Absence and Ascent

Intentional Propagation is frequently confused with the Principle of Intentional Absence, under which a thing is catalogued by what it does not contain. The distinction is that a propagation must arrive somewhere, whereas an absence is complete in itself. The Lyceum of Intentional Design has ruled twice that a propagation into an intentional absence is void, and once, in a decision later withdrawn, that it is not void but merely unanswered.

Propagation upward is governed separately by the Principle of Intentional Ascent; propagation downward by the Doctrine of Intentional Return. Instruments crossing the midpoint of a stairwell in the wrong direction are required to be re-addressed, and runners are instructed not to carry a lattice past a floor with the same number as the year, as this has caused confusion before. No one has been able to say when.

Unresolved Questions

Whether Intentional Propagation can be performed by an office that has itself been vacated remains open. The School of Intentional Architecture maintains that a vacated office has no walls to propagate through and therefore cannot send; the Bureau of Implementable Abstraction observes that vacated offices continue to receive, and that a receiving office is a party to propagation whether or not anyone remains to open the lattice. Both cite the Fourth Concordance, which supports each of them in different annexes.

The question is scheduled for review at the next Intentional Cross-Examination, where it has been scheduled before.