Interim Stacks

The Interim Stacks are the central repository system for subjects, artifacts, and documentary evidence awaiting final cataloguing determination within the Tower's hierarchy. Formally established by Concordance 7 on Floors -7 through -12, they serve as the procedural and physical limbo for materials deemed provisionally real but not yet authorized for integration into the permanent collections of floors such as Floor 306, Floor 5,712, or the Stacks of Possible Geometries.

Administrative Structure

Oversight of the Interim Stacks is the exclusive purview of the Provisional Cataloguers' Guild, a body granted its mandate by the same Concordance that created the Stacks. The Guild's authority is considered "provisional-perpetual," a term whose legalistic tautology is a frequent subject of pedantic discourse among lower clerks. All items entering the Stacks must be accompanied by a Primary Cataloguer's docket number, issued after a preliminary assessment against the Provisional Protocols for Interim Handling. These protocols, dictated by Clause 201.b of the Seventh Concordance, require clerks to open items, assess contents, and assign a temporary holding location, a process often described as "the ritual of first glance."

The day-to-day governance of the Stacks is a labyrinth of sub-committees, the most notable being the Interim Committee for Resonance Management, which handles materials that exhibit self-referential or meta-catalogical properties. The complete procedural charter of this Committee is a notable holding of the Museum of Superseded Governance.

Types of Holdings

The contents of the Interim Stacks are as varied as the reasons for their interim status. Broad categorizations include:

• Counter-Catalogued Subjects: Items whose existence was previously recorded in error on a permanent floor and which have been formally contested. These are held pending review, often for centuries.
• Artifacts of Disputed Provenance: Objects whose point of origin cannot be satisfactorily mapped to a known floor or aperture, such as those occasionally found in the Lower Stacks.
• Documents Under Metric Caging: Instruments or records sealed with the Sigil of Interim Silence to prevent their measurable properties from influencing adjacent holdings. This is a common fate for unstable geometries.
• Subjects of an Interim Mandate: Materials related to a Provisional Authority Transfer, held until the mandate is resolved or made permanent.

A significant portion of the collection consists of what are termed "Non-Sequential Indexical Artifacts," for which Floor 8,099 serves as the official Interim Repository. Transfers from Floor 8,099 to the broader Interim Stacks are governed by Ordinance 707.12, the copper-alloy sheet of which is housed on Floor 89 of the Vault of Interim Authority.

Notable Controversies and Precedents

The history of the Interim Stacks is punctuated by administrative disputes that have shaped Tower jurisprudence. The most famous is the re-categorization scandal instigated by Alaric of the Interim in Year 892, wherein he controversially moved seventeen specimens of auditory flora from the 'Living' to the 'Echoic' sub-stack without consulting the Registry of Minor Impressions. This action, though later partially validated by a footnote in the Twelfth Interim Mandate, established the precedent that "interim is not synonymous with inconsequential."

Another persistent scholarly disagreement concerns the finality of the "interim conclusion" ritual described in the Seventh Concordance for submissions made on Floor 5,712. Some argue, citing contradictory clauses in the Third Concordance, that such a conclusion permanently consigns a subject to the Interim Stacks, effectively a soft deletion. Others maintain it merely represents a stable state of procedural pause, a view tacitly supported by the Guild's endless backlog.

Physical and Conceptual Layout

The Stacks are not arranged by subject, date, or any conventional taxonomy. Instead, shelving follows a complex algorithm of "provisional affinity," placing items together based on perceived mutual non-interference or complementary states of potential. Aisle designations are alphanumeric codes that reset every fiscal quarter, making relocation of a specific item without its current docket slip a near-impossible task. This intentional obscurity is defended by the Guild as a "bulwark against premature ontological crystallization."

Certain volatile or conceptually expansive holdings are periodically transferred to more specialized sequestered environments, such as the Sequestered Stacks or the Annex 19-B of the Registry of Parcels, under the stewardship of bodies like the Cartographic Corps. The theoretical boundary between the Interim Stacks and repositories like the Vault of Unfinalized Sums or The Whispering Stacks remains a fertile ground for doctoral theses in Procedural Metaphysics.

Migration and Resolution

Migration from the Interim Stacks to a permanent floor is rare but not unheard of. It requires a unanimous finding by a panel of three Primary Cataloguers that the subject in question has achieved a state of "definitive incoherence" — meaning its properties have stabilized sufficiently to be described without provisional clauses. Most items, however, accrue supplemental dossiers, cross-references, and annotations until their original holding crate is itself catalogued as a new, composite interim artifact. In this way, the Interim Stacks are perpetually self-consuming and self-generating, a perfect bureaucratic engine whose only product is its own continued necessity.