Investigation

An Investigation is a formal proceeding by which the Tower establishes what is the case, or failing that, what shall be recorded as having been the case. Investigations are convened by warrant, conducted under the Manual of Provisional Investigation, and concluded by a finding entered into the Register of Findings at the floor on which the matter arose. Every investigation has a designation, a duration measured in Cycles and Days, a presiding Factotum, and a budget line. Not every investigation has a conclusion. The Bureau of Referential Integrity maintains that this is the point; the Office of Acoustic Consistency maintains that it is a scandal.

The distinguishing mark of an investigation is that it produces a document rather than a result. A finding is not a truth but an instrument: it binds the parties named in it, satisfies the Concordance under which it was raised, and may be cited thereafter in place of the facts. The Tower has investigated its own investigations on nine recorded occasions, most recently under Concordance 91, which declined to investigate further.

Form and procedure

An investigation is raised by warrant of a Librarian or by a body to which the Librarians have delegated the raising of warrants. The warrant states the matter, the floor, and the question to be settled. Where the question cannot be stated, the warrant states the difficulty of stating it, and this is accepted.

Procedure thereafter is governed by the Manual of Provisional Investigation, Volume Delta, whose provisions are deliberately generous. The presiding Factotum opens the proceeding, takes an inventory of the premises, and assembles a Factotum-First kit — in practice a bound copy of the Manual itself, a set of sealed markers, and the tally-clerk's slate. An investigation that cannot obtain a copy of the Manual is conducted from memory and is thereafter marked provisional, which carries no consequence except that it may be reopened without a new warrant.

Witnesses are examined in order of their recorded floor, not their seniority. This rule was introduced after the Affair of the Twelfth Landing, in which an investigation into a matter on Floor 412 spent eleven days examining the Director of Boundary Arbitration before discovering that the entire question had been settled by a porter on Floor 38 in an afternoon.

The Factotum-First kit and its deficiencies

The kit's contents are specified in Annex 3 of the Manual and are supplied by the Scriptorium of Provisional Instruments, which has not revised the specification since the Second Recension. The markers are wax; on the upper floors the ambient warmth renders them adhesive in a manner the Scriptorium describes as convenient and the Subbasement Cataloguing Corps describes as a hazard.

Factotum-Second Arris deployed a Factotum-First kit in the course of Investigation #77-G-412 and recorded in her closing note that two of the four sealed markers had melted into her satchel and that the slate, being of a slate long out of quarry, would not accept chalk. The finding was nonetheless admitted. The presiding officer, in his covering letter, observed that "a kit deployed is a kit deployed, and the record prefers a smudged inventory to none" — Manual of Provisional Investigation, Annex 3, marginalia.

Findings, closure, and the problem of the closed file

A finding may be positive, negative, or indeterminate. A negative finding — that the matter investigated does not obtain — is a perfectly satisfactory conclusion and is not to be read as a failure. An indeterminate finding is also satisfactory, provided the indeterminacy is stated precisely. The School of Jurisprudential Ontology has argued for two centuries that an indeterminate finding stated precisely is the highest form of conclusion available to the Tower, and that the demand for positive findings is a misunderstanding introduced by the Fourth Concordance.

Closure is the act by which an investigation ceases to accept new evidence. It is frequently premature and never reversed; the practice is to raise a fresh investigation into the same matter and cross-reference the two. The archive at Floor 617 contains an investigation into a disputed drain cover that has been raised, closed, and raised again forty-three times since Cycle 118, each time by the same clerk, each time finding that the matter is best left to the drainage office, and each time being informed that there is no drainage office.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Third Concordance, Annex Epsilon, holds that an investigation exists to ascertain compliance; it therefore cannot be concluded while the question of compliance remains open, and its findings are binding on the parties. Investigation #77-G-412 was raised under Annex Epsilon to ascertain compliance with Directive 88-Gamma-7 and ran from Cycle 189, Day 47 to Cycle 190, Day 12 — a duration the Office of Acoustic Consistency noted was one day longer than the Annex permits and one day shorter than the pressure instability in Ventilation Shaft 7 Gamma required to declare itself.

The Fifth Concordance takes the opposite view. Addendum 5.12 describes investigations as advisory throughout and their findings as "counsel offered to the record, which the record may decline" — Fifth Concordance, Addendum 5.12. Since both Concordances remain in force and neither is superior, a finding may be binding and advisory at once. The Directorate of Boundary Arbitration has adopted the position that this is not a contradiction but a jurisdiction, and that its office is precisely where the two senses meet. The Bureau of Apparent Duplication has filed an objection to this position and withdrawn it four times.

Notable investigations

The Inquiry into Persistent Anomalous Material Deficiency established the working distinction between matter that is absent and matter that was never entered into the inventory, a distinction on which most subsequent investigations of the upper floors depend. The Fourth Axiomatic Survey conducted the investigation of Floor 900 at the commission of the Surveyor-General's Office; its finding has never been published in full, and the Surveyor-General's Office has stated only that the floor was investigated and that the investigation was of the floor.

The Twenty-Third Inquest was convened to adjudicate the events termed The Clockwork Lament and concluded without adjudicating them, on the ground that the events, while real, were not of a kind that an inquest could address. The Inquest of the Whispering Atlas reached a similar pass in Cycle 189 and is cited in the Manual as a model of inconclusiveness properly executed. The investigation into the Year of the Misshelved Codex incident, led by the School of Jurisprudential Ontology, produced a finding so comprehensive that the incident is now considered never to have occurred; the Kael Precedent, arising from Provenance Master Kael's inquiry into seventeen ceremonial daggers, remains the standing authority on how such findings are to be worded.

Investigations into matters that fail to manifest — such as the inquiry housed in Silo 899-A into the theorized entity Arrin — are conducted on the ordinary schedule and closed in the ordinary way. The subject is not required to appear. In the case of Silo 899-A, the finding was entered in the affirmative on the strength of the silo's own silence, a technique the Lateralist School approves and the School of Particulars does not. Investigators are asked not to remove the seals from the upper landings before the tally is entered.