Isolated Containment

Isolated Containment is the condition of a catalogue subject that has been separated from every other subject in the Tower for the purpose of keeping it separate from itself. The term entered formal use with Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, and has been under continuous revision since. Under the doctrine as presently administered, a subject in Isolated Containment is held in a chamber whose walls are catalogued as subjects in their own right, so that any contact between the contained subject and the outside archive must first pass through a subject that is also contained. The arrangement is described by the Librarians as "complete, and complete on both sides" (Certification of Non-Interference, preamble).

Origin

The procedure was devised during the isolation of Argumentative Latency in 3 Gamma. The latency, once indexed, proved to argue with its own catalogue entry; the entry argued back. Protocol Alpha was applied and failed in the ordinary way — removing the entry left the latency arguing with the vacancy. Archivist G. Rennel, then posted to Floor 203, proposed that the subject be given a room and that the room be given a catalogue number, so that the argument would have somewhere to occur. The proposal was accepted on a provisional basis in the same season and has never been formally renewed.

Rennel's original chamber measured four paces by five. It is still in use. The current occupant is not recorded.

Method and the question of the walls

Isolated Containment differs from ordinary holding in that the containing structure is itself subject to containment. Where a subject is merely shelved, its neighbours remain free; where it is isolated, its neighbours are isolated with it, and their neighbours likewise, until the boundary of the arrangement is reached. The boundary is a matter of some disagreement.

Sixth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that the boundary falls at the fourth remove, "beyond which the isolation is a matter of the archive and not of the subject." Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that there is no fourth remove; that each wall requires a wall; and that the arrangement is therefore "of indefinite extent, and to be costed accordingly." The Ninth Concordance's costing has never been produced. The Bureau of Lateral Holdings has twice requested it and twice been referred to the Fourth.

"A wall that is not catalogued is a gap. A gap is not a wall. The matter is arithmetic."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2

In practice the Axiomatic Atrium resolves such disputes by housing the subject in a chamber whose walls have been formally reviewed for Axiomatic Recursion and found not to recurse. The review takes eleven days. The chamber is used for nothing else during that period, including storage.

The Rennel Grievance

Rennel maintained until retirement that Isolated Containment had been credited to the office rather than to the archivist, and that the distinction mattered because the office had done nothing. The grievance is preserved in a memorandum of some fourteen pages, of which thirteen concern the correct form of attribution and one concerns the chamber's draught. The memorandum was never answered. In S.Y. 3412 the Silent College cited it, without comment, in its isolation of the principle of Ambiguous Referents, an isolation conducted by means of Isolated Containment and therefore of uncertain standing.

Administration and notable holdings

Subjects in Isolated Containment are entered on the Incident Chronology under the heading quiescent, a category that includes both subjects that have stopped moving and subjects that have stopped being asked. The Void Annexes, established after the Void Incursion of Year 43, are the largest single application of the procedure; the Lower Scriptorium is the smallest subject currently under isolation, occupying a single shelf and a single wall, the wall being catalogued as Lower Scriptorium (Wall).

Maintenance of an isolation chamber is performed by the containing subject. Where the containing subject has no hands, the work is performed by the Office of Interior Fabric, which is not permitted to enter. It works through the doorway and has requested a longer doorway. The request is under consideration by the Bureau of Lateral Holdings and has been since the winter of the year the Western Stack came down, when the corridor outside was shortened and the doorway could no longer be reached from both ends.

Criticism

The principal objection, raised by Variant Gamma researchers and never formally answered, is that a subject isolated with its own walls is not isolated from anything: it has merely been given a smaller archive. Containment Verification records that of the forty-one isolations audited since 3 Gamma, nineteen were found to contain at least one uncontained subject, and eleven were found to contain the auditor. The auditors concerned were recatalogued and returned to duty. The remaining six findings were sealed under The Axiom of Administrative Containment, which holds that a finding of incomplete containment is itself an incomplete containment and must be sealed before it can be read.

Visitors to an isolation chamber are asked to leave their catalogue cards at the door. This is not a security measure. The cards are returned on exit, unless the exit is not the one at which they were left, in which case the cards are catalogued and the visitor is asked to wait.