Limited Interaction

Limited Interaction is the collective designation for a family of restrictive protocols governing contact between catalogued subjects, materials, and offices where full interaction is either prohibited, unadvisable, or has not yet been ruled upon. It is administered jointly by the Office of Coincidental Alignment and the Bureau of Provisional Contact, an arrangement that has itself been the subject of four Concordance amendments and one unresolved feud dating to the winter of Floor 2,208.

Limited Interaction is frequently confused with Stripping, which is a controlled interaction protocol under MAP-5 and proceeds from an affirmative authorization. Limited Interaction proceeds from the absence of one. The distinction is maintained with some heat by the Bureau, whose clerks will correct the error in writing and have done so, collectively, eleven thousand times.

Origins and the Seventeenth Concordance

The doctrine was first codified in the Seventeenth Concordance, Annex 2, which established that where two catalogued subjects might interact and no ruling had been issued, the interaction was to be presumed limited until such time as a ruling was issued, and that the presumption was not to be construed as a prohibition. The wording was intended to be temporary. It has not been revised in the interval, and the Bureau now maintains that the presumption is permanent, while the Office maintains that it is merely very long.

The practical consequence is that a great many subjects in the Tower exist in a state of Limited Interaction with one another without anyone having decided that they should. The condition is default rather than decree. Clerks refer to this as "the standing arrangement," and it is recorded on the relevant floor plates in a smaller hand than the surrounding text.

Grades of Limitation

Limited Interaction is graded in three degrees, though the grading is descriptive rather than prescriptive and the Bureau has twice declined to publish the criteria by which a subject is assigned to one.

• First Degree — contact permitted under observation, with the observing clerk named on the record.
• Second Degree — contact permitted in alternating intervals, the intervals to be set by the floor's senior cataloguer.
• Third Degree — contact withheld. Under Concordance 44, withheld interaction is to be treated as interaction for the purposes of the record, which means a Third Degree limitation generates more documentation than an unrestricted contact would.

The Third Degree is the most common and the least understood. A subject under Third Degree limitation is, in the Bureau's phrasing, "interacting at a distance of nil," and the paperwork reflects this: the file grows whether or not anything happens, and grows faster when nothing does.

The Aperture Omega Precedent

The modern form of Limited Interaction owes much to the Omega Whisper event and the subsequent establishment of the Limited Access Zone, Type Omega around Aperture Omega. The Zone is buffered by Recursive Buffer Zones, and the buffering was originally justified under Limited Interaction rather than under the Zone's own charter — a procedural shortcut that the Office has never fully conceded was a shortcut.

"The buffer does not prevent contact. It records the contact that would have occurred, at the rate at which it would have occurred, and files it. Nothing is stopped. Everything is noted."

— Bureau of Provisional Contact, Circular 9 (revised)

Clerk Ondra Vess, who kept the Aperture Omega contact ledger for nine years, lodged a formal grievance in the winter of Floor 2,208 arguing that a buffer which records contact at the rate at which it would have occurred is indistinguishable, in the record, from the contact itself, and that the distinction between Limited and full interaction had therefore collapsed. The grievance was heard, upheld in part, and the partial upholding was then appealed by the Office. The appeal remains open. Clerk Vess has since been reassigned to the Department of Self-Erasing Ledgers and has stated, in a note appended to the grievance file, that she considers this a comment on the appeal.

Interaction with Other Doctrines

Limited Interaction sits awkwardly beside Resonant Material Interaction, which predicts what happens when resonant materials are brought into contact and does not much care whether the contact was authorized. Where an RMI is initiated under MAP-5, the Limited Interaction presumption is suspended for the duration and reinstated on termination, a sequence that the Bureau insists is seamless and that floor staff describe as "two ledgers and a walk."

The relationship with Interaction with Absorptive Theory is more fraught. Absorptive protocols govern the transition of Type A entities into stasis, and a Type A entity under Limited Interaction may be in stasis, approaching stasis, or merely filed as though approaching it. The Office of Coincidental Alignment holds that the three conditions are procedurally identical; the Bureau holds that they are not, and has refused to say which is which. Both offices cite the Seventeenth Concordance in support of their position, and both are correct to do so.

Limited Interaction is also invoked, loosely and without authority, in connection with Weightless Feathers, whose study was authorized in a limited form by the Seventh Concordance, Amendment 17. The Amendment does not use the phrase. The Bureau's index does. The discrepancy has been noted and left.

Record-Keeping

Every Limited Interaction is entered in the floor's contact register and countersigned by a clerk holding Transient Credentials, which expire at the close of the shift in which they are issued. A register entry whose countersignature has lapsed is void, but the void entry is retained, and the retention of void entries is itself a form of record that the Bureau treats as authoritative and the Office treats as noise.

Registers are stored flat. They are not to be folded, rolled, or carried up more than four floors at a time. The rule dates from an incident on Floor 1,144 in which a rolled register was mistaken for a baton and used as one.

Scholarly Disagreement

The central dispute concerns whether Limited Interaction is a doctrine or a description. The Dialogic school maintains that it describes a state of affairs that would obtain whether or not anyone wrote it down, and that the Concordances merely notice it. The Office of Coincidental Alignment rejects the Dialogic view outright, as it does in the matter of Attenuated Interaction, and insists that limitation exists only where it has been entered, countersigned, and filed.

A third position, advanced by the Receding school and largely ignored, holds that Limited Interaction is best understood as the residue left when a full interaction is withdrawn, and that the Tower is therefore full of limitations that no one imposed. The Bureau has not responded to this position. The Office has responded twice, at length, and on both occasions to the wrong correspondent.