Mandatory Dormancy Period

The Mandatory Dormancy Period is the fixed interval, measured in calendar days, during which a subject, procedure, or object must remain untouched, unobserved, or otherwise inactive before any designation of dormancy may be entered against it. The period is not itself a designation; it is the waiting that precedes one. Under Edict Gamma-7/1 ("On Dormancy"), dormancy is defined as a state of "procedural latency," and the Mandatory Dormancy Period is the interval in which latency is presumed rather than proven. It is administered in the first instance by the Guild of Dormant Scribes and registered, once complete, in the Central Dormancy Index (CDI). The standard period is ninety days. Almost nothing else about it is standard.

Origin and the figure of ninety

The ninety-day figure derives from Clause 22 of the Third Concordance, which fixes a mandatory ninety-day review period for any Archival Designation of dormancy. The Third Concordance does not explain the figure. The Third Interval of Contemplative Service records that the number was chosen "because it is the smallest span in which a thing may be forgotten twice," a justification that has been cited in every subsequent recension without ever having been examined. Attempts to shorten the period have failed repeatedly; attempts to lengthen it have succeeded so often that the ninety days now functions chiefly as a floor.

The period should be distinguished from the Seventy-Two Hour Review and its companion holding, The Seventy-Two Hour Review, which govern short observational closures and bear no relation to dormancy proper. Confusion between the two intervals is the single most common cause of defective filings in the Index.

How the period runs

The period begins at the moment of last registered contact with the subject, not at the moment of filing. A subject filed late therefore begins its dormancy already advanced; a subject filed early begins it not at all. The Department of Procedural Archaeology has ruled on this point twice, in opposite directions, and both rulings remain in force.

Where the subject is an aperture that has failed to manifest a cycle within its proscribed observational period, the Inertia Clause establishes the precedent of dormancy and the Mandatory Dormancy Period is deemed to have commenced on the date the aperture was first expected to manifest. Aperture 7-Alpha has remained within a Mandatory Dormancy Period continuously since 1871 for precisely this reason.

Objects under ritual custody follow a separate track. The Silent Choirs claim spiritual custodianship over the Gavel of Deferred Judgment during its dormancy, and the period there runs by liturgical rather than civil reckoning. The Custody Dispute of the Silent Gavel turned in part on this discrepancy; the High Curator resolved it in 1933 by ruling the dormancy a "procedural vacuum," which had the effect of suspending the period entirely while leaving it technically running.

The period and the designation

The period is frequently mistaken for the designation it precedes. It is not. Completion of the Mandatory Dormancy Period entitles a filer to apply for a Certificate of Dormancy; it does not confer one. The distinction is preserved in the Scope of Dormancy and reaffirmed, somewhat testily, in Precedent of Provisional Dormancy P-9.1.04.

Three outcomes are possible at completion:

• the subject is designated dormant and transferred to the consolidated file;
• the subject is designated provisionally dormant and the period is renewed; or
• the subject is found to have been active throughout, in which case the file is struck and the filer is entered in the register of the Sub-Committee for Dormancy Integrity.

The third outcome is not rare. In the winter of 1908 a clerk of the Guild, one Alban Kells, entered a period for a stairwell on Floor 188 and completed it without once visiting the stairwell, which had carried traffic daily throughout. The resulting entry was struck, and Kells's grievance — that the rules required him to observe the subject's inactivity but forbade him to look at it — was upheld in part. No auditor may now oversee Floor 188 for more than one full audit cycle without a mandatory interim period, a rule drafted specifically on his account and never applied to any other floor.

Holding and the long interval

Where a period is interrupted or contested, the subject enters a provisional holding cell within The Ambulatory Annex, where it must remain for a dormitory vault term of fifty years before transfer to Annex gamma-9. The fifty-year term is not a Mandatory Dormancy Period, though it is regularly mistaken for one; the Annex has declined to correct the error in writing.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether the Mandatory Dormancy Period may expire during the Six-Year Silence, the interval in which no Index entries were made between 1911 and 1917. The Guild of Dormant Scribes holds that time did not run, since no registry was open to receive it. The Department of Procedural Archaeology holds that time ran regardless, on the reasoning that a period is a property of the subject and not of the registry. Directive 7-Δ is cited by both parties and settles nothing.

A secondary dispute concerns whether the ninety-day period under Clause 22 and the dormancy period proper are the same interval described twice. The Third Concordance appears to treat them as one; the Dormancy Records treat them as distinct and maintain separate columns. The question has been referred to the Sub-Committee for Dormancy Integrity for review, where it has remained since 1954.

"A period is not a permission. It is the shape of the waiting, and the shape must be entered before the waiting begins, or the waiting has no record and the record has no waiting."

— Edict Gamma-7/1 ("On Dormancy"), preamble