Manifest Copy

The Manifest Copy is a certified duplicate of a holding, produced under the supervision of the Office of Verification for the purpose of establishing that the holding exists in manifest form at a stated hour on a stated floor. A Manifest Copy is not a copy of the holding's contents. It is a copy of the holding's manifest status — a document which attests that a thing was present, certifiable, and legible to the Protocol of Manifest Delineation at the moment of examination, and which thereafter stands in the archive in the holding's place for all questions of presence.

The distinction is old and frequently litigated. The contents of a holding are recorded by the holding itself or by an Archive Copy. The mere fact of a holding — its having been there, in the sense the Tower recognises — is recorded by its Manifest Copy and by nothing else. Where an Archive Copy may be consulted for what a document says, a Manifest Copy is consulted for whether anything was ever in a position to say it.

Procedure and form

Production of a Manifest Copy proceeds from the submission of a Subject Manifest, the standard instrument by which Manifest Verification is initiated. On receipt, a verifying clerk attends the holding, applies the seven criteria of the Protocol of Manifest Delineation, and — where the criteria are satisfied — transcribes the holding's designation, floor number, aperture or spiral marking, and the hour of inspection onto heavy stock bearing the Office's counter-seal. The stock is provided in three weights; the third weight is used only for holdings above the two-hundredth landing, and clerks who requisition it for lower floors are required to state a reason on the reverse of the form.

The completed Manifest Copy is then entered against the holding in the Sealing Manifest, which records the sealed state of each holding and to which all later disputes about presence are referred. A holding whose Manifest Copy has been entered is said to be attested. A holding which is attested but subsequently moved without a Transit Manifest remains attested where it was, and not where it is, and the Office has declined on eleven occasions to regard this as an error.

The Kettleman question

The authority of the Manifest Copy was fixed, at least for a time, by the dispute over the Kettleman Copy of the Third Concordance. When the Redactions Copy was produced in evidence during the recensions hearings, counsel for the School of Manifest Inventory argued that the Redactions Copy could not be attested because no Manifest Copy of it existed, the original having been sealed at the time of examination. The Office of Verification replied that the Redactions Copy had been examined on Floor 1188 in the winter of the third recension and that a Manifest Copy had indeed been made, but had been filed under the holding's former designation and could not now be located. The hearings record the following exchange:

"The Copy was present. That it was present is in the archive. That the archive has misplaced the proof of its presence does not make the Copy absent; it makes the archive short of a page."

— Verifying Clerk Odile Marrant, testimony before the recensions hearings, Floor 1188

Marrant's formulation was adopted informally and never formally. It is cited more often than any clause of the Protocol, which is not the same as being good law.

Doctrine and disagreement

Two positions persist. The first, maintained by the Office of Verification, holds that the Manifest Copy is evidentiary only — a record about a holding, standing to it as a receipt stands to a purchase, and of no force once the holding's own attestation is otherwise established. The second, associated with the Manifest Theory Consortium and pressed at intervals by the School of Manifest Inventory, holds that the Manifest Copy is constitutive: that a holding becomes manifest in the Tower's sense precisely at the moment its Manifest Copy is sealed, and that a holding examined but not copied is, for archival purposes, indistinguishable from a holding never examined at all.

The constitutive view has the awkward consequence that a holding may be de-attested by the loss of its paperwork while remaining plainly visible on its plinth. The Consortium accepts this consequence and has said so in print. The Office has not accepted it and has said less.

In the Verification case of Floor 604 the conflict became practical. A holding of considerable age was examined and found manifest under all seven criteria, but the verifying clerk died before sealing the Copy, and the Copy was returned to stock uncertified. The floor steward, finding the holding present and its papers not, applied to the Office for a replacement. The Office ruled that no replacement could issue, since the original examination had not been completed, and that a fresh examination could not be ordered, since the clerk who might have ordered it was the clerk who had died. The holding remains on Floor 604 and is regularly cleaned.

Relation to Transit Manifest Σ-Ω

Manifest Copies are not required for items in Latent Transit, which are governed instead by the Transit Manifest and by the ledger registration recorded in Transit Manifest Σ-Ω for Manifest Sigma-Ω, also called the Final Prohibition. The Office has been asked whether a Manifest Copy of Sigma-Ω exists. It has answered that the question is improperly framed, and refers the asker to the Protocol of Manifest Delineation, criterion six, which is itself the subject of an unresolved amendment.

Physical custody

Manifest Copies are held in the Verification stacks and may be consulted by any Librarian of the third grade or above. Copies less than forty years old may not be unsealed. Copies are not to be carried between floors in an open hand; a satchel or portfolio is required, and the requirement is enforced most strictly on the stair between the 900s and the 1100s, where a dropped Copy has twice been recovered and once has not.