Material Anchor

The Material Anchor is the class of Ontological Anchor consisting of a physical object designated to hold a non-existent subject in place within the Tower's archival structure. Where the Procedural Anchor secures a subject by repetition of acts and the Temporal Anchor by fixed recurrences of date, the Material Anchor secures it by sheer mass and indisputable presence: the object is there, it may be handled, and its accession number cannot be argued with. The category is defined in Fifth Concordance, Annex Gamma, which distinguishes Designative, Material, and Procedural anchors and assigns to the Material class all objects "of sufficient persistence to bear a catalogue entry in their own right" (Annex Gamma, §2).

Material Anchors are held principally by the Division of Material Persistence, whose sub-archive on Floor 12,441 contains the largest single concentration of them in the Tower. The best known is the Anchor Spore, accession AS-12,441-01, which anchors the phylogeny of PC Moss and is cited in nearly every introductory treatment of anchoring as the model case.

Definition and threshold

An object becomes eligible for designation as a Material Anchor only after passing an Ontic Anchor Assessment, the formal procedure by which a proposed anchor is evaluated for suitability. Assessment weighs four properties: mass, inscribability, resistance to substitution, and what the Assessment schedule calls "willingness to remain in one place" (Onic Anchor Assessment, Schedule B). The fourth has proved the most contentious, since it is not a property the Division can measure and is instead certified by the attending Clerk of Persistence on the strength of observation, sometimes of a single afternoon.

Minimum mass is set at 400 grams under Clause 1: The Anchor Protocol, a figure derived from the displacement of the Axiomatic Nullpoint during the first controlled anchoring on Floor 3,119. Objects below the threshold may still be anchored, but only as satellites to a heavier primary, and the practice of chaining several light objects together to reach 400 grams was prohibited by Clause 2 on the ground that a chain of small things is not one large thing.

Procedure and the Vex hearing

Designation of a Material Anchor requires a hearing under the Vex Anchor Protocol, notwithstanding that the Protocol was drafted with procedural and temporal anchors chiefly in mind. The Ontological Anchor School, which originally drafted Clause 1: The Anchor Protocol, has argued for two hundred and eleven years that the Vex hearing is unnecessary for material cases, on the reasoning that an object which is simply present cannot be vexed. The Division of Material Persistence has never accepted this, and continues to convene hearings, on average, eleven days after an object has already been installed in its plinth.

"The plinth is not the anchor. The plinth is where we keep the anchor while the hearing decides whether it is one."

— Division of Material Persistence, standing instruction to Floor 12,441

The Hasp Dispute

The sharpest recorded disagreement over the class concerns whether a Material Anchor may be repaired. In the winter of the year the catalogue records as 8,404, a cast-iron hasp serving as the Material Anchor for the (non-existent) subject Locks That Have Never Been Cut was found to have cracked along its spine. The Division ordered a replacement cast from the same pattern. The Ontological Anchor School objected that the anchor had thereby been substituted and the subject left unmoored, and cited Fifth Concordance, Annex Gamma, §7 ("the anchor and the anchored are joined by identity of object, not identity of form"). The Division replied that a broken anchor anchors nothing, and that §7 had been written with reference to the Anchor Spore, which has never required repair, and was therefore a ruling about a case that had not arisen. The Vex Anchor Protocol hearing convened to settle the matter ran to four sessions and adjourned without resolution; the replacement hasp remains in place, and the original is kept in a drawer in the same room, which the Division maintains is sufficient.

Later commentary treats the dispute as a disagreement about what a Material Anchor is for. The School holds that it is for proving the subject was once real. The Division holds that it is for keeping the subject where the catalogue can find it. The two positions produce identical practice in every case except repair, and have produced no practical difference at all in the case of the Anchor Spore.

Degradation and Emergency Re-anchoring

Material Anchors are the only class subject to physical decay, and the Division of Material Persistence collaborates with the Deferred Catalogue Authority during Emergency Re-anchoring protocols when an anchor shows signs of degradation, paradoxical infection, or unexplained displacement. Paradoxical infection is rare but well documented: a Material Anchor that has itself become the subject of a manifest paradox may be reclassified as a Paradox Anchor and moved to the containment shelves on Floor 9,002, where it is anchored in turn by a small brass weight.

Unexplained displacement is more common than the Division's annual return suggests. Objects are recorded as having moved between plinths overnight, generally by no more than a metre, and never out of the room. The Provisional Locus marking each plinth is repainted rather than the object returned.

Inventory note

The Floor 12,441 sub-archive maintains a short standing inventory of anchor classes approved for use without further hearing, reproduced here as it appears on the door:

• Stone, unworked, any mass above threshold
• Metal, worked, single casting
• Bone, non-human
• Wood, provided it is not the only anchor in the room

The exclusion of wood is not explained in the inventory, but the Division's correspondence refers obscurely to "the Floor 6,808 business," and the file itself is not produced on request.