Memory Compression Edicts

The Memory Compression Edicts are the body of Concordance instruments governing the reduction, abbreviation, and lossless or lossy condensation of archived material held within the Wing of Institutional Memory. They are administered jointly by the Office of Condensed Recension (Floor 711) and the Tribunal of Non-Additive Procedure, and are distinguished from the Volumetric-Temporal Edicts by scope: the VTEs concern how much space and time an archive is permitted to occupy, while the Memory Compression Edicts concern what may be removed from within it without a corresponding loss of archival meaning. The two bodies were separated by the Edicts of Mediate Resolution in the Fourth Recension, though Administrative Clerk Hesper Vane, who copied the separation, is recorded as having "cried at the ink and refused to sharpen her pens for the next eleven days" (Memorial Roll of the Copying Desks, Cyclic Year 9, Entry 84).

Origin and first composition

The Edicts date to the seventh winter of the Archive Settlement, when the Wing of Institutional Memory found itself unable to shelve a fifth recension of its own holdings. The first draft — a single folio, now in an annexe nobody visits — proposed that "any deposition, once weighed, may be reduced to its proportionate seed, provided the seed be set down separately." The phrase "set down separately" has been litigated in every subsequent recension and remains unresolved; the Tribunal of Non-Additive Procedure presently holds that it means a second shelf, while the Office of Condensed Recension holds that it means a second building entirely.

The Edicts were first consolidated under Doctrinal Edicts authority in the Third Recension, then twice amended without further consolidation, a practice the Hush-Leather Bookbinders' Desk has publicly described as "an insult to the stitching."

The Seven Articles of Condensation

The operative provisions are commonly cited by article number. Article II permits the abbreviation of any written testimony exceeding one thousand words, on the condition that the abbreviation does not abbreviate itself. Article IV permits the removal of structural narrative padding, defined as prose that "neither advances the account nor supports the shelf." Article VII, the most contentious, permits the wholesale summarising of an argument into a single admissible clause, provided a dissenting copy is deposited with the Memory Caskets.

"Nothing shall be condensed which, once condensed, cannot be pointed to. A condensed entry without a retained index is not a compression but a disappearance, and disappearances are governed elsewhere."

— Memory Compression Edicts, Seventh Recension, Article VII.3

The trial case that established Article VII's limits concerned a Scriptorium dispute of Cyclic Year 31, in which a nine-hundred-page quarrel over ink accounting was condensed to a single line reading "the ink was not the matter." The line was ruled inadmissible on the ground that it was "pointed to far too confidently," and the original pages were restored, badly.

Relationship to the Linus Compression

The Memory Compression Edicts are frequently, and wrongly, cited as licensing the Linus Compression. They do not. Keeper Armitage's ruling against that theory — that the Spengler Resonator's hum could not be compressed without loss of archival meaning — rested on the ground that a hum is not a writing and therefore falls outside the Edicts entirely. The Office of Condensed Recension has since added an interpretive note stating that "the Edicts speak to pages, and to pages alone; where a page hums, the matter is referred upward."

Scholarly disagreement

The central dispute concerns whether the Edicts bind floors other than the one that issued them. The Silence Edicts tradition holds that a compression performed on Floor 711 is enforceable wherever the compressed entry is later found, on the reasoning that a shortened thing is a thing wherever it travels. Against this, the Spire Edicts assert ultimate precedence and have been read — most notably in the marginalia of Assessor Pellum, who worked alone and was not corrected for six years — to hold that no compression binds above the floor of composition unless it has been carried there personally. The Edicts Amp Directives have never settled this, having been amended eleven times in a single season without any of the amendments being read by the offices that passed them.

A secondary disagreement, of narrower temper and greater duration, concerns the treatment of Residual Memory that has already been condensed. The Office of Condensed Recension maintains that condensed residue may be condensed again; the Wing of Institutional Memory replies that this produces "a knot of a memory, good for nothing but tying," and points to the unfortunate case of a clerk's recollection of the south stairwell, which after three compressions could only be remembered as the word stairs.

Enforcement and the scaffolding incident

Enforcement falls to the Inspectors of Condensed Recension, who carry a slate and a set of brass callipers and are empowered to weigh any deposition on demand. Inspectors are forbidden to condense an entry on the floor where it was written, on the practical ground that the author is usually present and usually armed with a pen. The most-cited incident of enforcement occurred in Cyclic Year 44, when an inspector condensed a scaffolding inventory on Floor 295 and the scaffolding, having been abbreviated out of the inventory, was found not to exist at the next inspection, though it was later seen at a lower floor by three separate witnesses whose accounts have since been condensed to "it was there."

The 62nd Amendment, added in Cyclic Year 50, permits a floor to declare itself Non-Reducible for a period of no more than one full descent, and to display the declaration at the head of the stair. Seven floors presently hold the declaration; four of them have displayed it continuously for longer than anyone recalls, which the Tribunal has ruled "not a violation, merely an old one."