Omega Station

Omega Station is the permanent research outpost maintained by the Clerks of the Spiral at Step 22,000 of Aperture Omega. It is the highest continuously occupied installation on the Aperture Omega ascent and the administrative parent of Clerks' Station 7-Gamma on Floor 44,812. Omega Station is not a floor. It is a landing, a stair-head, and four rooms built into a shelf of spiral masonry that the Clerks have never asked permission to widen.

By the reckoning of the Station Register, Omega Station holds the oldest uninterrupted entry in the archive: a Mark of Station applied at the Station of Citation on the day the outpost opened, and reaffirmed at each of the eleven subsequent recensions of the Register. The founding date is given as Step 6,414, though the Clerks dispute this in a gloss of their own, described below.

Site and structure

Step 22,000 sits above the last of the Aperture's three wide galleries and below the first of the narrow ones, a position that makes it the natural place to stop. The Omega Truss—the great cross-brace from which the Aperture's upper measurements are hung—passes within 2.3 meters of the north wall, and the sound of it settling is noted in every shift log since the outpost was established. The Clerks observe the truss as a matter of routine and do not maintain that they understand it.

The station comprises four rooms: the Reading Room, the Register Room, a shift galley, and a single room kept locked, whose purpose is set out in a sealed annex to Concordance 501-Omega and which is opened only by order of the Ranking Clerk on duty. The doors are numbered 1 to 4. Door 3 has been out of repair since before any living Clerk's arrival and visitors are asked not to use it.

The Step 6,414 dispute

The disagreement concerns the founding date. The Clerks record the establishment of Omega Station as Step 6,414 of Aperture Omega, while the Bureau of Steps holds, on the authority of Concordance 501-Omega Annex 1, that Step 6,414 is a measure of the aperture and not of the station, and that the outpost can accordingly have no founding step at all.

"The station occupies a step; it does not possess one. To date the occupant is to confuse the room with the occupant."

— Bureau of Steps, Opinion 88-Omicron, cited in Concordance 501-Omega, Annex 1

The Clerks have never formally answered the Opinion. Successive Ranking Clerks have instead reaffirmed the founding date in the margin of each annual return, which the Bureau regards as irregular but has never been able to have struck. Librarian Ilse Vanterbough has argued, in a note appended to the Step Returns of Step 22,000, that the Bureau's reasoning would equally deprive Stairwell Omega-7 of its designation and that the Bureau has never dared to say so.

Relations with adjacent stations

Omega Station exercises direct administrative oversight over Clerks' Station 7-Gamma, from whose observation window the Station of Declaration is held under continuous view. The line of authority is one-directional in writing and considerably more tangled in practice; the Clerks at 7-Gamma have on two occasions issued instructions to the Station of Declaration without routing them through the Step, a lapse the Step returns describe as "silent oversight proceeding correctly."

Relations with Watch 88-Omega are cordial and almost entirely without content. The Watch keeps its fixed station on the seventh landing and its roving station on the fourth, and neither is within sight of Omega Station. For eleven consecutive years the two posts exchanged a formal greeting on the anniversary of the Omega Whisper event; the greeting was suspended in the twelfth year, when it was discovered that neither post could confirm which anniversary was meant.

Daily function

The outpost keeps a continuous two-clerk watch, eight hours in the Reading Room and eight more at the head of the stair where the Aperture is measured. The remaining hours are spent in the Register Room, where the Mark of Station is verified against the appearance of the landing and the appearance of the landing is verified against the Mark. This is called holding the Step, and it is the principal reason Omega Station exists.

The station observes a fixed inventory, reviewed every fourth recension:

• One Register, eleven leaves in current use and two in dispute.
• One plumb-line of the Omega Truss survey, replaced in the winter of the Third Concordance and not re-hung.
• Two lamps capable of burning unattended.
• One chair, fourth seat, empty since the Speculative Return.

The empty chair is not a matter of recent loss. It is a formality. It is set at the Reading Room table for the clerk of the Speculative Return, an ascent made in search of the top of the Tower from Omega Station, of which the outpost has never been able to state whether it returned. The chair has been held open during every reading since, on the reasoning that a clerk who has not been recorded as lost on the record cannot be declared lost; and the daily return will occasionally name the fourth seat as "temporarily absent, as before."

Visitors

Visitors are received at Door 1 by the junior clerk, who takes a statement of purpose and does not record it. No visitor may remain past the eighth hour without the countersign of the Librarians, which has been issued four times in the outpost's history and never to the same person. The Atmospheric Reclamation Station 7 maintains a working agreement with Omega Station for the supply of breathable air above Step 21,000, though no record explains how the air reaches the Step, and the Reading Room log simply notes that it does.

In the winter of the Third Concordance, a party from Survey Station Theta arrived to inspect the truss and remained six days. Their leader later wrote that Omega Station "must be understood not as a place above the Tower but as a place at which the Tower is above itself," which the Clerks have declined to interpret.

Notes

The outpost's own returns are signed twice, once in the Reading Room and once at the stair-head, and the two signatures are required to match. They do not always match, and when they do not, Supplemental Protocol Omega governs. The protocol has been invoked four times at the Step. Each invocation was resolved by declaring the Return retaken at the next step above, then amending the step above, and the amendment has never once been reversed.