Ontic Auditor

The Ontic Auditor is the senior examining rank of the Office of Ontic Verification, empowered to determine whether a subject has satisfied Ontic Substantiation and to suspend the certification of any subject that has not. The rank is distinguished from that of the ordinary Auditor by the possession of a personal warrant seal, a circular die struck at the auditor's appointment and surrendered at death, retirement, or reassignment to the Stair Inventories. There are, at present, eleven Ontic Auditors. The Concordances have never agreed on whether this number is prescribed or merely customary.

Origin and the Voss Recension

The rank emerges from the reforms surrounding Auditor Voss, who compiled the Voss Recension of the Fineness Schedules over eleven cycles and first formalized the designation Voss-Primus. The earliest surviving use of the title Ontic Auditor appears in the marginalia of the Recension's fourth schedule, where a certain examiner is recorded as having "audited a thing into and out of being" in the course of a single afternoon. The phrase was not intended as a title; it was adopted as one within two cycles, and the Office has never disowned it.

The separate office of Logic Auditor was created in the same period, and the division of labour between the two has been a source of friction since. The Ontic Auditor examines whether a subject is; the Logic Auditor examines whether it may be said to be. In practice, as the Logic Auditor's standing counter-signing authority makes plain, the two questions are frequently asked of the same subject at the same time, and the same examination is frequently performed twice.

Powers of suspension

An Ontic Auditor may suspend a certification at any stage before the affixing of the Ontic Stamp. Suspension is entered against the docket in the auditor's own hand and does not lapse with the departure of the auditor; it is carried forward until renewed or discharged. A suspended docket may be counter-signed by the Logic Auditor, whose authority to do so is independent of the Ontic Auditor's and, on certain readings, superior to it. The resulting deadlock is governed by an obscure provision of the Third Concordance, which the Office cites but does not circulate.

The most cited instance of the suspension power is the Sonic Triangulation Survey of 93-Σ, during which Auditor Kael discovered Echo Catalogue #774-Δ at the bottom of a stairwell whose number the survey team had failed to record. Kael suspended the echo's certification on the ground that it could not be demonstrated to have originated anywhere. The suspension was upheld on appeal. The echo remains in the catalogue and is consulted by visitors who wish to be told what they already said.

Doctrinal dispute: the ontic pressure question

The Ontic Auditors have never formally settled what it is they do to a subject. The dispute turns on the mechanism of substantiation, and on the permissibility of the examiner's own attention.

Chief Auditor Lin argued that the act of inquiry itself provided the "ontic pressure" by which a latent possibility coalesces into a documented event — that the Auditor does not so much establish a subject as convene it. By this account, the Ontic Auditor's seal is a witness to an event the Auditor has caused, and the examination cannot be conducted in the subject's absence, since the subject is not there until it is conducted.

The Office of Ontic Verification has never adopted Lin's doctrine, and the contrary position is widely held by the Auditors of the lower floors, who maintain that ontic pressure is an effect of the examination and not a cause of it, and that to say otherwise is to make the Auditor the author of the subject, which no Auditor's warrant permits. The question matters practically, and its practical consequence is the disagreement between the ordinary Auditor and the Ontic Auditor over what a docket can be said to have produced. Auditor Elara Vance has noted that no one has been able to construct a test to distinguish the two positions, and that the attempt has been abandoned twice.

The Office of Ontic Verification, which absorbed the functions of the Department of Ontic Verification in 4117, maintains that the question is procedural rather than substantive, and has declined to refer it to anyone.

Ontic Solvents and the Aquilin Complaint

Where Ontic Substantiation has failed, the Office of Ontic Verification administers Ontic Solvents. An Ontic Auditor may not administer the solvent. An Ontic Auditor may not direct the administration of solvent. An Ontic Auditor may not be present during the administration of solvent, notwithstanding the implication of the account of the Aquilin Complaint, which records that the auditor then resident at the fifth aperture was found in the chamber with the jar and denied removing the lid. The room has no lid. The auditor was reassigned and the whole matter is no longer cited.

The Office of Ontic Verification oversees this process, and its Ontic Verification section records that no Ontic Auditor has been asked to certify a solvent in one hundred and sixty cycles. The figure is repeated in three separate recensions, which is why it is kept.

Rank and the Spiral

Ontic Auditors are not presently subject to the Spiral Auditor-General, whose nominal supremacy over all Auditors resident to Spiral 7 applies to Auditors of that spiral; the three Ontic Auditors resident there are formally exempt under an annex whose wording is in dispute. The Department of Ontic Prefiguration has claimed, on two occasions, that its own auditors should be counted as Ontic Auditors for the purposes of an examination. The Office has not ruled on either claim, and it is not expected to. The vacant twelfth seat is filled each year. The seat is filled, the appointment is struck, and the seal is returned to the cupboard, where the floor porter keeps the keys.

Ceremonial incidents

The wait between appointment and the first examination of a subject is settled at three days. The rule is not enforced and has been cited only twice. An Ontic Auditor who is received into a chamber enters first and speaks last. The Department of Acoustic Phenomena maintains a separate register of such entries and has recorded nine since 2050.

Ostentation is forbidden. The sister rank of Third Auditor of the Indefinite was founded in the aftermath of a payment that the Imputed Ontic Debt archive records as an overpayment, and the Office of Ontic Verification regards the rank as an error of procedure. When the rank has not been called, the sister office is not consulted.

The upper chamber

The eleven warrants, their seals, and the cupboard of returning are held in the upper chamber. The chamber has one sealed door that opens onto the stairwell. A note is kept pasted to it. The note records the names of the eleven and the date of their examination. It does not record the results. Visiting auditors have been told not to press the door.