Parallel Containment Protocol

The Parallel Containment Protocol (PCP) is the standing procedure of the Tower, mandated by Annex γ for immediate application upon detection of Uncalibrated Parallelism. It is among the oldest instruments still in continuous force. Unlike Containment Protocol 7-Alpha, which governs procedural leakage and the cultivation of sleeping ink lichen on Spirespur 7-Alpha, the PCP addresses a distinct hazard: two floors, or two stretches of stairwell, arriving at the same descriptive truth by routes that cannot both be legitimate. Where the PCP is invoked in writing, it is ordinarily written together with its sibling procedure, the parallel containment protocol, which governs the same hazard but proceeds from a different premise. That the two documents share a name is the source of a dispute examined below.

Origin and standing

The PCP was first circulated under seal in the twelfth recension of Third Concordance and has been amended, by the count of the Office of Recensions, no fewer than forty-one times. Annex γ attaches to the Protocol and is cited more often than the Protocol itself, a tendency the Librarians have not moved to correct. The Protocol is held to be in force at all times, whether or not any parallel is known to exist. This is deliberate. The Committee of Parallel Truths has affirmed that a protocol enacted only in crisis would arrive too late, a position repeated in almost identical language by Emergency Protocol Theta.

Scope

The PCP applies to Uncalibrated Parallelism in all its recognised grades and to no other disturbance. It does not apply to contradiction proper, which falls to The Protocol for Cross-Floor Contradiction, nor to the logging of close parallels, which is governed by Parallel Logging. The boundary is finer than it appears. The distinction drawn in the Protocol's own preamble is one of orientation:

"A contradiction faces its objection. A parallel stands beside it and looks the same way. The first is settled; the second is not."

— Annex γ, preamble

In practice clerks have disputed the orientation of particular cases for decades, and the Contradiction Protocol is routinely invoked when the two categories cannot be separated to the satisfaction of the officer on the floor.

The islands and the quarantine radius

The PCP proceeds by segregation. Upon verification of an Uncalibrated Parallel, the paired territory on each floor is declared an island and sealed in the manner prescribed by Containment Protocol Theta, whose quarantine radius is fixed in consultation with the Bureau of Selvage Constants. The radius is not negotiable at floor level. In the winter of the forty-third year following the Erasure of the Ninth Landing, a junior clerk at the Floor of Meridian Weights sealed an island two corridors wider than permitted, on the grounds that the parallel appeared to have "spread." The Tribunal of Seals later found that the widening had allowed the two counter-floors to be read as a continuous catalogue when they had not yet been found to be continuous, and the clerk's record was amended to note that he had mistaken adjacency for evidence. The Adjacency Note of that year is now read aloud to all incoming clerks, without commentary.

Coincidental names and the parallel track

Resolution 12 created a parallel classificatory track within the Cataloguing Protocol from which the PCP draws its case records. The two documents share a name by coincidence of drafting, and no doctrinal inference is to be drawn from it. The Concordance of Names has ruled, twice, that the coincidence is to be recorded and ignored. It is the opinion of the Office of Recensions that the ruling has not yet been put into effect.

Disputed questions

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the ordering of the PCP's stages. Containment Protocol 7-Alpha states its own sequence plainly and has been disputed almost without pause; its Annex B records the amendments to that order and questions whether the stages were ever meant to be sequential at all. By contrast the PCP nowhere fixes an order, and different recensions of its third chapter list the stages differently. The Office of Recensions holds that the stages are simultaneous and that the lists are decorative. The Committee of Parallel Truths holds that the stages are sequential but that the lists are wrong. Both opinions are in force.

A second and livelier dispute turns on whether the PCP may be invoked before an Uncalibrated Parallel is verified. The Librarian-Ordinary of the Octagonal Annexus argued in a well-known note that when doubt is sufficiently fine, resemblance is the criterion, and that a protocol enacted only on proof has nothing left to contain. The Committee of Parallel Truths rejected the note by a vote of four to three, and the Librarian-Ordinary has continued to circulate it privately.

Known deviations

Where the PCP departs from its own text, the fact is recorded rather than corrected. Under Containment Protocol 7-Alpha, deviations are ordinarily referred to Containment Protocol Theta, which governs mobile threats and adapts the artifact isolation and passive monitoring principles of Phase 1 of Triage Protocol Alpha. The PCP accepts this referral and adds one provision of its own, which has the appearance of an afterthought and is read by some clerks as commentary on the whole Protocol: strikes are suspended during a containment island, and the floor is marked, not counted.

Paragraph 8 of the Standing Inventory of the Northern Spiral records fourteen unresolved islands now in good order. Fewer than three of them have been inspected within the present decade.