Permit Forgery

Permit Forgery is the fabrication, alteration, or unauthorised reissue of any instrument issued under the Permit Register of the Tower, and — by extension under Ninth Concordance, Clause 2 — the act of using such an instrument, whether or not the user knows it to be false. The Tower distinguishes forgery sharply from Permit Rubble, which is the ordinary degraded residue of expired and superseded documents, and from oblique access, which is irregular but lawful. Forgery requires intent. The difficulty, as the Office of Instrument Examination has conceded in writing, is establishing intent three hundred floors from where the document was made.

Definition and scope

The offence is set out in Ninth Concordance, Clause 2, which reads in full: "No instrument shall be made, unmade, mended, or multiplied by a hand not named upon it." The clause's four verbs have generated four centuries of dispute. The Guild of Material Authenticators maintains that "multiplied" covers faithful copying; the Scriptorium of the Fourth Annex maintains that it does not, and that faithful copying is the entire purpose of a scriptorium. The two bodies have not spoken since the Winter of the Second Recension, when a Scriptorium copyist was found to have reproduced Clauses 6-9 of Addendum 7 from memory and was suspended for it, a ruling the Scriptorium still considers forgery.

Simple possession is not forgery. A forged permit carried unknowingly is a Provisional Research Permit defect, handled administratively and corrected at the nearest registry window. A forged permit carried knowingly is forgery. A forged permit carried knowingly and corrected becomes forgery again if the correction is made without recording that it was a correction, which the Registry of Corrections regards as the more serious matter.

Methods and notable cases

Most permit forgery is dull. The Office of Instrument Examination reports that of the four hundred and eleven cases recorded on Floor 2240 between the years of the Third Reckoning 88 and 112, three hundred and sixty involved nothing more ingenious than a wet seal lifted from an envelope and pressed onto a blank. The remainder divide unevenly between alteration of expiry markings and the wholesale fabrication of instruments for offices that do not exist. The latter is punished most severely, not because it deceives anyone, but because fabricated offices accumulate correspondence, and correspondence must eventually be filed.

One instructive case is that of Clerk Adela Voss of the Sixteenth Filing Gallery, who in TR 104 issued forty-two Vibration Permits to herself over a period of nine months. Voss did not generate vibration. She filed the permits correctly, stamped them herself, and stored them in the correct sequence, and the Examiner's report notes that the fraud was discovered only when a clerk auditing the Gallery remarked that the sequence was too regular. Voss was reprimanded, not expelled. Her grievance — that she had done the office's work more tidily than the office did — was entered into the record and has never been answered.

A more serious class is the reuse of genuine instruments after suspension. A suspended Wanderer's Permit that continues to be presented at stairheads is, under Ninth Concordance, indistinguishable from a forged one, and the Wanderer's Permits office on Floor 7112 treats it as such. Travelers are advised that a permit's suspension is not always recorded where they are standing.

The Kael Precedent and the question of origin

The governing case remains the Kael Precedent, in which two daggers were presented as instruments of access and the Guild of Material Authenticators was unable to find a point of manufacture, acquisition, or forgery. The Guild's failure — recorded in its own hand and never retracted — established that an object may be authentic, forged, and neither, without the Tower being able to say which. Following Kael, the Office of Instrument Examination no longer rules on the authenticity of an instrument's origin. It rules only on whether the instrument was made by the hand named upon it, and if the hand cannot be found, the file is closed with the annotation "origin indeterminate" and the document is left in circulation.

"Where the hand cannot be produced, the instrument is not thereby false. It is merely unaccompanied."

— Office of Instrument Examination, Ruling 61, appended to the Kael file

Conditions for lawful reproduction

Reproduction is lawful only where it is performed under a permit authorising the reproduction of permits — a category the Tower recognises and has never simplified. The standard instrument is a reproduction annex to a Provisional Research Permit 4409, which authorises designated copyists to produce certified duplicates for the Expeditionary Cartographers' Guild and no one else. The annex does not travel. A copyist who carries an annex to a floor not named in it is committing forgery at the moment of arrival, regardless of what is done there.

Two conditions apply to every certified duplicate. The duplicate must bear the words "duplicate of" in the same hand as the original, a rule introduced after the Affair of the Twelfth Stairwell and enforced without exception since; and duplicates must be lodged in the Registry of Corrections within one shift of production, whether or not anyone has asked for them. Late lodgement is treated as non-lodgement. The Librarians have declined, four times, to extend the shift.

Interaction with sound and phenomena

Because many forgeries involve instruments for activities that are themselves permitted, the question of what a forged permit authorises has been raised repeatedly. The Auditory Permit Office holds that a forged Class Δ permit authorises nothing, and that any sound generated under it is unpermitted sound and falls to be assessed as such, the forger being liable additionally for the original forgery. The Ambient Phenomena Permit office takes the contrary view: that phenomena do not read documents, and that a Hum generated under a forged permit is the same Hum, and should be assessed as incidental. Neither office will hear the other's cases. The Auditory Permitting annex to the Intercyclic Variance Permit schedule, added in TR 118, quietly assigns the dispute to whichever office receives the complaint first, which is the Auditory Permit Office in almost every instance, as it is open longest.

Forged instruments relating to Theoretical Wings are not prosecuted. They are collected.

Permit forgery is tried by the Instrument Bench on Floor 2240, in sessions held on the second and fourth shifts. Seals are examined in the morning only. Visitors are asked not to bring documents of their own into the examination room, as they will be examined.