Phenomenal Inventory

Definition and scope

The Phenomenal Inventory is the standing register of acoustic phenomena held at Floor 11 under the joint seal of the Bureau of Phenomenal Triage and the School of Phenomenal Integrity. It records, for each phenomenon admitted to its columns, a designation, a point of first detection, a stated amplitude, and a routing decision. The Inventory is not a catalogue of what was heard; it is a catalogue of what the Tower has agreed to say it heard, a distinction that has generated more correspondence than any other in the history of the register.

The Inventory's authority derives from the Seventh Addendum to the Third Concordance, which in Year 342 charged the School with the preliminary adjudication of phenomenal description. Its practical procedures descend from Provisional Protocol 888-A, whose Standard Conditions of Phenomenal Engagement govern what may be entered, what must be deferred, and what is to be returned to the eastern arm of Floor 11 unopened.

Structure of an entry

Each entry occupies a single folio, numbered in the Inventory's own sequence, which bears no relation to the floor numbering of the Tower and has never been reconciled with it despite three separate attempts by clerks of Proxy Inventory Maintenance. An entry carries four mandatory fields: designation, locus, amplitude, and disposition. A fifth field, condition of observation, is mandatory only where the phenomenon exhibits self-referential properties, in which case custody passes to the School under Clause 3 of the Seventh Addendum.

The amplitude field is written in whole numbers. Where a phenomenon's measured amplitude falls between integers, the clerk records the lower figure and appends the notation resonant remainder. There is no notation for an amplitude of zero; phenomena recorded at zero amplitude are entered in the Inventory of Proposed Holdings instead, where they remain until someone can be persuaded to make a sound.

Disputed recensions

Three recensions of the Inventory are currently in circulation: the working recension maintained on Floor 11, the fair recension held in the scriptoria, and the concordant recension produced annually for citation purposes. The three disagree routinely. The working recension, compiled under the direction of Senior Clerk Halvern Osk, permits the retrospective amendment of an amplitude figure where later observation contradicts it; the concordant recension does not, holding that an entry, once cited, is fixed by the terms of its citation. This disagreement was formalised in the On the Integrity of Absence proceedings of the Winter of the Long Corridor, where the School ruled against Osk on the specific case of phenomenon 4412-B (a hum recorded on Floor 118, later measured at a value Osk had already amended twice).

The consequence is that a citation of the Inventory may be entirely accurate and nonetheless describe something that no longer appears in the working recension. Scholars who rely on the concordant recension are advised to check their figures against the fair recension before arguing a point at length, though in practice they rarely do.

Relation to the Inventory of Proposed Holdings

The Phenomenal Inventory is frequently confused with the Inventory of Proposed Holdings, which is a separate document with a separate mandate. The latter records phenomena that have been proposed for entry but not yet admitted; the former records those admitted. A phenomenon may pass between the two several times over the course of a decade, and a small number have been admitted, withdrawn, proposed again, and admitted a second time with a different designation and an amplitude that differs from the first entry by a figure neither recension can account for.

Under Inventory and Quarantine Protocols, phenomena moving from proposal to admission are held in quarantine for one full circuit of the Great Ledger of Potentialities before entry. This is intended to ensure that what is recorded will not subsequently contradict the nature of its own cataloguing, in accordance with the Principle of Phenomenal Coherence as taught by the School. The quarantine is honoured in most cases. In the case of phenomenon 7701-C, it was not, and the entry was struck by the The Obsidian Decree four months later.

Custody and access

Access to the working recension is granted to clerks of the Bureau of Static Inventory under the terms of the Ordinance of Continuous Inventory, which also provides for the perpetual observation of entries and the referral of contested observations to the Bureau of Paradoxical Inventory. Visitors may consult the fair recension by written application to the eastern arm of Floor 11, submitted in ink and countersigned by a member of the School. Pencils are not permitted in the reading room, and loans of individual folios have not been granted since the incident recorded in the Department of Perpetual Inventory's winter log.

The Inventory remains open, and entries continue to be added at a rate the Bureau of Phenomenal Triage has described, in a memo circulated without signature, as "approximately what one would expect."