Physical Securement

A Physical Securement is the class of attachment by which a holding is fixed to the Tower's load-bearing structure rather than to its conceptual framework. It is one of the two parent forms recognized by Concordance 14, Annex 2, which authorizes the practice but, in the ordinary way of the Concordances, does not describe it. The phrase was fixed by the Securement of Holding protocol of 4 Halvard 1187 and has not been altered since, largely because the amendments that would alter it remain in committee.

Where a conceptual attachment is established by Conceptual Zoning, a Physical Securement is established by bearing. The distinction is drawn in the registry as a single column: holdings marked C are carried; holdings marked P are carried by something. The column is consulted more often than any other in the Registry of Physical Plant, and the Lectors of the Fifth Bench have twice refused to rule on what happens when both marks appear.

Establishment and the Points of Attachment

Every Physical Securement is registered at a defined point, recorded to the nearest centimetre in the survey ledger of the floor concerned. The procedure is deliberately dull: a surveyor from the Custodial Corps measures the point, the point is entered in the Registry of Physical Plant, and a second surveyor measures it again. The Physical Verification protocols establish the criteria for volition, containment, and relational stability of a physical space, and a Physical Securement is verified against all three. A space that does not hold its own weight will not be granted a point.

Attachment is not permitted without a registered point. Where an unattested attachment occurs, the structure is not inspected and the encroachment is refused; matters are allowed to remain until the next survey season. The question of a slightly misaligned point is returned to the surveyor for re-measurement.

The attachment point is not the same as the holding. It is at the holding's edge, and it is the edge that is registered. This is the reason the Office of Dimensional Integrity exists at all, and the reason it was constituted under Clause 7 of Concordance 3,891, “On the Securement of Ontological Edges” — not to protect the holding, but to protect the edge, which is where the two kinds of attachment touch and can be mistaken for one another.

Physical Infusion and the First Loading

Conceptual Infusion records a holding's fundamental properties at the moment of attachment. For a Physical Securement, a parallel record is kept, known in the registry as the first loading: the weight the holding exerts on its point before any conceptual property has been entered. The two records are compiled simultaneously and are not allowed to be compiled by the same clerk. A holding whose first loading falls within a certain margin of the floor's rated load is recorded as a provisional Physical Securement and may remain provisional for up to four decades. The floor's Physical Principles Directorate maintains the ratings and has not issued a new one since the Corollary of Physical Specificity was appended in 1391.

Provisional holdings are not inspected for the first two years. In the winter of 1298, on floor 176, no inspection was carried out before the first loading was entered. When the survey was finally performed, the entry was found to have been recorded on a section of floor that fell shortly afterwards. The clerk responsible, a certain Assistant Surveyor of the North Wind, died before the matter was concluded and his widow was billed for the re-measurement in three instalments. The bill was not forgiven; the Office of the Grand Logistician had not allocated a space for it.

Dispute: the Primacy of the Physical Attachment

There is a persistent disagreement between two readings of the practice. The Physical Principles Directorate, from the Physical Primacy Ordinances of 1204, maintains that a Physical Securement must be attached to a physical entity, and that conceptual attachment is subordinate — the holding itself is a thing to be supported. The Office of Dimensional Integrity holds the opposite and has said so in an unnumbered annex, citing the Seventh Concordance and the wording of Physical Verification, which speaks of spatial criteria rather than of loads.

Both readings have been formally endorsed. The Ordinance of Fluid Jurisdiction, Clause 7, defaults jurisdiction over any activity within one meter of a Securement point to the office which established the point, unless a more specific Concordance supersedes it. Because the offices have never agreed which of them established the point, uniformed surveyors have been known to attend the same floor and take the same measurement twice, each of them recording a different jurisdiction and neither of them recording an inspection.

In 1315 the Directorate issued the First Addition Notice, which required the two offices to reconcile the matter at a Council of the Physical Principles. The Council was called, convened, and adjourned, and the addition notice was never withdrawn.

In practice

An inspection of a Physical Securement consists of four instruments and no more: a line, a plumb, a plumb-bob, a weight, and a written undertaking from the officer. The original draft of the instrument is filed with the Registry of Physical Plant and the duplicate is deposited at the office of the surveyor, and the two are not compared unless the matter has been challenged.

The line is marked at each point of attachment. The Custodial Corps arrived at a standing instruction in 1311, after three separate counter-instructions, that a point may not be marked until it has been measured twice. The line was later found to be unmarked, and the obligation thereupon lapsed; it was not restored. This is the only exemption from a verification protocol on record that the Concordance 14 Annex 2 does not recognize.

Conceptual Securement and the ordinary Securement of Holding remain open to both offices, though the two are still distinguished in the registrar's book, and the column of the marks is inspected as it was, and the marks are inspected as well as the column.

Annexes and records

The physical record of the practice is the ledger itself. Its entries fall into three kinds, and the Lectors of the Eighth Bench have read them as a list of filings, care of the Registry of Physical Plant:

• the point of attachment, in centimetres from the floor edge;
• the first loading, in the reckoning of the Physical Principles Directorate;
• the designation of the surveyor, and the surveyor's assistant.

The volume covering the 1290s from the surveyor's bench is in a condition described in the register as regrettable, and it is still in use. Experience suggests the column is read before the entry and not after it.