Plot D-12

Definition and situation

Plot D-12 is an administrative parcel on Sub-Level 34, one floor beneath the Cartographic Grey region that contains Plot A-7, and is held by the Department of Ambiance Amp Inclemency under a provisional warrant dating to the winter of 3,188. It is not a room. The Department's surveyors have twice attempted to establish that it has a floor, and twice the attempts have been inconclusive: the parcel's northern boundary is coaxial with a service conduit whose depth was never entered into the register, and the parcel's southern boundary abuts nothing at all. In the standard cadastral return, Plot D-12 is described as "a volume of record with a recommended height of four metres and no confirmed aspect."

Plot D-12 is best understood as Plot A-7's upstream neighbour. Where A-7 receives narratives already shaped enough to be validated, D-12 receives the looser material — a figure glimpsed on a stair, a rumour with no corroborating witness, a sentence overheard and badly remembered — and holds it until the Department of Ambiance Amp Inclemency can determine whether it has enough substance to be moved down the corridor. Porters on Sub-Level 34 refer to the parcel as "the ante-room," a term the Department has never officially adopted and has never quite managed to prohibit.

Designation under the Third Concordance

The parcel's curious status derives from a drafting accident. Clause .1 of the Third Concordance (Addendum Ξ) instantiated Plot Ξ-Infinity as a placeholder for all unresolved and recursive assignments. It was not observed, until some four hundred pages later, that the clause's own schedule of excluded premises named Plot D-12 as a parcel "not to be treated as terminal." The effect is that material which is too unresolved for A-7 but not quite unresolved enough to be sent to Ξ-Infinity has exactly one lawful destination, and it is D-12.

"A parcel expressly excluded from termination shall, without further instrument, be taken as a holding pen for the indecisive."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, recension of 3,201

The Librarians have declined to rule on whether this makes D-12 a terminus in fact if not in name. The Grey Niche debates touched the question repeatedly in the 3,170s without resolving it. In practice the Department has settled the matter quietly: nothing entered in D-12 is ever formally entered into a register of conclusions, only into a register of pending material, and the distinction has held for ninety years.

Association with the Delta Sequence Map

Because conventional survey methods return inconsistent adjacencies for D-12 — the parcel appears, on successive surveys, to neighbour three different corridors, one of which does not exist — the Department has adopted a Delta Sequence Map as its working instrument for the parcel. Fitted with a D-12 overlay, the Map plots the parcel not where it is but where it is likely to be next. This has proven useful and unsettling in equal measure. In 3,244 a survey party using an unoverlaid Map recorded the parcel's west face at a distance of eleven metres from its east face; a follow-up party, using the overlay, recorded the same face as nine metres, and found a coat stand there that neither party had placed.

The parcel is not bounded, like A-7, by the Hum of the Depths or by Aperture Alpha-7, Sub-Level 33. Its only fixed feature is the Iron Catwalk that crosses its western edge at a height the Department's surveyors give as "approximately breast-high, subject to review." All measurement of D-12 is now taken from the catwalk rings, which have the additional merit of being audible when struck and therefore locatable in dark.

Incidents and feuds of record

The parcel's most significant event was the so-called Overfill of 3,259, when a junior clerk in the Office of Terminal Designations, one Meret Salvis, admitted fourteen unsorted anecdotes of uncertain authorship into D-12 in a single morning. By early afternoon the anecdotes had begun to cohere: witnesses on the catwalk reported that the parcel had acquired a smell of wet stone and a recurring sound of a door closing twice. The Department, alarmed at the parcel's evident tendency to consolidate, sealed D-12 for eleven days and reduced the admission quota to three items per week. It has remained at three. A standing instruction, posted at the catwalk access, reads that "items of an appealing nature shall not be left unattended in the parcel overnight"; it has been broken twice, and both occasions required the attendance of a surveyor.

The Overfill also produced a lasting grievance. The Office of Terminal Designations held that the consolidated material should have been treated as an emergence and transferred at once to Plot A-7; the Cartographic Office held that it should have been dropped entirely. The dispute was heard before the Librarians in 3,262, which found for neither party and instead directed that the parcel be "held in its present condition, whatever that is." The file has not been closed.

Inventory and present use

A full inventory of D-12 has never been compiled, on the ground that counting the parcel's contents alters them. The Department's most recent partial return lists the following, all entered under seal:

• One description of a staircase, unreferenced, thought to originate above Sub-Level 40;
• Three unfinished names, of which one has since been completed elsewhere and struck from the return;
• The sound of a handbell, recorded as a location rather than as a sound;
• A dispute between two porters as to whether a particular coating of dust on the catwalk had been there the previous week.

The parcel remains in active use and is inspected quarterly. Visiting parties are advised to enter from the catwalk and to leave by the same route; the Department notes that the eastern approach has been found to work, but only once. Requests for transfer of material from D-12 to Plot A-7 are made in writing to the Office of Terminal Designations and are granted at a rate the Department describes, in its annual return, as "adequate."