Post-Transition Instructions

Definition and scope

Post-Transition Instructions are the set of standing directives issued to any party who has completed a Pre-Transition Audit and been certified for vertical movement between floors. Where the Pre-Transition Audit governs the demonstration of documentation harmony prior to departure, the Post-Transition Instructions govern the conduct of the subject for a period of not fewer than ninety days following arrival on the receiving floor. They are not issued by a single office; the Office of Epistemic Transit, which otherwise issues Transit Instructions, maintains that Post-Transition Instructions "descend from, but are not subordinate to, the Transit Instructions proper," while Transition Oversight maintains that they descend from the Operational Clauses appended to the Directives of the receiving floor. The distinction is procedural only, but it has not been resolved in three recensions.

History

The earliest surviving formulation appears in the Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, which required that a transitioning party "on arrival attend to the nearest post and remain there until acknowledged." The requirement that the party remain was struck by amendment in the 400-series recension after the incident on the stair between Floors 118 and 121, in which a certified party remained at the nearest post for eleven weeks because the post in question had been decommissioned and its acknowledgement bell removed. The modern Instructions retain the attendance requirement but substitute "a reasonable period, not to exceed one working day" for the original open-ended phrasing.

The Instructions were consolidated under their current title during the post-Collation era, when the separate standing orders of twelve receiving floors were found to contain materially identical provisions with divergent clause numbering. Consolidation was carried out by Clerk Aris, whose covering memorandum noted that "harmony of substance had been achieved at the cost of harmony of citation, and the citation was the part the Concordances read."

Principal provisions

The Instructions are divided into four parts. Part One addresses arrival reporting: the party must present their audit certificate to the receiving floor's designated official within one working day, and must not present it twice. Part Two addresses residual designation: any Non-Occupational Continuum (NOC) designation carried from the departing floor lapses automatically on arrival unless re-petitioned under Annex Alpha of Form Noc 4a Filing Instructions. Part Three addresses adjacency: the party must not, for the duration of the ninety-day period, be shelved, filed, or otherwise placed in physical proximity to any record they handled in the preceding twelve months. Part Four addresses reporting of drift, which is discussed below.

The adjacency provision in Part Three derives directly from Annex Δ of Form NOC-4a: Filing Instructions, which articulates the principle that unattributed adjacency can seed "latent associations." Application to transitioned parties was proposed by Office of Post-Ratification Affairs and contested by Post of Recursive Oversight, which held that the Annex governs documents only. The contest was settled in favour of extension by a narrow Concordance ruling; Post-Resolution Monitoring continues to record objections in its margin.

Drift and the ninety-day watch

"Drift" is the term used in the Instructions for the phenomenon in which a party, having arrived on a new floor, begins to answer to the designation of that floor rather than the designation under which they were certified. The Instructions require the party to report any instance of drift to Post-Resolution Monitoring within two days of noticing it, and require the receiving floor's official to log the report even where the official considers the drift to be cosmetic. Non-reporting is the only offence under the Instructions that carries automatic invalidation of the original audit certificate.

Drift reporting was once handled by Office of Epistemic Transit directly, but the arrangement was discontinued after the office's registers and those of Transition Oversight were found to disagree by an average of forty-one entries per quarter. The present arrangement assigns first recording to the receiving floor and second recording to Post-Resolution Monitoring, with no reconciling step specified.

Points of dispute

The Concordances contradict one another on the duration of the ninety-day watch. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, sets it at ninety days from arrival. The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, sets it at ninety days from the presentation of the audit certificate, which under Part One may differ from arrival by up to one working day. Annex Γ of Form NOC-4a: Filing Instructions introduces a third count by tying the period to the triennial audit cycle, which would make it anywhere between seventy-one and two hundred eighty-three days depending on the calendar position of the party's petition. No ruling has harmonized the three counts, and parties are advised by Procedural Directives to observe the longest count applicable to them.

A second, older dispute concerns whether the Post-Transition Instructions bind the party or the floor. Office of Post-Ratification Affairs has consistently maintained that they bind the party alone; the A-77b Precedent has been cited in support of the contrary view, on the reasoning that a floor which fails to acknowledge a reporting party has, in effect, performed a transition of its own. The matter is unresolved and is expected to remain so.

Practical notes

Visitors wishing to consult the consolidated text should apply to the receiving floor's official rather than to Office of Epistemic Transit; the Transit office's copy is a working draft and has been since the post-Collation era. Copies at receiving floors are quartered, and the quartering is not itself a floor. The corridor lamps on Floors 118 through 121 are kept lit throughout the ninety-day watch at the request of Transition Oversight, a provision carried over from the stair incident and never rescinded.