Potential Receipt (Series P)

The Potential Receipt (Series P) is the instrument by which The Tower acknowledges a submission that has not occurred but retains a robust potential for occurrence. It is the third of the three receipt series maintained under Receipt and Triaging, following the Material Receipt issued for physical objects and the Abstract Receipt issued for non-corporeal submissions. Unlike its siblings, a Series P receipt does not describe what has been received; it describes what is expected to be received, in a form sufficiently precise that the eventual receipt, should it occur, can be recognised as the fulfillment of the earlier one rather than as a new submission altogether.

Series P receipts are printed on stock heavier than Series A and lighter than Series M, a compromise settled by the Subcommittee on Stock and Impression in a ruling of 9 Frost, Year 412, after eleven years of complaint from the scriptorium supply offices. Each receipt bears a spiral mark in the upper left quadrant and, in the upper right, a number from 0.1 to 0.9 indicating the assessed robustness of the potential. A receipt marked 0.9 is understood to be nearly a receipt of something; one marked 0.1 is understood to be, in the words of the Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, "an acknowledgement extended to a rumour of a rumour."

Issuance and the Anticipatory Register

A Series P receipt may be issued only where an Receipt of Anticipatory Intent has already been filed in the prescribed Receipt of Anticipatory Intent. The intent form supplies the anticipated contours of the submission; the Series P receipt supplies the Tower's acknowledgement that those contours have been noted. The two documents are stored in separate rooms, on separate floors, and are never reconciled in the presence of the submitter, a practice confirmed by Clause 14.7.δ and never explained in writing.

The issuing clerk assigns the robustness figure by a method set out in the Register of Assessed Potentials, a volume of some nine hundred pages that has never been revised and is therefore consulted chiefly for its marginalia. In practice most clerks defer to the Potential Resonator Array on the floor above, whose readings are treated as authoritative when they can be read at all. Where the Array is silent, the clerk is directed by Section 7.1 to assess by inspection and to record the grounds of the assessment in no fewer than four words. The formula "appeared likely enough" accounts for 61 per cent of entries in the last complete survey.

Storage in the Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts

A Series P receipt that is not formally received — that is, whose anticipated submission does not arrive within the period stated on its face — is transferred to the Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts, where it is cross-referenced by anticipated date, anticipated category, and the name of the clerk who anticipated it. The Gallery holds Series P receipts in higher proportion than either M or A, and the Gallery's keepers maintain a separate index for those whose anticipated submissions have since been anticipated a second time by a different office. This index is called the Echo Register, though the Ninth Concordance refers to it as the Register of Repeated Expectation, and both names appear on the spine.

Receipts in the Echo Register may not be destroyed. They may be consolidated, a procedure that requires the signature of a Librarian and the agreement of both anticipating offices, which is rarely obtained. The oldest unresolved pair dates to Year 388 and concerns a potential submission described only as "a door, or the sound of one."

The Dispute of the Robustness Figure

Scholarly opinion divides on whether the robustness figure attached to a Series P receipt is a description or an instruction. The Second Concordance, Annex 11, holds that the figure merely records the assessment as made and has no bearing on whether the submission occurs. The Sixth Concordance, Annex 3, holds the reverse: that a submission is drawn toward occurrence in proportion to the figure assigned to it, and that a clerk who writes 0.9 has, in a limited sense, caused something to be nearly true.

"The figure is not a prophecy but a receipt of one. He who writes it has already been paid."

— Sixth Concordance, Annex 3

No reconciliation has been issued. The Bureau of Registry has declined three times to refer the question to the Bureau of Implementable Abstraction, on the grounds that a docket under Form IR-9 would require the Bureau to define what it means for something to be nearly true, and the Bureau has no form for that.

Nominal Flags and Overlap

Where a Series P receipt appears to anticipate a subject already catalogued under a different entry, the issuing clerk applies a Nominal Flag in the NF-series. Flagged receipts are held at the issuing desk for no fewer than thirty days, during which any office may object. In Year 561 a clerk named Osric Vane issued forty-one Series P receipts in a single winter in anticipation of a proposed floor that was never built; thirty-eight were flagged, and the resulting file occupied a shelf that had to be widened. Vane's defence — that the floor's non-existence was itself robustly potential and therefore properly receipted — was accepted, and the receipts remain active.

Destruction and the Incinerator

Series P receipts lapse after seven years if unfulfilled, whereupon they are carried to the Incinerator of Lapsed Potential. The carry is performed by two clerks, one of whom must not have read the receipt. Clerks are reminded that the Incinerator operates on the lower gallery and that the lift does not stop there; the stair is the approved route and the handrail is to be used throughout.

The School of Latent Potential maintains that lapsed receipts ought to be retained for study rather than burned, and has petitioned on the point since Year 490. Its most recent petition, filed under the Petitions of Apparent Isness, was returned unopened on the ground that the School had described the receipts' continued existence as merely possible.