Procedural Forms

Procedural Forms are the standardized documentary shapes that an administrative action must assume before the Tower will recognize that it has been taken. They are not records of procedures; they are the procedures, considered as objects. A requisition is held to be a Form in the same sense that a stair-tread is a stair-tread — it has dimensions, a footing, and a load it will bear. The distinction is maintained by the Index of Procedural Nomenclature, which lists some forty thousand approved shapes and classifies each by spine width, margin concession, and the number of seals it will admit without buckling.

The forms are overseen by the Office of Unbuilt Forms, which does not issue them, and issued by the Bureau of Transient Forms, which does not oversee them. This arrangement is nearly four centuries old and is not considered a fault. It is regarded, rather, as the load-bearing separation that keeps the Doctrine of Antecedent Forms from collapsing into mere filing.

Classification

Forms divide by precedence. A Primary Form is one whose submission alone constitutes the act it describes; the Tower has eleven, of which the Notice of Intent to Vacate (Form 12-b) is the most frequently submitted and the least frequently acted upon. A Secondary Form requires a Primary to be lodged first, and a Tertiary Form requires a Secondary, and so on through seven degrees, after which the nomenclature index stops counting and simply assigns letters. Form delta-9, the Acknowledgement of an Acknowledgement, is the deepest approved shape in current use; it was last submitted in the winter of the long audit and is still being returned for want of the sixth-degree document beneath it.

The dispute over the pre-procedural

The central and unresolved question in the study of Procedural Forms is whether a form precedes the procedure it records or follows it. The Retroactive School holds that no form exists until a procedure has been completed, at which point the form is generated backwards from the outcome under the Doctrine of Retroactive Standing. Their opponents, the partisans of Textual Primacy, cite the Treatise on Pre-Procedural Forms, which describes certain stairwells as "completed by what was left out of them," and argue that a form may be present before it has anything to hold.

"A form lodged before its procedure is not premature; it is the procedure's reason for occurring. What the Tower calls an empty form is a form whose procedure has not yet caught up with it."

— Treatise on Pre-Procedural Forms, recension gamma, folio 88

The Seventh Concordance was understood to have settled the matter by fixing the acceptable sequence at three weeks between lodging and act, but Annex 4 of the same document requires the form to be lodged no earlier than the act it governs. Both clauses remain in force. Contradiction Flagging records an average of sixty filings a year on this point alone, and no office has been found willing to rule.

Procedural Vacuum and the unbuilt shapes

Where a necessary administrative act has no sanctioned form to wear, the gap does not remain empty. It fills with pressure, and the pressure deforms adjacent paperwork — margins widen, seals migrate, a completed form is found on the desk still bearing a blank where its purpose should be. This is the ordinary business of Procedural Vacuum Theory, which treats the missing form as a cavity in the procedural field and predicts, with tolerable accuracy, which neighbouring documents will buckle first.

The Office of Unbuilt Forms maintains drawings of forms that have never been issued, on the view that a shape must be drafted before the vacuum can be read. Its catalogue includes the celebrated Sheet 4-C, a single-page instrument intended to close a vacuum on Floor 210 that has since been annexed and subdivided twenty-two times. The original drawing is kept under glass and is not to be handled; visitors may view it on the second and fourth days of the week, and must remove their seals before entering.

Material and use

Forms are executed in Procedural Binding or, less often, in Material Binding, the choice governed by whether the act in question is to be held in place or merely kept. The warehouse stores them flat, in runs of two hundred, under weights cut to the Federal standard. When a run is exhausted before the act it serves has concluded, a fresh run is issued bearing the same numeral and the suffix "bis," which does not restart the count but suspends it; a third run is issued as "ter," and a fourth is not issued. Clerks are asked not to write on the weights.

The most persistent grievance in this quarter is that of Clerk-Adjunct Perrin Ostley, who in the first winter of her appointment lodged nineteen consecutive Secondary Forms, each of which returned an error traceable to the isolation of the floor. In her account, set down for the Office of Unbuilt Forms, she wrote that her forms had been "returned for the want of a stairwell," and that she had checked, and there was a stairwell. Her memorandum is retained as an exhibit in the standing inquiry into whether a form may be refused for a deficiency that is not on the form.

No form has ever been withdrawn once issued, though several have been lost, and one — Form 0, the Blank, whose dimensions are not recorded — is said to be in use wherever a procedure has begun and cannot be named.