Procedures

Procedures is the collective designation for the body of numbered procedural documents governing action within the Tower, and, by extension, the doctrine that no action is valid until it has been procedurally anticipated. The term is never used in the singular. A Librarian asked to produce "the Procedure" for a given task will correct the request; there is no single Procedure for anything, and the correction itself is procedure.

Procedures are issued, amended, and superseded continuously, and the archive distinguishes between the standing text — the most recent recension deposited with the Bureau of Appointments — and the operational text, which is whatever copy an agent is actually carrying. The two are permitted to differ. Standing Procedures states at Clause 3 that "an agent shall act upon the text in the agent's possession, the possession being the authority" (Standing Procedures, Rev. 44, Clause 3). Annex B: Procedures for Reality Audits does not dispute this, but notes at paragraph 11 that possession is difficult to demonstrate after the fact.

Form and numbering

Procedures take the form of principal documents, annexes lettered A through at least Sigma, and clauses numbered within annexes. Cross-referencing is by the full chain — document, revision, annex, clause — although in practice clerks abbreviate, and the abbreviations have themselves acquired authority. Procedures for Latent Integration is cited almost universally as PLI Annex-Φ, a usage the originating office has neither ratified nor prohibited.

Some Procedures are grouped by theme rather than issued singly: the Procedures for Manifestation (PM-1 through PM-12) form a closed set, while the Procedures for the Cataloguing of Ephemera form an open one and have grown by accretion since the Curator of Ephemera's appointment. The Manual of Alignatory Procedures occupies an anomalous position, being chiefly a schedule of measurements attached to a procedure conducted by others. See Atmospheric Calibration.

Amendment and the recension problem

Amendment is by recension: a revised text is copied out in full, the old text struck but retained, and the difference recorded in a separate schedule. This produces the Paradoxic Layer — the accumulated schedules of differences, now exceeding the Procedures they describe by a factor of roughly four to one, according to the count taken at the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing in the winter of the year recorded as 3,411 (the count does not agree with the count of the year before). That the Paradoxic Layer has never been catalogued as a document in its own right is a matter of repeated complaint from the Office of the Dean of Lexical Purity.

"The Procedures are not a record of what has been done. They are the condition under which anything may be said to have been done at all. A librarian who cannot cite the Procedure for an act has not committed the act, whatever witnesses report."

— Concordance 42, Annex Gamma, Section VII: Standard Operating Procedures for the Phenomenological Capture of Resonant Entities, preamble

The Arris question

Scholarly disagreement centers on the career of Arris, whose record is distinguished by a diligent application of Provisional Procedures — that is, of Procedures issued for a limited term and never formally made standing. The Office of the Dean of Lexical Purity holds that Provisional Procedures lapse on the stated date and cannot ground any later action, citing Concordance 199, Annex δ: Procedures for Sub-lexical Disputes. The Bureau of Appointments holds the contrary: that a Procedure applied diligently and without objection passes into standing by prescription, a position it derives from Twelve Citing Concordances for Appointment Procedures and Investigative Purview, four of which it concedes are no longer in force.

The dispute is not academic. Several appointments made under Provisional Procedures remain occupied. The Procedures for Paradoxical Depiction require that where an agent's field report contradicts a standing entry, an Interstitial Plenum is convened at once; and Arris's field reports, read strictly, contradict entries in at least nine standing Procedures. The Bureau has declined to convene on the ground that the entries in question are Provisional. The Warden of the Interstitial Plenum has recorded its disagreement in a minute that the Bureau has not answered.

Known failures

Procedures fail in three recognized ways: by redundancy, where two Procedures require incompatible actions and neither yields; by dormancy, where a Procedure is obeyed but its outcome is not recognized by any subsequent Procedure; and by saturation, where so many Procedures bear on a single act that the act cannot be performed before the relevant annexes are superseded.

The most cited instance of redundancy is the Concordance 742 affair, in which two Procedures issued in the same year required, respectively, that a sealed chamber be opened and that it remain sealed until opening was authorized. The chamber remained sealed for eleven years, during which time the clerks assigned to it maintained the seals, filed quarterly reports on their condition, and did not open it. The resolution, when it came, was a further Procedure.

Current clerks are reminded that the Procedures are shelved by the floor of issue and not by subject, that the floor numbers are not sequential, and that no request to reshelve them by subject has succeeded. Lamps must be extinguished before leaving a reading bay.