Proposed Containment Protocols

Proposed Containment Protocols are preliminary or draft measures submitted for formal review and ratification before they can be entered into the Tower’s official compendium of Containment doctrine. Governed by Provisional Logging Protocols, these protocols occupy a liminal bureaucratic status, existing as formally acknowledged proposals while lacking the full authority of ratified ordinances.

Submission and Logging

All proposals must be submitted in triplicate to the Recursive Amendments Office on Floor 707. Upon receipt, a clerk assigns a temporary alphanumeric designation (e.g., PCP-α/44-19) and initiates a standard 90-day review cycle. The proposal is then circulated to the relevant oversight bodies, which typically include the Paradox Control Bureau (per Codicil 127), the Senior Indexers' Guild, and the originating Containment Schematic drafting office. A notable exception is made for proposals concerning Floor 881, which are immediately forwarded to the custodians of the Seventeen Provisional Protocols for pre-assessment.

Structure and Required Elements

A valid Proposed Containment Protocol must conform to the template outlined in the Twelfth Concordance, Annex Delta. Mandatory sections include:

• Statement of Ontological Variance: A precise description of the phenomenon to be contained, citing its initial manifestation report.
• Proposed Classification: A recommendation for a Provisional Classification (Type-1 through Type-7), with justification referencing the Protocols for Coherency Assessment.
• Containment Methodology: Detailed procedures for stabilization, isolation, or neutralization. This section often references existing Clause 7 standards or Doctrines of Implicit Containment.
• Resource Requisition: An itemized list of required spatial allocations, personnel shifts, and non-standard archival materials.
• Risk Assessment & Bureaucratic Precedent: An analysis of potential failure modes, citing past incidents such as the Echoes in West Spiral 44, and a review of contradictory or supporting articles in the existing Concordance series.

Review and Ratification Process

The review process is notoriously labyrinthine. Proposals are subject to annotation, challenge, and amendment by each reviewing body. It is not uncommon for a protocol concerning, for example, a self-replicating footnote, to accumulate several hundred pages of appended commentary before reaching a vote. Disputes often hinge on interpretations of the Sixth Concordance versus the Eighth Concordance, which contain subtly different amendments regarding measurement protocols for high-variance phenomena.

Final ratification authority rests with the Senior Indexers' Guild, who must find the proposal to be both ontologically sound and bureaucratically elegant. Approved protocols are stamped, assigned a permanent Concordance amendment number, and moved from the provisional ledgers to the active Vault of Unspoken Protocols. Rejected proposals are archived with their review commentary in the Annex of Superseded Suggestions, though clauses from them may be later excerpted for use in other protocols, such as those governing a Proposed Descent.

The Doctrine of Tacit Approval

A peculiar, and often contested, feature of the system is the Doctrine of Tacit Approval. As established by a footnote in the Ordinance for the Containment of Ontological Variance, if a Proposed Containment Protocol has been under active review for more than 360 days without explicit rejection, it may be provisionally enacted under its temporary designation. This has led to the curious circumstance where over 17% of currently active containment fields are governed by protocols still technically labeled "proposed." Scholars argue this represents either a critical flaw in the ratification machinery or a sophisticated form of Containment through Bureaucracy, where the endless process itself becomes the stabilizing agent.

Notable Examples and Controversies

The most famous successful proposal is the Directive Somnia-Ω, which established the framework for containing dream-logic intrusions into waking stacks. Its passage required the reconciliation of seven contradictory clauses across four Concordances.

A persistent controversy involves proposals that are inherently self-negating or recursive. For instance, PCP-θ/99-01, "Protocols for the Containment of Rogue Proposed Containment Protocols," was stuck in review for 12 years before being dismissed as a category error. Similarly, proposals that mandate their own secrecy, aligning with the Protocols of Silence, create unique logistical challenges for the review committees, who must debate the merits of a document they are formally forbidden from acknowledging they have read.

The failure to swiftly ratify a proposal is historically cited as a contributing factor in the Crisis of the Unmoored Stacks, underscoring the tangible risks of procedural delay in matters of ontological stability.