Proposed Floor Amp Neighbors

Proposed Floor Amp Neighbors (formally, the Schedule of Adjacent Entitlements for Floors Not Yet Ratified; cited in practice as PFAN) is the standing register in which a Proposed Floor records the floors it claims as its neighbors, the terms on which it claims them, and the objections entered against those claims by the neighbors themselves. No Proposed Floor may be opened for Survey, Delineation, or Descent until its entries in PFAN have been sealed by the Office of Structural Paradox and countersigned by the Office of Inventory Amp Cataloguing.

The register is maintained by the Bureau of Measurement Amp Demarcation on the fourth mezzanine of the western spiral, in bound volumes of fourteen leaves apiece. As of the 2,411th volume the register held 8,902 open entries and 31,776 sealed ones, a ratio the Bureau describes in its annual return as "durable."

Origin

PFAN was created in response to the neighbor drift recorded during the delineation of Floor 451's northern approach, when a Proposed Floor was found to have claimed four adjacent floors in a single season, three of which had themselves been closed to survey since the Third Concordance's annex on standing. The Office of Structural Paradox traced the difficulty to what it called "the promiscuous adjacency of the unratified," and the Bureau issued the first PFAN volume in the winter of that year, with the instruction that henceforward no floor should be considered adjacent to another simply because it was near it.

The principle was stated plainly in the register's front matter:

"A neighbor is not a thing one has. A neighbor is a thing one has declared, and had declared back."

— PFAN, Volume 1, Preliminary Note on Standing

Entry and sealing

Each entry in PFAN sets out the Proposed Floor by its working designation, the claimed neighbor by floor number and, where one exists, name, the interval between them in standard stair-measures, and the seal of the neighbor's own registry. A claimed neighbor that does not return a seal within ninety days is entered as silent, which carries no standing but does not lapse; the Bureau preserves silent claims indefinitely, and some entries in the earliest volumes have been silent for longer than the Bureau has had a registrar. Petitions to strike a silent claim must be brought under the Holding Title Amp Floor forms, which the Office of Acquisitions Amp Stasis regards as an unnecessary use of its time and has said so in writing on four occasions.

Sealing is not a determination of fact. It records only that both parties have agreed to be entered in the same column. The distinction matters: in the celebrated case of the Proposed Floor designated FF-12071, the claimant's neighbor returned its seal, then withdrew it, then returned it again within a single audit cycle, and the Bureau declined to amend the register on the grounds that "the entry is accurate to the state of the parties at the moment of its reading" (Bureau circular, 4th revision). The floor was subsequently returned to Containment Amp Stabilization for unrelated reasons and the entry remains open.

The Allegorist dispute

PFAN is the subject of the longest-running disagreement in the demarcation literature. The Preliminary Index of Correlative Placement, the lost foundational text of the Allegorists, holds that a floor's meaning is derived not from its contents but from its numerical relationship to its neighbors. The Allegorists read PFAN as a record of meaning; the Bureau reads it as a record of paperwork. Neither has been able to persuade the other, and the Seventh Concordance's formalization of the topology of Floor 12,104 is cited by both sides, at length, in support of opposite conclusions.

The dispute is complicated by the Field Ledgers, in which Field B is entered under the seal of Field A and Field E. The Allegorists maintain that this is a demonstration of the correlative principle; the Bureau maintains that it is a clerical convenience and that the surveyor responsible, whose initials are recorded as T. Vesk, was several days behind on his returns. Vesk's own annotation — "sealed A and E to close the sheet" — is preserved in the Ledgers and has settled nothing.

Notable incidents

In the matter of the Proposed Floor catalogued as NN-3, the registrar accepted a neighbor claim on the strength of a stair interval of 212 measures, later corrected to 121. The correction was entered in the margin, but the sealing page had already been copied into the working files of Notification Amp Sequestration Phase Alpha, and the erroneous interval remained in circulation for six years. When the error was finally traced, the registrar responsible, one H. Marrow, petitioned for the correction to be struck from the record on the grounds that the floors had behaved as though the interval were true for the whole of that period. The petition was refused, with a note that the Bureau "does not correct the past, only the register."

Marrow's subsequent grievance — that a register which corrects itself cannot also be cited as evidence of what occurred — was heard by the Bureau of Guild Liaison Amp Compliance and dismissed for want of a form. It is reproduced in full in the Bureau's appendices and is read by new clerks as an example of careful reasoning arriving at an unhelpful place.

Current holdings and a note on use

The following is the standard inventory issued to a clerk opening a fresh PFAN volume:

• One seal-press, Bureau pattern, with the 121-measure die.
• Fourteen leaves, ruled; blanks may be requisitioned from the mezzanine stores on Tuesdays.
• One set of the current Holding Title Amp Floor forms, unamended.
• The register's front matter, to be read aloud at the opening of each volume.

No entry in PFAN may be erased. Where an entry is superseded, the Bureau strikes it through in red and enters the superseding claim below, a practice inherited from the Office of Taxonomy Amp Cataloguing and retained despite repeated calls for its reform. The red strikethroughs are the only red permitted in the western spiral, and Doffing Amp Deactivation has twice requested an exception for its own returns without success.