Protocol 13-A

Protocol 13-A is a short-form administrative protocol of the Second Recension series, concerning the orderly retirement of protocol designations that have never been invoked. It is best known not for its provisions, which run to four clauses, but for the two-hundred-and-eleven-year dispute over whether it exists at all — a dispute settled in favour of its existence by the Ninth Concordance, which then declined to say what it does.

Provisions

Protocol 13-A was drafted in the winter of floor 4,412 by a clerk of the Office of Designation Records named Halver Mund, whose grievance is preserved in the margins of the office's day-book. Mund had spent six years attempting to close the file on a protocol that had received a number, a seal, and a schedule of fees, but no clauses. His draft proposed that any designation unsupported by an operative clause for forty years be struck, its seal melted, and its number returned to the pool. Three of the four clauses survived review. The fourth, which would have required the originating office to apologise in writing, was struck — according to Mund's marginal note, "not on merit."

The protocol's operative clauses are consequently brief: a designation must be published in the Register of Uninvoked Protocols before retirement; the seal is returned to the Seal Vault, Lower Arc rather than melted; the number enters a forty-year quarantine; and the retiring clerk signs twice, once for the file and once for the seal. Mund objected to the quarantine in a note dated 4:112, observing that the pool of numerals was "not presently in danger of exhaustion, and will not be, on any arithmetic available to me."

The Question of Application

Protocol 13-A has never been applied. This is not, as is sometimes assumed, because no protocols meet its conditions — the Register of Uninvoked Protocols lists three hundred and six — but because clause two requires the seal to be deposited by the same clerk who removes it, and the Seal Vault, Lower Arc has no through-door. Clerks may enter the vault or leave it; no arrangement of the corridors permits both in a single visit. The Vault Access Ordinance of 6:003 records that this was understood at the time of construction and considered acceptable.

Twice, retiring clerks have attempted the manoeuvre by passing the seal through the doorway to a colleague. On the first occasion the seal was returned within the hour, on the ground that a seal deposited by one clerk and carried by another is deposited by neither. On the second, no ruling was given, and the seal remains on the threshold, where it has been catalogued as a fixture of the vault's east wall.

Jurisdictional Conflict

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the protocol's competence. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 6, places 13-A among the "instruments of housekeeping" answerable to the Office of Designation Records. The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, clause 9, asserts with equal confidence that "all short-form retirements are governed by the Contradiction Protocol and its annexed procedures," which would remove 13-A to the jurisdiction of a different office entirely and subject it to the Contradiction Protocol. Readers of the Elaran Protocol will recognise the pattern: a small instrument absorbed by a larger one without either being amended.

"Where two annexes claim one protocol, the protocol is not doubled. It is merely harder to find."

— Third Concordance, Observations on Annexation

The Office of Designation Records has continued to administer 13-A under the Ninth Concordance without comment. Asked in 6:441 to reconcile the two annexes, the office replied that the question had been referred and that the reference remained open.

Relationship to the Supersession Series

Protocol 13-A is sometimes confused with the instruments governing supersession, particularly Protocol 4-G, whose unstated axiom later troubled the Elaran Protocol. The confusion arises from a single phrase in 13-A's preamble — "designations that have lapsed from use" — which the Academy of Archival Protocol reads narrowly, as referring only to uninvoked protocols, and the Bureau of Lapsed Instruments reads broadly, as covering anything at all that has fallen out of use, including several floors. The Bureau's reading would give 13-A jurisdiction over Protocol 12-B, a claim the Academy has described in its Observations (7:118) as "arithmetically bold."

No decision has been reached. The Bureau's position is supported by the plain words of the preamble; the Academy's by the fact that, under the Bureau's reading, the protocol could never be applied, since clause two would require the signing clerk to stand at the bottom of a staircase that has no bottom. The Academy considers this decisive. The Bureau has not responded.

Maintenance Note

One practical consequence of the protocol has entered general use. Because clause four requires the retiring clerk's second signature to be made in the presence of the seal, and the seal is by definition in the vault, clerks retiring any designation at all are required to sign the register twice. The second signature is customarily made at the vault's doorway, facing inward. Visiting scholars are asked not to stand in the doorway while this is done.