Protocol M-2001

Overview

Protocol M-2001 is a standing instrument of the Division of Precedent & Protocol, first sealed on the eleventh of Amsel, 2001, and never formally withdrawn. It governs the treatment of records that have been catalogued twice under different names but refer to the same object, and it is the reason a small number of Tower floors carry two number-plates at their landings. Unlike the operational instruments of the Archival Protocol series — of which Protocol 22-F and Protocol 22-A are the usual comparators — M-2001 is procedural in the narrow sense: it creates no obligations of its own and instead determines which of two conflicting obligations already in force shall be read first.

The Protocol is administered by the Division under the authority of Security Protocol Sigma, whose annexes supply the insulation language by which M-2001 is kept from interfering with instruments it was not written to touch. Its numeral, 2001, is not a sequence position. Under Concordance 4-11 all instruments of the M series are numbered by the year of their sealing, and M-2001 is therefore the eldest of the M instruments still in force.

Origin and the Kestrel Grievance

The Protocol arose from a dispute between two cataloguing offices over the naming of a single landing on Floor 1108. The office of the Lower Stacks had entered the landing as Vestibule of the Second Seal; the office of the Ascending Register had entered the same landing, with the same measurements and the same seal impressions, as Anteroom Nine. Both entries were correct. Neither office would surrender its entry, and for eleven months the landing was counted twice in every inventory, with the result that the Tower's total floor count for that year exceeded the number of floors by one.

The dispute was brought by Clerk Annel of the Ascending Register, who had been required to reconcile the inventory and had done so by entering her own name twice, in the appropriate columns, as a floor. She was not disciplined. Her grievance, filed as Register Complaint 1108-b, was upheld on the narrow ground that the inventory form had no column in which to record a duplication, and M-2001 was drafted to supply one.

Operation

Where two entries are found to describe the same object, M-2001 directs that neither entry be struck. The later of the two is marked with a marginal sigil — a single upright stroke through the entry number — and thereafter reads as a duplicate rather than as a record. The object is counted once. The second entry is retained in place, and may be cited in the ordinary way, provided the citing party acknowledges the sigil. In practice this acknowledgement is a phrase, by the duplicate, appended to the citation.

The sigil is applied with a stylus of blackened brass and may not be made with ink. The rule is old and its reasons are not recorded, but it is enforced: in the winter of 2004 a clerk on Floor 1140 marked forty-one duplicate entries in red ink during a shortage of styluses, and all forty-one were struck from the register, not the sigil but the entries themselves, and had to be recatalogued from the seal-room copies at a cost of some six weeks.

Relation to the Contradiction Protocol

M-2001 is frequently confused with the Contradiction Protocol, and the confusion is not without foundation: both instruments concern two records that cannot both be read as primary. The distinction is one of intent. The Contradiction Protocol governs records that genuinely disagree, and its annexes — under which Protocol 22-F and the Chen Protocol are filed — exist to preserve disagreement rather than resolve it. M-2001 governs records that do not disagree at all. It is a housekeeping instrument, and its supporters have always said so.

This reading is not universal. A minority position, argued at length in the Marginalia of the Ninth Recension, holds that a duplicate is a species of contradiction and that M-2001 is therefore improperly insulated from the Contradiction Protocol by Security Protocol Sigma. The Division has declined to hear the argument four times, most recently in 2019, on the procedural ground that the Ninth Recension is not a citable authority.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns precedence. Concordance 4-11, Annex 3 provides that instruments of the M series "shall be read before the instrument to which they are applied, and not after." Concordance 9-02 provides, in language no less firm, that "no instrument shall be read before another unless it is named in that other." M-2001 is not named in any instrument. The two Concordances have never been reconciled, and the Division has adopted the practice of reading M-2001 first while citing 9-02 in the preamble of every ruling that does so.

Where the precedents collide openly, the Division tends to fall back on Protocol Delta, whose seventh clause — Protocol Delta/7 — provides a default ordering for instruments of equal rank. Whether M-2001 is of equal rank to the instruments it orders is itself unsettled, and Protocol 308-Delta is cited on both sides of the question.

Inventory of Marked Duplicates

The Division maintains a running tally of sigilled entries. The figure stood at 4,112 at the close of the last sealed return. The following are the holdings most often consulted:

• Floor 1108, the landing entered twice — the founding duplicate, sigilled 2001.
• Floor 402, the two catalogues of the Brass Stair, sigilled 2007.
• The seal-room inventory of 1988, entered twice in error and sigilled 2013.
• Floor 1140, the forty-one red-ink entries, sigilled on recataloguing in 2005.

Entries marked by the duplicate may be consulted in the ordinary way. Visitors are asked not to lean on the stylus cabinet.