Protocols of Conditional Intent

The Protocols of Conditional Intent are the standing body of procedural rules governing statements of purpose that take effect only upon the satisfaction of a stated condition. They are distinct from the Axiom of Intent, which asserts a principle, and from the Lexicon of Conditional Phrases, which supplies the wording; the Protocols govern what happens between the utterance of a conditional purpose and its lawful execution. They are administered jointly by the Registry of Provisional Intent and the Vault of Conditional Authority, an arrangement that has produced four centuries of overlapping jurisdiction and one murder inquiry, closed in 3,112 without findings.

The Protocols are conventionally cited in three recensions: the Long Recension of the Forty Seventh Concordance, Annex 9; the Short Recension circulated by the Clerks of the Conditional Tense from 2,806; and the Schedules of Qualification appended to the Stairwell of Qualified Intent inventory, which are not strictly Protocols but are bound with them because no binder will hold one without the other.

Origin and the Matter of the Burned Register

The Protocols were first consolidated following the winter of 2,441 on Floor 18, when a party declared an intent to traverse the Stairwell of Qualified Intent "provided the weather holds." The qualifier was accepted by the duty clerk, Custodian Vell Anterry, who recorded it in the provisional register and admitted the party to the aperture. The weather did not hold. The aperture held. The party was recovered eleven days later from Floor 18 itself, having descended no distance measurable by the instruments then in use, and submitted a complaint running to forty pages.

Anterry's defence — that no Protocol then existed specifying what "holds" was to mean in the case of weather — was accepted by the Chamber of Conditional Causality, which nonetheless ruled that the register in which the qualifier had been recorded was itself a conditional instrument and nullified it retroactively. The burned register is preserved in the Archive of Lost Protocols as Exhibit 18-c, charred but legible at the margins. Anterry was reassigned to the Division of Conditional Permissions, where he is remembered chiefly for a memorandum arguing that "provided" and "subject to" are not interchangeable, a position the Operational Clauses later adopted by a single vote.

The Three Conditions of Standing

A conditional intent has standing under the Protocols only where all three of the following are satisfied. First, the condition must be one that can be observed by a party other than the declarant; the Attestation of Intent supplies the required witness. Second, the condition must be capable of failing. Third, the intent must specify what is to happen upon failure, or the Protocols supply a default derived from the Provisional Tagging schedule.

The second condition has caused the most difficulty. In 2,903 the Arbiter of Recursive Intent was asked to rule on an intent conditioned upon the continued existence of the Tower. The Arbiter held that the condition was valid but unfalsifiable within the Tower's observing apparatus, and suspended the matter pending a determination that has not been issued. The file is marked open, and is consulted annually by the Bureau of Spatial and Temporal Alignment as an example of a scheduling conflict that cannot be resolved by scheduling.

Dispute Between the Recensions

The Long and Short Recensions disagree on the treatment of nested conditions. Annex 9, clause 14 provides that a condition may itself be conditioned, "and so on without limit, provided each link is separately attested." The Short Recension, at clause 6, holds that no intent may carry more than two conditions, "the third being invariably a device for delay," a phrase attributed to the School of Accumulated Intent and never withdrawn.

The Vault of Conditional Authority has declined to reconcile the two, issuing instead a Conditional Certification in 3,044 that permits either reading according to the recension held by the filing office. The Registry of Provisional Intent holds the Long Recension; the Custodian of Conditional Passage holds the Short. Filings submitted at one office and forwarded to the other are therefore frequently invalid on arrival, and the Protocols require the forwarding office to say so in writing, which it does.

"Where two offices hold two books, the petitioner shall not be heard to complain that the Tower holds two answers."

— Forty Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, clause 31

Practical Requirements

Declarations under the Protocols are entered on Form 44-V where traversal is concerned, and on the general schedule Form 12 otherwise. The Sphygmomanometers of Intent are used at intake to establish that the declarant's purpose is stable at the moment of filing; a reading taken after a condition has already lapsed is void and the declarant must return the following day. Both forms are to be completed in ink. The Protocols do not specify a colour, and a standing instruction of the Registry excludes green.

Where a condition is satisfied during the period of filing itself, the Archive of Superseded Etiquette receives the original and the petitioner receives nothing, which several petitions have described as the Protocols' principal defect.

Relationship to Other Instruments

The Protocols are pre-conditional to most subsequent pronouncements, by the scheduling protocols of the Bureau of Spatial and Temporal Alignment. They are also read alongside the Statute of Settled Qualia where a condition has already resolved, and alongside the Register of Conditional Tangibility where the object of the intent is a thing whose solidity is itself contingent, as is usual on the upper floors. Exemplary Intent is not a category the Protocols recognise; the phrase appears in the Short Recension once, at clause 40, and is there a copyist's error for "exemplified intent," which means something else entirely and is dealt with elsewhere.