Registry of Lost Seconds

The Registry of Lost Seconds is the Tower's central ledger of temporal discrepancy, maintained continuously since at least the ninth recension of the Concordance of Measured Intervals and housed, by long-standing arrangement, in a locked cabinet on the mezzanine of the Horological Annex of the Northern Stair. It records every documented anomaly exceeding 0.003 standard beats, together with the location, the attending officer, and — where one can be agreed upon — a provisional cause. Entries below the threshold are not recorded, though they are collected in a separate waste-bundle and retained for ninety days. No entry in the Registry has ever been struck out. Corrections are appended; the original reading stands.

The Registry is not a record of time that has passed. It is a record of time that has failed to account for itself. The distinction is insisted upon by the office of the Keeper, whose seal appears on every fourth folio and whose jurisdiction extends to the anomaly and not to whatever the anomaly displaced.

Antecedents and establishment

The Registry was not the first attempt. Its immediate predecessor, the Ledger of Deferred Moments, was abandoned in the winter of the year the Northern Stair froze at the eleventh gallery, when an entire season of readings was found to have been entered on a single folio in an increasingly small hand, the clerk having run out of paper and, by his own later account, patience. The Keeper at the time, Sarn of the Lower Mezzanine, ruled the Ledger inadmissible as evidence on the grounds that it could no longer be read aloud in a single sitting.

The Registry was established the following spring under Concordance Annex 9, which fixed the recording threshold at 0.003 standard beats and, in the same clause, forbade the alteration of any figure once entered. The prohibition was debated for six days and has been honoured without exception except on eleven occasions, each of which is itself recorded in the errata.

Method of entry

Readings are taken by the Office of Standing Clocks, which maintains a chain of eleven regulators along the Northern Stair and refuses to describe them as synchronized, preferring "mutually aware." When two regulators disagree, the discrepancy is entered to the Registry and the clocks are not adjusted, on the principle that the disagreement is the measurement. A visiting inspector may request a reading, but may not be present while it is taken. This rule was introduced after a dispute in the fourth gallery and is not explained in the Concordance.

Each entry requires the countersignature of a second officer. Where the anomaly occurs during a period when only one officer is on duty, the entry is held in the Antechamber of Lost Intent until a second signature can be obtained, sometimes for years. The Registry's longest-held unsigned entry, folio 4,112, waited eleven years and four months before attestation and is cited in the teaching of new clerks as an example of patience rather than of neglect.

Dispute with the Scriptorium of Lost Roots

The Registry's remit has been contested by the Scriptorium of Lost Roots, which maintains that lost figures fall within its own authority and that a lost second is a lost figure under another name. The Librarians of the Lost Figure have declined to adjudicate. The matter was referred to the Archive of Lost Protocols in the year of the second audit, which authenticated neither claim but noted that both offices had in fact maintained parallel registries for a period of some decades.

The parallel registry kept at Š-Lost was surrendered to the mezzanine cabinet in a handcart, in the rain, without ceremony. The Garrulous Golem of Š-Lost, which had been charged with guarding the alcove's copy and which could not be persuaded to release it, was left in the alcove. It continues to recite entries from memory. Its recitations do not match the Registry, and the discrepancy between the two is not itself entered, on the grounds that the Golem is not a clock.

Relation to the Lost Catalogue of Negative Space

Where an anomaly cannot be located in ordinary space — where the reading simply exceeds the instrument and no gallery, alcove or landing will accept it — the excess is entered in the Lost Catalogue of Negative Space under the Negative Volume, and the Registry's entry receives an appended Reciprocal Leverage Marker upon approval of Negative Leveraging. The approval process ordinarily takes between two and nine weeks. Entries awaiting a Marker are marked with a spiral in the margin, which is frequently mistaken for a correction and is not one.

Notable entries

The Registry's most-cited holdings include the following.

• Folio 112 — eleven seconds lost on the eleventh gallery, adjacent to the Archivium, entered without cause and never explained.
• Folio 2,904 — a single second recovered and immediately re-lost, recorded as two entries, both valid.
• Folio 6,771 — the double reading at the Orrery of Lost Hours, later attributed to the Orrery's own maintenance and allowed to stand.
• Folio 9,018 — the "stacked" entry arising from a stacked coincidence, which by its nature tolerates eleven seconds of drift and was therefore entered in full, with the drift noted in the margin by the same hand.

Access and custody

The Registry may be consulted by any Librarian of the third grade or above, by written application, and in the presence of the Keeper. The cabinet key is held by the Keeper and, as a safeguard, by the Directorate of Preemptive Resource Allocation, which seconds an officer to the mezzanine for the purpose. The two keys are identical and have been exchanged in error three times. On each occasion the Registry was opened, examined, and found correct.

"The Registry does not measure the Tower. It measures the difference between the Tower and itself, which is smaller than it sounds and larger than the instruments allow."

— Keeper of the Registry of Lost Seconds, address to the Archive of Lost Protocols, opening of the second audit