Registry of Mitigation Protocols

The Registry of Mitigation Protocols is the consolidated schedule of approved responses maintained by the Paradox Control Bureau on Floor 2,208 (the Reading Room of Approved Outcomes). It assigns every recognized hazard class a response class and, by extension, a permitted vocabulary, a permitted duration, and a permitted number of clerks. It is not to be confused with the Registry of Protocols, a separate and older instrument with which it has maintained a formal and largely ceremonial correspondence since the Ninth Concordance; nor with the Registry of Protocols, which is a recension, not a registry, and which its custodians have asked the archivists to stop conflating.

The Registry's authority rests on a single sentence of the Fourth Concordance, Annex 2: "A response unregistered is a response unperformed." The sentence has been read two ways for six hundred years and the Registry has never settled which reading it prefers.

Structure and numbering

Entries are numbered by class, not by hazard. Class one covers observational responses, in which a clerk is permitted to look at the matter and record it. Class two covers containment. Class three covers displacement, in which the hazard is moved elsewhere and the elsewhere is described in an appendix. Class four covers the response of stating that no response occurred, and is the shortest section of the Registry by design.

Contrary to common practice, Displaced Narrative Mitigation (DNM) is classified as a class-three displacement response and does not appear under the letter D at all; it is filed under the number 3, subheading 3.14, and clerks who look for it alphabetically are directed by a card at the D drawer to the correct shelf. The card has been replaced eleven times.

Relationship to the mitigation offices

All response classes catalogued in the Registry descend from the foundational text of Contradiction Mitigation, On Referential Collapse, and the Registry serves as the operative schedule for practitioners of Paradox Mitigation and Hazard Mitigation alike. Deployments of the Paradox Mitigation Harness must cite a registered class before the harness is unsealed; deployments of the Resonant Damping Mesh are governed separately by SMP-Ξ, which is registered with the Registry but not by it.

The damping protocols used to stabilize mitigation environments are supplied by the Bureau of Coincidental Resonance and entered in the Registry as standing appendices rather than as response classes, a distinction the Bureau of Coincidental Resonance has twice petitioned to have abolished. The petition is under consideration in the ordinary way.

Reabsorption Protocols sit awkwardly in the scheme, being neither a response nor a class but a state that follows one. The Registry accommodates them by listing them in every class and none, with a footnote reading "see above" that has never had an above to see.

The Winter Amendment

In the winter of the year the Registry records as 4,411 (Floor 2,208, during a heating failure that lasted nineteen days), the then Keeper of Classes, a clerk named Ovin Marrow, inserted the following into the preamble without consulting the Office of Semantic Integrity:

"A response shall be counted as registered when it has been written down by two clerks who agree, or by three who do not."

— Registry of Mitigation Protocols, Preamble, Winter Amendment

The amendment was intended to speed the processing of class-three entries during the cold and was drafted at a desk at which the ink had frozen twice. It had the opposite effect. Clerks disagreed deliberately, in order to reach the third clerk, and the three-clerk provision created a new office of Tie-Breaking Clerk, which was filled for forty years by a single individual and then abolished by the Tenth Concordance without notice. The Bureau of Registry's Office of Semantic Integrity has ruled the amendment "operative but embarrassing" and declined to say which of those words governs.

Scholarly disagreement

Two readings of the Registry's scope persist in the scriptoria. The narrow reading, advanced by the custodians of the Registry of Unfound Procedures and supported by the correspondence with the Registry of Protocols, holds that the Registry governs only those responses that were registered before the hazard occurred, and that a response improvised in the field is void regardless of its success. The broad reading, asserted in Chapter 7, "Registry Protocols" of the standard manual and taught at the School of Contextual Propagation until its absorption, holds that any response subsequently registered—even years later, even by survivors—retroactively acquires authority.

The broad reading permits the Registry to be amended by its own consequences, which its defenders call elegance and its critics call the reason the class-four section exists. The School of Applied Paradox argued for the narrow reading in a tract of 4,452 that the Paradox Control Bureau ordered dissolved along with the School; the tract's argument survives only in citations, which under either reading remain valid.

Use and maintenance

The Registry is consulted at the desk, not borrowed. Clerks entering the Reading Room of Approved Outcomes must surrender their writing implements at the door; the Registry is annotated in pencil supplied by the room, and the room's pencils are counted out and counted back. In the last recorded audit, four pencils were missing and the matter was registered as a class-three displacement.

Corrections to the Registry may be proposed by any Librarian and are entered by none. A proposal stands on the amendment shelf for one year, then is moved to the second amendment shelf. There is no third shelf.