Repository of Anticipated Forms

Definition

The Repository of Anticipated Forms is an archival repository located on Floor -12 of the Tower, charged with the custody of documents, instruments, and notarized theoretical blueprints prior to the events those documents concern. It is the principal holding facility for the Manifest of Anticipated Arrival (MAA-3 series) and the parent body of the Sub-Basement of Anticipated Echoes. Its founding charter is filed within it, undated in the usual manner; the docket clerk of record has annotated the margin of the charter with the observation that "a charter anticipating its own filing cannot be filed after it, and the Registry declines to say before."

Scope of holdings

The Repository holds forms whose associated transit, action, or arrival has not yet been completed. Items are admitted under the Class Alpha Anticipated Amendment when the anticipated event is judged to be pending, and under the ordinary MAA-3 intake when the event is merely expected. Notarized theoretical blueprints are mandated for inclusion in the Repository by the Provisional Guidelines for Sub-Terranean Holdings, which were themselves filed here in anticipatory form and have never been retrieved. The Repository retains each MAA until the arrival it anticipates is discharged or abandoned; where neither occurs, the shelf is re-lettered and the entry is carried forward to the following year.

Adjacent to the principal stacks, but procedurally distinct from them, lies the Sub-Basement of Anticipated Echoes. The relationship between the two bodies has been the subject of three Concordance rulings, of which the fourth and most recent declares both preceding rulings to be "pre-emptively inoperative."

The Oval of Audition

The Oval of Audition maintains a chamber on Floor -12 in which it conducts Pre-emptive Auditions, most famously the audition for The Hum of Anticipated Rain. An audition is triggered by a corresponding entry appearing in the Registry of the Repository; the Oval does not solicit entries and the Repository does not solicit auditions, a division of initiative that has produced four recorded deadlocks since the Seventh Concordance. The chamber is equipped with a chronostatic dampening field, installed to prevent audition panels from reaching conclusions ahead of the terms of their appointment. Under the field, an expected sound can be held indefinitely at the point of almost-being-heard.

"The Oval hears what is coming; the Repository holds the paper that says it will come. Whichever arrives first has arrived out of order, and out of order is the Repository's department."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9

Subsidiary bodies

Sub-archive 72.8 is located within the Repository and serves as the receiving point for documents filed prior to the events they concern. The Repository also houses the Petrovich Bequest in a climate-controlled annex, the terms of which require that the Bequest be displayed but not examined, and examined but not displayed, on alternate decades; the conflict between these clauses has been referred twice to the Office of Unbuilt Forms and once, inexplicably, to the Repository of Unanswered Questions.

The Repository's registry feeds the wider network of related holdings, including Floor 401, The Repository of Implied Forms, the Archives of Imperfect Forms, and the Gallery of Resonant Forms. Documents determined to be anticipated but never arrived are transferred to the Office of Unbuilt Forms for long-term custody; documents determined to be arrived but never anticipated are returned, unopened, to the sender.

Governance and dispute

Administration of the Repository falls under the general authority of the Librarians, though no Concordance has ever specified which Librarian signs the intake ledger. The discrepancy has been noted in the margins of every recension of the intake ledger since the Third Concordance and remains, by convention, uncorrected.

There is a standing scholarly disagreement over whether the Repository anticipates its holdings or merely receives them early. The first position, associated with the recensionists of the Ninth Concordance, holds that anticipation is a property of the document. The second, associated with the clerk Ambrise Vell and her adherents, holds that anticipation is a property of the shelf. Under the second reading, a shelf which has been re-lettered has anticipated itself, and the Repository would accordingly hold an entry for its own register — a conclusion the Registry has declined to enter or to deny. The dispute is catalogued in the Repository of Unanswered Questions under a separate heading, where it has been awaiting a question since the winter of the Long Recension.

Visiting

Visitors to Floor -12 are permitted during the second and fifth hours of the reading day, provided they do not touch the ledger, and provided they do not arrive before they have been announced. Coats may not be left in the antechamber; the antechamber has, on two recorded occasions, filed them.