Retirement/Archival

Definition and scope

Retirement/Archival is the composite designation applied to the transfer of a subject from active catalogue status to inactive storage, and to the conditions under which that transfer is deemed to have occurred retroactively. It is the only procedure in the Tower's administrative practice that operates in two grammatical moods at once: the active, whereby a subject is retired by an order; and the perfect, whereby a subject is found to have already been retired, sometimes before its own acquisition. The distinction is maintained rigorously in the paperwork and ignored almost everywhere else.

The procedure is governed principally by the Fourth Concordance, Clauses 44–72, and by Annex Δ of the Sixth Concordance, which together supply the operative definitions. Its custodial terminus is The Wing of Conceptual Retirement, an annex of The Tower. Subjects arriving there are not destroyed; they are shelved, indexed a second time, and thereafter cited only in the past tense.

Relation to Archival Retirement

The term Archival Retirement denotes the narrower act: the removal of a subject from active catalogue status, authorized by the Ontologically Unsound verdict of a Determinative Report. Retirement/Archival is the wider envelope. It includes Archival Retirement proper, but also covers retirements that have been entered without a Determinative Report, retirements entered in error, and retirements whose authorizing report has since been itself retired.

Under Protocol 13-A, a subject may be retired/archived on the strength of a single countersigned sheet where the subject in question has no corresponding floor record. This is the commonest route by which a floor's holdings shrink without a matching order, and it is the source of most standing objections from the Order of the Fractured Nib, whose scribes maintain that a document countersigned once is a document countersigned not at all. The objection has been noted in three consecutive Concordances and acted upon in none.

Retroactive operation

The distinctive feature of Retirement/Archival is its retroactivity. Where a Determinative Report returns the verdict Ontologically Unsound, the resulting Archival Retirement is held to have taken effect at the subject's moment of greatest prominence — a determination made by the Department of Material Causality, and one that has never been satisfactorily defined. The Department's own gloss, filed with Gamma Report 4419, states that the moment is "the one at which removal would have been most noticed."

The practical consequence is that retired/archived subjects frequently vanish from the record during periods in which they were busiest. The most frequently cited instance is the Fading Crimson of Aethelred's Retirement, where the subject in question conducted its entire observable history across a single winter and was archived before the season closed, leaving three floors of documentation with no events to document. The discrepancy was not resolved; it was filed.

The Protocol of Unbeginning and its second recension address a neighbouring case, in which the subject of retirement is an event rather than an entity — specifically, an event determined not to have occurred. The two recensions disagree on whether such an event may be said to retire at all, or whether it merely ceases to be under consideration. Annex 4 of the second recension concedes the point and then proceeds regardless.

Ceremonial form

A Retirement/Archival concluded with full ceremony is conducted under Clauses 61–67 of the Fourth Concordance. The retiring officer reads the order aloud in the presence of the subject's floor-mates, if any remain; the subject's index card is struck; and the card is carried by hand to The Wing of Conceptual Retirement, where it is filed under the subject's own name and not under the name of the order. The Lamplighters' Guild maintained a retirement annex on Floor 200 for this purpose until the annex's own retirement, which was conducted without ceremony and, according to the minutes, without witnesses.

Where the subject is a person rather than a concept, the ceremony is abbreviated. Guildmaster Aris is recorded as having shortened his own by two clauses on the grounds that the third clause required the subject to speak, and the subject had, by that point, been archived. The shortening was ratified eleven years later as a general provision.

Disputed cases

Scholars of the Tower disagree, and have long disagreed, on whether Retirement/Archival describes one procedure described twice or two procedures conflated by clerical habit. The first position, associated with the Doctrine of Administrative Silence, holds that the active and perfect forms are simply the same act observed from two points in its duration, and that the retroactivity is an artefact of the record rather than of the act. The second, associated with Concordance 17, Annex C, insists on their separateness and requires each to carry its own order number.

The disagreement is not merely academic. Under the first reading, a subject retired by mistake may be un-retired by amending the order. Under the second, the retroactive form having already operated, no amendment reaches back far enough, and the subject remains archived though the order that archived it has been withdrawn. The Tower has resolved this by declining to test it, which the Fractured Nib describe as the most expensive form of resolution available.

Custodial notes

Subjects in Retirement/Archival are stored under the ordinary conditions of Archival Relocation, with two exceptions: they are not to be reclassified while in storage, and they are not to be read aloud in full. Visitors to The Wing of Conceptual Retirement are admitted in pairs and are asked not to bring candles. The rule against candles was introduced after an incident in which a visiting clerk illuminated a passage concerning a retired subject and, for the duration of the illumination, the subject was briefly considered present. The matter is recorded in the register of the Wing under the year of the incident and nowhere else.