Sensory Integration Profile

The Sensory Integration Profile (catalogue mark Δ-44-K.2.0.007) is the standard instrument by which the Bureau of Pre-Integration records what a subject perceives at the moment of intake, and in what order. It is not a test and confers no rank; it is a description, completed in the presence of the subject by a clerk of the intake scriptorium and countersigned, where the subject's intake is contested, by a member of the Integration Committee. The Profile has been in continuous use since its revision under Integration Directive 14 Lumen, which fixed the present form of the Integration Phase and, incidentally, the present form of the Profile.

Form and construction

The Profile is a single leaf, ruled in seven registers and printed on one side only. Each register corresponds to a sense the Tower recognises for intake purposes, and each is scored from nothing perceived to wholly perceived in eleven gradations, marked with Roman numerals. The subject is not asked to name what is perceived. The clerk reads a fixed sequence of prompts — the prompts themselves are held in the sealed schedule appended to the Profile and are not reproduced in the open record — and records only whether the subject's attention moved, and in which register it arrived first.

The ordering column is the Profile's chief departure from earlier instruments. Under the Manual of Vertical Integration, a subject's senses were assessed together, as a single capacity, on the reasoning that a subject ascending the Tower perceives the Tower as one thing. The Profile's authors disagreed, and the disagreement was eventually recorded in the fourth recension of the manual rather than settled. The Profile therefore records sequence: which register answered first, which second, and whether any register answered at all.

Completed Profiles are filed by intake floor and not by subject. A clerk wishing to consult the Profile of a particular person must therefore know the floor of their first examination, which is often not the floor of their entry. The Bureau has twice petitioned to change this and twice been refused.

Relation to Resonant Integration

The Profile is preparatory and is not itself an integration. It is completed before the Manual of Resonant Integration's procedure is begun, and its result is entered as the opening exhibit of any subsequent Integration with Annexes. Where the Profile shows a subject whose registers answer in an unusual order — three or more out of sequence — the Directorate of Concordant Integration may direct that the subject be examined a second time, and the second Profile, not the first, governs.

This arrangement was clarified only after the dispute of the Ninth Register. A subject examined on Floor 212 in the winter of that year returned a Profile in which no register answered. The intake clerk recorded this as a negative Profile and released the subject; the Directorate subsequently held that a subject who perceives nothing has not failed the Profile but has completed it in the negative mode, which is a distinct finding and requires a distinct countersignature. The clerk, one Aurelia Stave, argued in her defence that the form provides no box for the negative mode and that she had drawn one herself in the margin. Her marginal box was adopted into the next printing, with her initials retained in the form's lower corner.

Contested scope

Disagreement persists as to whether the Profile belongs to Environmental Integration or to the resonant family of practices. The Manual of Resonant Integration distinguishes Resonant Integration from Environmental Integration on the ground that Resonant Integration acts upon subjects, while Environmental Integration acts upon the surroundings in which subjects are examined. Since the Profile examines the subject, the Directorate's own commentary treats it as resonant. The Bureau of Cyclical Integration, which maintains the intake rooms and their furnishings, has argued in three separate memoranda that a Profile records the room as much as the subject, since a change in the room's hangings reliably changes the Profile's third register, and that the instrument is therefore environmental whatever the Directorate's commentary says.

No concordance resolves the point. The Sixteenth Concordance assigns all intake instruments to the Bureau of Pre-Integration "without distinction of kind," and the Nineteenth Concordance assigns instruments that respond to surroundings to the Bureau of Cyclical Integration "without exception." Both have been cited in the same hearing. The customary practice, which has no written authority, is that the Profile is completed by Pre-Integration and stored by Cyclical.

"Where two instruments of the same name are held by different bureaux, the elder copy is consulted first, and the younger is not consulted at all."

— Nineteenth Concordance, Annex 2

Role in the Integration Phase

Under Integration Directive 14 Lumen, the Profile is read aloud at the opening of the Integration Phase, and the Integration Committee must authorise any Concordant Resolution arising from it before the entry itself is conducted. The Committee conducts the entry, and the Profile is not mentioned again once the entry begins. Lemuel Vane records, in a marginal note now widely copied, that the reading of the Profile at the Phase's opening is "the last occasion on which the subject is consulted and the first on which the subject is described."

A Profile may be amended within one session of its completion, provided the clerk who made it is present. It may not be amended after the subject has been entered. The Bureau of Pre-Integration administers Form 88-C Integration in practice, and the Profile is its required attachment, which is the reason the Bureau has never relinquished the instrument despite the Cyclical memoranda.

Modifications and copies

The Profile has been modified twice. The first modification added the sequence column described above; the second, made after the Committee for Photonic Authenticity raised an objection concerning the third register, restricted the examining clerk to a single lamp carried into the room rather than the room's fixed illumination. The Committee's objection is sealed, but its effect on the form is not: the clerk's lamp is listed in the intake inventory and must be returned.

An abridged Profile, omitting six registers, is issued to subjects who decline examination. It is archived as a complete Profile with the omitted registers left blank, which is not the same as a negative mode. The distinction is explained in a footnote that has not yet been printed.

No copy of a completed Profile may leave the Tower, a rule older than the Profile itself and applied to it without discussion. Visiting scholars have occasionally asked why. The answer, recorded in the Bureau of Pre-Integration's standing instructions, is that the Profile travels poorly and has never returned intact.