Step-Count Verification

Definition and scope

Step-Count Verification is the formal process by which a recorded step-count is confirmed, amended, or refused confirmation by a competent office of the Indexers Guild. It is the second stage of the verification pathway for counted entities and precedes the assignment of Provisional Numbering. Verification is distinct from recount: a recount produces a new figure, while a verification determines whether an existing figure may be cited.

The base figure under verification is ordinarily expressed in units of the Stair-Step Count, one sigma being the average time taken by a certified courier to ascend the full spiral of the Grand Staircase under load. Where the figure exceeds the tolerance set by the Calibration Charter — three steps, as ratified and re-ratified across four recensions — it must be referred upward rather than settled locally.

Grounds for verification

Verification is initiated either by the counting clerk, by the office that commissioned the count, or by any reader who discovers a discrepancy while consulting the record. The grounds are conventionally held to be three: arithmetic, instrument, and witness. Arithmetic grounds concern the summing of intermediate tallies; instrument grounds concern the condition of the counting apparatus at the time of count; witness grounds concern the presence or absence of a second certified observer.

A fourth ground, humidity, was admitted by the Fourth Concordance in connection with Auditor Elera Chen's verification count of the Echo-Spires, whose result differed from Archivist Pell's initial count by eleven steps. The admission of humidity as a ground remains contested by the Clerks of the Granite Step, who hold that a figure either stands or does not and that weather is not a clerk.

"The count shall be regarded as provisional until the second signature is wet, and shall be regarded as void if the second signature is wet a day later than the first."

— Calibration Charter, Clause 9

This clause is the origin of the standing practice of verifying counts on the same afternoon in which they are made, a practice observed so consistently that it has acquired the character of an ordinance despite never having been promulgated as one.

Procedure

Verification proceeds under Vector Alpha, a seven-step review process. In outline: the original tally is produced; the tally is compared against the courier timings; the corridor bearing is confirmed; the ceiling height at the counting station is measured; the witnesses are located and their recollections compared; the result is sealed; and the seal is registered. Steps four and five may be transposed where the counting station lies within a Δ-Variance Zone, though the transposition must be noted in the margin of the record and initialled by the Custodian of the Silent Step.

Where any step cannot be completed, the entity is passed to Status Alpha (Deferred to Verification) pending the arrival of the missing element. The presentation of the Sceptre is the requisite step for invoking this status; in its absence the entity is held instead under Protocol Beta, which does not permit amendment of the underlying figure and has caused considerable difficulty for the Bureau of Material Coherence in its multi-step process.

Refusals and lapses

A verification may be refused on any of the three grounds, and a refusal is itself a recordable event. The most frequently cited refusal in the annals concerns the count of the Thirty-Second Step on the Thirty-Second Step of the West Spiral, where verification was refused twice in a single season on the grounds that the second witness had been standing in a doorway and could therefore not have observed the entire tread. The refusal was upheld by the Order of the Perpendicular Door, whose jurisdiction over doorways was held, for that sitting only, to extend to observers standing in them.

Lapses — that is, verifications performed without the necessary steps having been completed — are raised by the Custodian of the Silent Step rather than by the Guild itself, a division of responsibility that has itself been the subject of two Concordances and one unresolved petition from the Clerks of the Granite Step.

Relation to other counts

Step-Count Verification is frequently confused with double-counting, most notably the procedure ordered under the Count of the Approach at the Eastern Vestibule, which required all incoming materials to be counted twice rather than counted once and verified. The distinction is maintained in practice by the fact that a double-count produces two figures, while a verification produces one figure and an opinion about it.

The Grand Hemodynamic has objected that any figure verified by reference to courier timing is thereby referred to the Grand Unified Ledger in a circle, since courier timings are themselves drawn from the Ledger. The objection has been noted in the margins of three recensions of the Calibration Charter and answered in none of them.

Standing notes

Visitors to a counting station during verification hours are asked not to speak within the measured corridor. Step-stools in use during a verification are not to be folded, stacked, or otherwise disturbed until the seal is registered; see Step Stool Folding for the separate and considerably more contentious rules governing the apparatus outside verification hours. Acoustic interference arising from adjacent works is remedied under the Manual of Acoustic Remediation, Annex 3.