Temporal Binding

Temporal Binding is the discipline by which a duration, sequence, or recurrence is fixed to an authority so that it may not thereafter be shortened, lengthened, reordered, or quietly omitted. It is distinguished from the four disciplines of the Vault of Binding Precedents — Primordial Binding, Material Binding, Procedural Binding, and Interpretive Binding — by the fact that those four bind things to a record, whereas Temporal Binding binds the record to its own elapsed time. A page may be materially bound and still be found, a century later, to have occupied no measurable interval at all. The Temporal Binding is what prevents this.

The practice is administered jointly by the Chronologers' Guild and the Chamber of Measured Dispute, the former issuing Temporal Resolutions and the latter recording Volumetric-Temporal Edicts (VTEs). Where the two disagree, the Principle of Temporal and Authority Precedence (TAP) governs: the more recent ruling from the higher authority prevails. The Guild has noted, without apparent concern, that TAP ensures a ruling may be superseded by a later ruling establishing that it was never in force.

Origin in the Stairwell Overflow

The discipline is conventionally dated to the winter of the Stairwell Overflow, when the reservoir of floor 44-C rose without warning and flooded the approach to the Forty-Fourth Landing. The flood itself was contained within nine days. The inquiry was not: successive investigators established, by careful measurement, that the water had arrived on a Tuesday, on a Thursday, and — in the recension favoured by the Central Scriptorium — on neither day, having occupied a duration the Scriptorium described as "real but unsituated" (Eleventh Concordance, Addendum Gamma, note 3).

Addendum Gamma was drafted to settle the matter and instead established that the chronology of the Scriptorium's own drafting of the Addendum was legally binding upon all subsequent procedural deadlines, including those already passed. Clerks at the Forty-Fourth Landing still keep two ledgers, one for the days the flood occurred and one for the days it is deemed to have occurred. Neither is considered the duplicate.

Instruments and Procedure

Temporal Binding is effected chiefly by the Temporal Gauges, a matched set of instruments maintained at the Vault of Binding Precedents and calibrated against the Meridian Clock of the Nineteenth Floor. A binding is considered complete when the gauge reading has been entered in the register, countersigned, and allowed to stand unchallenged for one full interval of its own measurement. The interval is measured by the gauge. It is not permitted to measure the interval by any other means.

The close of a binding is a Binding Trigger and must be witnessed. The Luminous Binding Agent is applied to the register seal at this stage, though its use in temporal matters is advisory: the Agent was formulated to indicate the presence of a binding, not its duration, and the Guild has twice recorded an Agent that continued to glow for eleven years after the binding it attested had been formally dissolved.

A binding may be re-opened only under Binding and Re-binding, and only if the original gauge is produced. Where the original gauge cannot be produced, the petitioner must show that the binding was never properly closed, which is to say that they must produce the original gauge.

The Kessendy Grievance

The most cited difficulty in the discipline concerns Clerk Ovin Kessendy, who in the ninth year of the current recension filed for a binding of the twenty minutes he had spent waiting at the Aperture Sigma service desk. The Guild granted the binding. It then ruled, on the same day, that the twenty minutes had not occurred, because the service desk had been closed for the whole of that afternoon and its closure record was itself temporally bound. Kessendy's subsequent appeal argued that a duration could not both be bound and be absent, and that the Guild had therefore bound nothing.

"The appellant's twenty minutes are hereby confirmed as having elapsed, having not elapsed, and having elapsed in a manner not available to the appellant."

— Chronologers' Guild, Ruling 1,204, annexed to the Kessendy file

Kessendy was awarded costs in the amount of the disputed duration, payable in kind. He has not collected them. The file remains open, and the Guild maintains that it is not.

Disputed Doctrine

The Interpretive and Procedural schools differ on whether a Temporal Binding attaches to the event or to the record of the event. The Procedural position, sustained by the Chamber of Measured Dispute, holds that only records are bound, and that an event unrecorded is free to occur as often as it likes. The Interpretive position holds the reverse and cites the Temporal Cartography surveys of the upper spiral, in which three floors are mapped at the same number and no floor is mapped twice, a result the cartographers attribute to the events having moved rather than the records.

A third view, advanced by the Society of Unmeasured Intervals and never formally entertained, contends that Temporal Binding is indistinguishable from Archival Binding at sufficient remove. The Society has not been invited to present this view. It has presented it anyway, on four occasions, in rooms it was not booked into.

Restrictions

Temporal Bindings may not be applied to the Principle of Ephemeral Binding, to any interval shorter than the time required to record it, or to the month of Second Inventory. Gauges are not to be carried on the stairs between the Forty-Fourth Landing and the Forty-Sixth Landing; the descent is known to displace a reading by up to four minutes, in the direction of the descent, regardless of the direction of travel.