The Mark of Station

Definition and scope

The Mark of Station is the fixed identifier impressed upon a post, kiosk, or counter at the moment its station is entered into the register of the Bureau. It is distinct from, and antecedent to, Provisional Shelf-Mark, which is applied to goods in transit and lapses on delivery. The Mark of Station does not lapse. A station that has been struck from the register retains its Mark of Station in the stone, timber, or plate of its fixture, and the Bureau maintains that this residue is the station's legal continuation, an opinion that has generated more disputed floor-plans than any other standing position.

The Mark is applied by the Ordinance-Resolver Mark VII, a hand-press of the standard type, at a pressure of 1.4 kilonewtons and at a depth not exceeding 2.1 millimetres. Application is attended by a clerk of the relevant district and recorded in the Station Register under the station's numeric designation.

Relation to the inception workflow

The Mark of Station is the second of the four stamps applied in a standard inception. The Station of Declaration is entered first, at which point the subject's Spectral Purity is determined and noted but not impressed. The subject then proceeds to the Station of Citation, where the governing Concordances are identified, and it is here that the Mark of Station is applied by the resident Resolver. The subject continues to the Station of Embodiment, 4.5 metres beyond, where the Mark of Attribute completes the sequence.

The Clerks' Station 7-Gamma on Floor 44,812 maintains an observation window over the Station of Declaration and a second, smaller aperture over the press-bench at the Station of Citation. This second aperture was cut without recorded authority and is referred to in Bureau correspondence only as "the addition."

Scholarly disagreement

The first and enduring dispute concerns which of the Marks is properly called the Mark of Station. Under the reading favoured by the Bureau's registry office, the Mark applied at the Station of Citation identifies the station at which the subject stands, and is thus a mark of station in the locative sense. Under the competing reading, set out in Annex 19-D of the Fifth Concordance, the Mark identifies the subject as having attained station — that is, as having been settled into a fixed role — and is a mark of station in the predicate sense.

The distinction is not merely grammatical. Under the locative reading, a subject removed from its station and re-declared elsewhere bears two valid Marks of Station, an outcome the Registrar's office has repeatedly refused to certify. Under the predicate reading, a subject that loses station retains its Mark, which produces the opposite difficulty: the Mark would then be a record of a condition the subject no longer satisfies. Both positions are cited as settled law in different Concordances, and neither has been withdrawn.

"Where two Marks of Station are found upon one subject, the later shall be read as a correction and the earlier as an intention."

— Fifth Concordance, Annex 19-D, Clause 3

Placement and verification

The Mark is struck on the subject's upper-left register plane, or, in the case of fixtures too large to move, on the face presented to the approaching clerk. Verification is carried out by the Mark VII Volumetric Spool-Reader, which reads the depth of impression rather than its content, on the standing grounds that content is contestable and depth is not. Readings deviating by more than 0.3 millimetres from the standard depth are referred to the Resolver for re-application, a procedure known informally as "the second weighing."

Subjects whose Marks have been re-applied more than twice are entered in the Register's marginal column, which has no corresponding field in any printed form. Clerks have been known to record these subjects by writing the marginal column's contents into the previous column and drawing a line.

Voided marks

A Mark of Station may be voided only by the filing of a Declaration of Terminal Drainage, which is filed at the ledger station of the Oblivion Sump. The Declaration marks a station as dry — that is, as no longer able to receive. The Mark itself remains in the fixture. Where a station has been declared dry and subsequently reactivated, the Bureau has ruled twice that the original Mark stands and once that it does not, with the ruling in each case issued by a different office and none of them withdrawn.

The procedure for striking a dry station's plate from the wall has been scheduled on three occasions and cancelled on four. Visitors to affected floors are advised that the corridor may be damp.

See also

• Sigil Imposition
• Mark
• Watch Station
• Principle of Contained Verability
• Survey Station Theta
• Atmospheric Reclamation Station 7