The Volatile Edition

The Volatile Edition is the informal designation for any printed recension of a Tower codex whose text does not remain fixed between readings. Unlike merely erroneous editions, which may be corrected by erratum and reissue, a Volatile Edition satisfies the threshold established in Containment Protocol 7-Alpha: its variance is intrinsic, reproducible, and does not diminish under confinement. The class was formally recognized in the seventeenth revision of the Manual of Silent Procedure, Revision 9, which declined to define it further on the grounds that definition tended to accelerate the process.

Volatile Editions are held in the north galleries of Floor 61, where shelving is left partly unassigned. Readers are asked not to compare copies aloud in the reading room.

Criteria for volatility

A volume is entered on the Volatile Register when three consecutive examinations by separate examiners produce three non-identical texts, and when the direction of variation is not attributable to the reader. The second condition has proved the more contentious. The Office of Experimental Resonance maintains that all variance is reader-induced at a sufficient remove, and has petitioned four times for the Register's abolition; each petition has been deferred under the Manual of Perpetual Deferral, Revised Edition 44, Section 9, a document which has itself never been conclusively read.

The Manual of Taxonomic Purity classifies Volatile Editions under Class 44(b), "texts whose identity is asserted rather than observed." The classification is contested by the Librarians of the First Edition, who observe that Class 44(b) was drafted to accommodate a single troublesome atlas and has since absorbed nine distinct phenomena.

"A recension is not volatile because it changes. It is volatile because it insists on having changed in our absence."

— Marginalia of Examiner Toves Harn, appended to the 43rd edition of the Manual of Taxonomic Purity and retained without comment in the 44th

Known holdings

The Register is short and its entries are not stable. At the time of compilation it included the following:

• The so-called Eleventh Copy of the Manual of Acceptable Strain, which reports tolerances from an edition that has not yet been published.
• A partial printing of Spiral 44Γ, bound in cloth, whose acoustic tables resolve correctly only when the volume is closed.
• The Migrating Map, quarantined before its entry was completed and never removed from the Register.
• One copy of the Manual of Corporeal Confirmation, Edition 12, which corroborates its own binding.

The Varn incident

In the winter of Cycle 38, Examiner Ilse Varn undertook a collation of the Eleven Copies over eleven days, working from the unassigned shelving on Floor 61. Her working notes are preserved as Appendix 7 to the Register and are considered the clearest surviving account of prolonged exposure.

By the sixth day her transcriptions had begun to agree with one another and disagree with every source. By the ninth she reported that the Eleventh Copy had begun citing her notes. The collation was suspended under Clause 12 of Containment Protocol 7-Alpha, which prohibits completion of any comparison once the comparator has become an object of comparison. Varn's notes were sealed, entered on the Register as a Volatile Edition in their own right, and shelved with the others. A request for their return, filed in Cycle 41, was granted; the returned folios were blank and have since been reclassified as an erratum.

Dispute with the Office of Experimental Resonance

The Office holds that a Volatile Edition is a Conceptual Anchor that has slipped, and that it may be stabilized by proximity to a fixed text of sufficient mass — specifically, by the Manual of Cyclical Reckoning, whose First Compiled Edition was produced by the Librarians of the First Edition and has not varied in recorded memory.

The Librarians dispute this on procedural rather than physical grounds. Placing a Volatile Edition against the Reckoning has been attempted twice. On both occasions the Reckoning remained unchanged and the Volatile Edition acquired a Reckoning's front matter, including a title page bearing a date four cycles prior to its own printing. The Third Concordance has since designated such contact as a Volatile Holding, and the Somatic Stacks were reclassified alongside the Register on the strength of that ruling, a decision no one has been able to explain and no one has been able to overturn.

In practice, the galleries on Floor 61 are now separated from the Reckoning shelves by a corridor of forty-one paces. The corridor is unlit, which is given as a maintenance matter rather than a containment measure.

Cataloguing practice

Shelfmarks for Volatile Editions are assigned at accession and are not revised, on the reasoning that a volatile volume cannot be asked to hold still for reclassification. This produces occasional collisions: two distinct holdings currently share the mark 61/V-44, and one of them has been withdrawn three times without the shelf ever appearing empty.

Borrowers are reminded that the Manual of Silent Procedure requires all readings of a Volatile Edition to be conducted in silence and transcribed afterwards, in ink, from memory. Transcriptions are retained for one cycle and then compared. Where a transcription matches another borrower's, both are struck from the record. Where a transcription matches the volume itself, the volume is re-examined.

The Register's prefatory note, revised in Cycle 47 and attributed to no named office, records the position of the Archivists with characteristic restraint: "The Volatile Edition is not an imperfect copy of a perfect original. It is the same document at a different moment. The Tower collects moments, not texts."