Three States of Unreality

The Three States of Unreality is the classificatory scheme by which the Tower distinguishes between kinds of things that are not, and it is the operative basis of the Vertical Filing System between Floors 70,000 and 70,003. The scheme is defined in Clause 7.8 of the Seventh Concordance, which names the states provisional, derivative, and absolute, and which has been amended four times without any of the amendments being struck from the record. A material's designated State of Unreality is marked on its spine in tincture of lead and must be renewed at each transfer. Where the three states are in conflict regarding a single item, the Central Index governs, except on the third day of the Three-Day Schism, when it does not.

Doctrine

The states are ordered by the manner in which a thing's unreality is sustained rather than by its degree. A provisional unreality is one held in place by a procedural condition of limited duration — most commonly the condition of "provisional unreality" created by a Warrant of Transubstantiation, under which the Bureau of Spatial Integrity and the Office of Temporal Reconciliation conduct their preparatory audits. A derivative unreality is one inherited from a parent holding, such that the thing is unreal because the thing it derives from is unreal; the Treatise on Proximate Nullities classes these alongside, but distinct from, Recursive Nullities, on the ground that derivation requires a chain whereas adjacency requires only a neighbour. An absolute unreality is one that requires no support whatever and would remain unreal if every other holding were withdrawn.

Clause 7.8 further provides that the three states "shall not be ranked, nor shall any officer prefer one to another in writing." The prohibition is widely understood to be directed at the Guild of Harmonic Theorists, whose scholia on Clause 7.8 arranged the states in descending order of dignity and were withdrawn from circulation in the winter of the year recorded as 9,441.

Application and the filing floors

The Vertical Filing System requires that materials be shelved by state before being shelved by any other consideration, including height, which has caused difficulty on Floor 70,001, where the shelving is 3.4 spans and the absolute holdings are not. The floors are administered jointly by the Department of Structural Verifications, which surveys existing holdings for conceptual contiguity whenever a new unreality is accessioned, and by the Registry of Immaculate States, which maintains the register of items whose state has never been questioned.

The three states correspond, though no Concordance says so directly, to the three designated atmospheric states managed by the Ambient Reservoirs: Charged Stasis for the absolute, Vestigial Dread for the derivative, and Lingering Curiosity for the provisional. The correspondence was asserted in the Manual of Accepted Mental States and has never been formally adopted, largely because adoption would require the Reservoirs and the filing floors to agree on a common calendar, which they have not done since the Three-Phase Protocol lapsed.

The question of the fourth state

A persistent scholarly disagreement concerns whether Clause 7.8 originally enumerated four states. The Third Concordance, Annex 7, refers in passing to "the several states of unreality, being not fewer than three," a phrasing that the Principle of Unbroken Continuity reads as preserving the possibility of a fourth. The Three-Velocity system was adduced by the harmonic school as evidence that the Tower's classifications proceed in threes by nature and that the fourth state is therefore a scribal intrusion; the counter-argument, advanced in the Treatise on Proximate Nullities, is that the number three in Clause 7.8 is a description and not a principle, and that the school has confused an inventory with a law.

No fourth state has ever been accessioned. The vacancy is nonetheless maintained on Floor 70,003 as a matter of record, and the empty bay is dusted on the first of each month.

"The states of unreality are three in number, and where a fourth is urged, the urging party shall bear the cost of the bay."

— Seventh Concordance, Clause 7.8, second recension

Dispute of the 70,002 recension

The second recension of Clause 7.8 replaced the word provisional with pending, and the change was not reconciled with the first recension for one hundred and sixteen years. The resulting confusion was resolved, after a fashion, by the Bounding Principle, which holds that to catalogue is to define a boundary, and that within the boundary the reality of an entry is unconditional. Under that reading, a material marked pending on a floor whose register reads provisional is neither misclassified nor corrected; it is simply bounded twice. The Class Alpha Contradictory States were established to hold such doubly bounded items, and hold them still.

The filing clerk chiefly associated with the dispute, Ovin Marl of the 70,002 scriptorium, petitioned for locational clarification on eleven occasions and was answered on none. His Petition for Locational Clarification of the ninth of March survives in three copies, two of which are themselves of disputed state. Marl's marginal note on the third copy — "the bay is empty; the bay is correct" — is frequently cited in the Registry of Immaculate States and never explained.

Common errors

The most frequent error in the filing floors is the assignment of absolute unreality to an item that is merely old, an error known informally as hardening and formally as the Absence error, after the holding in which it was first recorded. The converse error, the assignment of provisional unreality to an item with no warrant behind it, is rarer and is corrected by the issue of a retrospective warrant, which is backdated and which nobody enjoys drafting.

State is not to be inferred from the condition of the ink. Clause 9 of the Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks requires that no ink be certified permanent until it has dried three times in three separate vessels, in three separate rooms, on three separate days, and the resulting intervals have repeatedly been mistaken for provisionality by clerks reading the drying record rather than the spine. The distinction is set out in Protocol XVII and in the Theory of Sympathetic Vectors, which are not in agreement.

Transfers between states require the countersignature of a Librarian and, on Floor 70,003 only, an appointment.