Type-B (Attributive)

Type-B (Attributive) is the classification applied to structures whose function depends upon the identity, standing, or stated origin of the person approaching them — as distinct from Type A structures, which perform their function irrespective of who approaches. Where a Type A aperture opens for anyone, a Type-B aperture opens for someone in particular, and the entire administrative difficulty of the class lies in establishing, after the fact and often years after, who that someone was and whether the aperture was correct to admit them.

The designation is held by the Department of Attributive Contradiction, which maintains the Type-B register on the twelfth gallery of the eastern stack. Materials are accepted for registration on Tuesdays and Thursdays before the third bell; nothing is accepted during the evidentiary closures, which are announced only by the closing of the shutter.

Definition and scope

A Type-B structure is one that reads its visitor. The reading is not metaphorical: the apertures of the class are fitted with attributive plates, thin inscribed panels that compare the approach of a body against the provenance recorded for that body elsewhere in the archive. If the plate finds the approach consistent with the record, the structure performs. If the plate finds no record, the structure performs nothing and the visitor is advised to stand where they were until an Annotant arrives. Records disagree about how long this takes. The Type B Pause — the interval preceding activation — is treated as a separate holding and should not be confused with the present class, though the two are filed adjacently and are frequently misfiled into one another.

The class is distinguished from Type Gamma in that a Type-B structure always has an opinion about you, whereas a Type Gamma structure has an opinion only about itself.

History of the classification

The class was first separated from the general Type-B family in the winter of the Fourth Spiral, when Ottoline Vesh was drafting the formal attributive clause for Algernon's Theorem and required a category for structures that had begun refusing visitors on grounds of provenance. Vesh's working notes, preserved in the annexe to the Ninth Recension of the Bibliographic Register, list eleven such structures on floors she does not name, each annotated only with the word particular.

The Department of Ontological Contradiction objected at once, on the grounds that a structure which refuses a visitor has not contradicted the visitor's origin but merely declined it, and that the matter therefore belonged to them. The Fifth Concordance, Annex 11, awarded the class to the Attributive Department on the narrow technicality that the plate must first state a provenance before it can decline it, and that stating provenance is attributive work. The Ontological Department has not appealed. It has, however, continued to forward Type-B cases to the Attributive Department with a covering note reading, in full, "Not ours."

The Question of the Unrecorded Visitor

The principal scholarly dispute concerns what a Type-B structure does with a visitor for whom no provenance is held — the so-called unrecorded visitor. Two positions obtain.

The first, maintained by the Attributive Department and set out in its standing memorandum of 14 March, holds that the plate returns a null result and the structure remains dormant, and that the visitor is therefore in a state of provisional non-attribution until such time as an Annotant supplies a record, at which point the structure may perform retroactively, sometimes to visitors who have long since left.

"A structure of this class does not judge the visitor. It consults the register. Where the register is silent, so is the structure, and the silence is the register's and not the structure's."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9, para. 4

The second position, associated with the Hall of Provisional Whispers and never formally disavowed, holds that the null result is itself an attribution — that the structure has read the visitor and found them to be nobody — and that the visitor is accordingly admitted to a state of non-entry that is not the same as refusal and cannot be appealed as one. Under this reading the unrecorded visitor is inside the structure the entire time and simply cannot tell.

Floor 1,408 and the Lampsden Incident

The class is best known from the lampsden of floor 1,408, whose lumen-sconces are Type-B and will illuminate only for a visitor whose provenance includes a recorded apprenticeship in the scriptoria. In the winter of the Fourth Spiral the lampsden stood dark for eleven days following the death of the last registered apprentice, though the door was open throughout and several parties entered, one of them twice.

The matter was resolved by the junior Annotant Perrin Halloway, who observed that the late apprentice's record had been closed but not sealed, and that a closed record could be reopened provisionally under the procedural pause. The lamps illuminated on the twelfth day. Halloway's report notes, without further comment, that the lights came on for everyone in the room at the time and that the room contained four people.

Registration and known difficulties

Type-B structures are entered in the register by attributive plate, not by location, because the class includes several structures that have been moved. A structure whose plate is removed ceases to be Type-B and becomes Type A, and may not be reclassified as Type-B again in the same spiral without a fresh attributive clause — a rule introduced after a stairwell on floor 2,013 was reclassified four times in a single winter and began performing for nobody, a condition later diagnosed as Type-A Drift and treated under Type 3.

Known registrations number forty-one. They include the lampsden of floor 1,408; the north reading room of the Hall of Provisional Whispers; the archive lift, which is Type-B and will not descend for anyone carrying an unresolved contradiction, and which has therefore not descended since the migratory transit of the previous recension. The lift is inspected annually and found to be in good order.

Annotants are reminded that Type-B structures may not be approached in company, as the plate reads the party rather than the person and returns an attribution belonging to no one in it.