Unclaimed Echoes

Unclaimed Echoes are auditory phenomena detached from their originating event or speaker, for which no claimant has registered within 60.6 Tower cycles of first audible occurrence. The figure of 60.6 cycles is set by Concordance 2214, Annex 9, and has been amended twice without the amendment being entered in the index; the Archivists of the Second Recension maintain that the operative period is still 61 cycles, which they say was the original reading and which nobody has troubled to contradict in writing.

An Unclaimed Echo does not differ from any other echo in its substance. It differs only in its paperwork.

Registration and lapse

A newly audible echo is announced by the nearest duty clerk on Form 412-β, and the announcement is posted on the relevant stair-landing for a period of not fewer than nine days. Any party who can demonstrate prior attachment — a speaker, a wall, a bell, a room from which the sound plausibly departed — may register as claimant and remove the echo from standing. If no registration is made, the echo lapses into the unclaimed register at the end of the sixtieth-and-six-tenths cycle.

Lapse is not instantaneous. The Department of Unclaimed Intervals holds that the fractional portion of a cycle must be observed in full, and has issued Certificates of Temporal Exhaustion to clerks who closed a register at the sixtieth cycle on the grounds that nothing further was expected. The Scriptorium of Unclaimed Hours has declined to treat these certificates as disciplinary matters, and has said so in a memorandum of the fourth winter.

Deposit and handling

By the designation of the Office of Spectral Hygiene, bodily remains of this class — that is, echoes without claimant — are deposited on Floor 606, which serves as the primary depository. Handling on Floor 606 follows the ordinary gloving protocol; echoes are not audible at a distance of less than one half-arm and are to be collected in the usual manner.

The Vault of Unclaimed Mechanisms receives only those echoes with a demonstrable mechanical origin. The distinction is tested by tapping the echo's container and observing whether the sound continues after the tap. Echoes that continue are remitted to the Vault on the first available lift; echoes that cease are recorded as answered and returned to Floor 606.

Jurisdictional dispute

The Chamber of Echoes has long argued that any echo lacking immediate, unambiguous propagation falls under its broader mandate for unclaimed resonances, and that Floor 606 is therefore a temporary holding of the Chamber's own consequence. The Office of Spectral Hygiene rejects this reading on the ground that the Chamber's mandate concerns echoes of receding origin, not echoes of absent claimant, and that the two categories coincide only in a minority of cases — the Chamber of Receding Echoes having confirmed the point in an opinion of 44-B.

"Where an echo has both receded and gone unclaimed, the Office shall yield to the Chamber in the first instance and resume custody upon the Chamber's written declination. Where it has done neither, the reader is referred to Concordance 2214 and may not proceed further."

— Concordance 2214, Annex 9, second recension

The Chamber's position has been further weakened by its handling of Echoes in West Spiral 44, where custody was assumed for eleven months and then returned without a covering note. The Office of Spectral Hygiene has not forgotten the covering note.

The Hesper question

Keeper Hesper, before elevation to the Bureau of Unclaimed Categories, argued in a private minute of 2,988 that lapse ought to run from the echo's last audible occurrence rather than its first, since a sound that continues is not yet detached from the moment that produced it. The minute was never entered in the register, and the Bureau has declined to confirm its existence on three separate occasions. Its argument nevertheless survives in a marginal note on The Ledger of Damped Echoes, where an unidentified hand has written, beneath the Keeper's name, the single word wrong.

The Bureau of Unclaimed Attributions has taken no position, though the Court of Necessary Adjustments inherited the furnishings of that Bureau in full and is understood to have found among them a quantity of unanswered correspondence on the subject.

Seasonal variation

Unclaimed Echoes accumulate unevenly. During the Month of Lingering Echoes the unclaimed register on Floor 606 rises by as much as a third, and the Office of Spectral Hygiene authorises the temporary shelving of overflow in the west corridor. The overflow is not to be shelved above head height, as a reader passing the corridor in the fourth winter disturbed an echo of a falling object and the matter took some weeks to settle.

Procedural Echoes are exempt from the register entirely, on the ground that they are produced by the process of claiming and cannot meaningfully be said to lack one.

Notable holdings

• One echo of a struck hour, origin unknown, lodged in perpetuity since the Great Rift of 900 under the residual provisions of the Office of Unclaimed Text.
• Four echoes of the same door, each claiming to be the original, all four unclaimed and mutually exclusive.
• One Unlit Echo of a lamp-lighting, which cannot be heard and has therefore never acquired a claimant, but which the Office refuses to strike from the register on grounds of principle.

The register on Floor 606 is open to inspection by any Librarian holding a current stair warrant. Visitors should note that the register is not to be read aloud in the chamber, and that the chamber does not echo.