Unfinished System

The term Unfinished System designates, in Tower usage, any administratively recognised body of work whose completion has been formally deferred rather than abandoned, and which therefore retains an active curatorial claim on future attention. An Unfinished System is distinguished from a merely neglected project by the existence of a steward, a designation under Docket UB-0001-α, and a recorded expectation — however distant — of eventual resumption. The genre of record is the Unfinished Symphonies, but the designation is applied across media, and the archives contain unfinished atlases, unfinished census walks, and one unfinished apology to the Clerk of Unfinished Business that has been in revision since Fl. 1188.

The precedent of Docket UB-0001-α

The category acquired its legal shape in the matter of Docket UB-0001-α, whose facts are briefly these: a steward of the northern slopes had suspended a register of stair-measurements midway through the fourth landing, on the ground that the staircase in question appeared to continue. The Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies objected that incompletion was its own province and could not be claimed by a surveyor with a theodolite. The docket was found for the steward, but narrowly, and the finding established that incompletion is a property of the work and not of the officer who happens to be standing near it. Since that ruling every Unfinished System has been required to name its steward, its point of suspension, and the condition under which resumption will be considered.

"A system is unfinished when it has been halted at a place from which it could proceed, by a hand entitled to halt it, for a reason that has been written down."

— Docket UB-0001-α, finding, para. 6

Stewardship

Stewardship is personal and does not transfer with the floor. Kaelen of the Unfinished Stair is the most frequently cited example, having held a curatorial stewardship across four relocations without once arriving at a landing he considered final. The office is not hereditary, though the Tower records at least one instance of a steward's daughter inheriting a suspension and maintaining it for thirty-one years before the Chamber noticed that no resumption condition had ever been filed.

Stewards are expected to keep a suspension log. In practice the logs vary enormously in quality. The log of the western aperture survey is eleven pages; the log of the unfinished apology is a single leaf, revised nightly. The Chamber has declined to standardise the form, on the reasoning that a standard log would itself become a system and would then require finishing.

Jurisdiction and its disputes

Jurisdiction over Unfinished Systems is divided, and the division is contested. The Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies supervises systems whose incompletion is deemed musical, notational, or — in the phrase of Clause 14 of the Concordance of Unfinished Works — "analogous to a held breath." The Curatorium of Unfinished Likenesses claims portraits and effigies halted before the eyes, and has argued in three recensions that a face is a system with a natural point of suspension at the chin.

Where a system resists classification, the Chamber may claim it by analogy under the authority recorded at the Anteroom of Unfinished Symphonies. This has produced a substantial body of grievance. The unfinished census walk, a system of some forty thousand measured paces, was claimed by the Chamber in the winter of Fl. 1214 on the ground that a walk has a rhythm; the surveyors appealed; the appeal was docketed; the docket was misplaced; and the walk has since been administered, without enthusiasm, by both offices, each filing its own quarterly return.

A minority reading, advanced by the Reading Room of Unfinished Arguments and never formally withdrawn, holds that a system cannot be unfinished unless it was intended to finish, and that stair-measurement — which has no terminus — is therefore not unfinished but merely ongoing. The Chamber has not replied to this reading in writing.

Record and transcription

Unfinished Systems are entered in The Unfinished Metacollection, where they are cross-referenced against transcriptions received from The Garden of Unfinished Symphonies. The intersection is not tidy: the Catalogue of Unfinished Bridges meets the Metacollection at tier four, and systems spanning both are duplicated, sometimes with divergent suspension dates. Duplication is tolerated. Correction is not required, because correction would complete the record.

Physical remnants are held where they fall. The Stacks of Unfinished Sentences take the sentences; the Archive of Unfinished Sentences takes the rest; the Vault of Unfinished Business takes anything that was also, at the time of suspension, a debt. A system halted in transit is recorded in place and left there. Sweepers are instructed not to disturb a suspension marker, and to work around it, however long it remains.

Inventory of a typical suspension

The file for a well-formed Unfinished System normally contains the following, in this order:

• the initial designation under Docket UB-0001-α;
• the name and floor of the steward;
• the point of suspension, described in the steward's own hand;
• the resumption condition, if any;
• the date of the last inspection, which is often the date of suspension;
• a prefatory note, where the file has been recopied, as recorded in the Collected Prefaces to the Unfinished Catalogue.

Files missing the resumption condition are not void. They are marked resting, which carries no legal weight but is understood throughout the Tower to mean that no one has yet thought of a reason to start again.