Verification of Lacunae

Verification of Lacunae is the formal procedure by which a suspected absence is confirmed to be a lacuna rather than an error, an omission, or a surface not yet examined. It is administered jointly by the Curators of Lacunae and the Office of Registry Silence, and its results are entered in the Docket of Lacunae under the countersignature of a verifying officer. Verification does not remove a lacuna; it certifies that the lacuna is there, which the Tower distinguishes sharply from the ordinary act of finding something.

The distinction is not pedantic. The Master Typology of Lacunae assigns each confirmed lacuna a Provisional Fidelity Quotient, or PFQ, and that figure determines whether the Curators of Lacunae implement immediate containment protocols; the threshold is a core PFQ of 0.7. A lacuna that has not been verified cannot be scored, and an unscored lacuna cannot be contained. Verification is therefore the narrow gate through which every absence in the Tower must pass, and the queue at that gate is long.

Procedure

The verifying officer does not look for the missing thing. This is the first instruction in the protocol and the one most often violated by new officers. Instead the officer takes the blank, gap, or silence in question and examines it against the three registers of the Index of Absences: the record of what was expected, the record of what was found, and the record of who was in a position to look. Where the two latter records disagree, the absence is provisional; where they agree that nothing was found, the absence is admitted to verification.

The Index of Ambient Conditions is consulted for acoustic lacunae, since a silence may be only a room that was always quiet. Predicted ambient baselines are established in advance and cannot be revised after the fact, a rule adopted following the Autumn Recension of the Third Concordance, which reversed the practice of the two prior recensions.

Verification concludes with a single sentence in the Docket — the lacuna affirmed, the PFQ struck, and the officer's seal — and with a small wax tag affixed to the site of the absence, if the absence has a site. Tags are not to be affixed to anything that would be damaged by the wax. This has been the rule since a dispute over a resonant staircase on Floor 4021 that has not been settled and probably will not be.

Contested standing

Two schools persist. The first holds that verification is a species of confirmation and that a verified lacuna is a stronger entity than an unverified one; this is the position of the greater part of the Department of Implied Texts. The second holds that verification only establishes that a lacuna is well-formed, and that no lacuna is made more real by the attention of an officer, a position argued at length in the Disputation on Absence as Such and never refuted. The practical difference is that the first school affixes the tag in the presence of the lacuna and the second from a marked distance; the Distance is not specified in the Concordance, and officers have used the ambiguity.

"The omission is not the absence, and the absence is not the person, and the seal is not the absence either. The seal is the fourth thing."

— Verification Protocol, Annex 7, Fourth Concordance

The two schools are also divided on the disposition of fainter, unverified cases, which are remitted to the Curators of Lacunae and which the Catalogue of Absences lists under the heading "awaiting the seal." The wait is variable. A lacuna first noticed on Floor 221 in the winter of the year it was noticed is still awaiting its seal, and the officer who was assigned to it has since retired without filing a report. The dispute over that particular file is now cited in the Crossconcordance Analysis as an example of a rule that works as written and not as intended, which is considered the better kind of rule in the Tower.

Interaction with other absences

Verification of lacunae is not the same procedure as the verification of Perceptual Lacunae, which are the charge of the Containment Directorate of the Office of the Master of Absences and are never verified by the Curators. A perceptual lacuna that is confirmed not to be perceptual is returned to the Curators, who then verify it as a practical lacuna at the same site, and the two offices have been known to verify the same absence twice. A practical resolution exists in the "one absence, one seal" rule but is not widely observed.

Verification also touches the Spatial-Topological Gaps and the Taxonomic Gaps, though neither is verified in the strict sense. The Taxonomists insist on the word "recognised" and have refused to countersign the Docket since the matter was raised. The Aural Lacunae Archive does accept verified lacunae at any time, including the tags, and its staff prefer to examine them in the box.

Records

Every verification generates a sealed entry in the Docket, a copy in the Catalogue of Absences, and a stub in the officer's own log, which is sealed separately and not read for one hundred years. The stubs, once opened, are cross-referenced against the Docket's own entry; the practice is to check whether the officer and the Docket agree. Where they do not, the Docket's entry prevails, unless the officer is alive and the Docket is, in which case the Docket's entry prevails anyway. A stub is segregated and never read. Very little is done with stubs, and the office is not sure whether to close the stub office or to keep it as a stub.