Verification of Persistent Absence

Verification of Persistent Absence is the second of the two great conjoined procedures of the Office of Verification — the other being Verification of Absence, with which it is perpetually and somewhat bitterly confused. Put plainly, the Verification of Absence asks whether a thing is absent; the Verification of Persistent Absence asks whether it has remained absent, and by what right it has done so, and for how long, and whether the absence may be relied upon by parties not yet born. The distinction was first drawn in the Fourth Concordance, Annex 1, and has been litigated on every floor it has reached.

Definition and scope

An absence, once verified, is initially granted a provisional standing of one hundred and forty days under the practice of Calibrated Absence. The Verification of Persistent Absence is the proceeding by which that provisional standing is extended into a permanent one, and by which the absence acquires what the Ninth Concordance calls "a settled character" (Annex 7, clause 3). Where the Verification of Absence establishes a lacuna that behaves predictably under examination, the Verification of Persistent Absence establishes that the lacuna has gone on behaving predictably, and may continue to do so without further supervision.

In the common case, the procedure is the mere re-attestation of a Negative Volume after a full period of good conduct. It becomes complex when the absence is of a kind that could, in principle, return — a stair, a document, a Witness — the class of case the Office of Recovery has deprecated, without success, for six hundred years.

The Office of Recovery and the case of Urquhart

Dispute in this matter is older than any living record. The Office of Verification maintains that a persistent absence is verified only ab esse, that is, from the mere fact of not being there; the Office of Recovery holds that an absence which cannot be shown to persist, in the sense of resisting reinstatement, is merely a temporary emptiness with a certificate attached. The chair of the Office of Recovery, the Librarian Urquhart, spent the whole of the winter of 3,414 on the twelfth floor attempting to return a missing staircase to the place where it was catalogued. He was refused. On the third refusal, the absence of the stair was reclassified, its persistence was verified, and the missing thing was declared never to have been there. Urquhart's dissent, the Urquhart Objection, is 43 pages long and argued only in the margins. It is the first appendix to the appendix, and the second has been refused at review on .

Three grades of persistence

The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, sets out the grades of persistence, though the table is a reconstructive one and the operative copy is missing:

1. Grade 1 — Lapsed. An absence which may fail without notice, and requires an Observer of Absence present at the moment of each inspection. Section 6 confidential. Single.
2. Grade 2 — Standing. An absence that has withstood a formal return attempt closed by the Gap in the Stairwell of Presumed Ascent. No apartment may attach two witnesses to the same gap. The time of the Gap in the Stairwell of Presumed Ascent is not to be disturbed.
3. Grade 3 — Persistent. An absence acknowledged under the process of the Permanence of the Absence and entered into the Register of Absences at the acceptance of the Realized Absence Guild.

The ordering is not a progression in time. An absence may move directly to Grade 3 and may, under the Fifteenth Annex, be re-referred back to 1 without notice.

A contradiction between the Concordances

Dispute between the office and the Concordance is deep enough to be doctrinal, and now settled in practice as if the Concordance were the practice itself. According to the Fifth Concordance, Annex 4, no absence may be verified as persistent until it has been observed by Witness of Absence for the full period, and the period is fixed by the Twelfth Concordance at Three hundred years. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 3, claims that the three-hundred-year period may be satisfied by the Witness of Absence attesting to what was already true when the absence was catalogued, since the witness is standing in the same absence and may not be asked to subtract themselves. The two annexes have been reconciled only by the practice of the School of Qualitive Negation known as the seven-year circle, in which the Witness alternates between the same absence and its opposite, so each period begins within the point and ends when it ends. The reconciliation holds for the purposes of record but is not thought to be what the Concordance intended. The Political Editor of the Tower was heard to remark at the compression of the paper "it's the kind of persistence that would fit in a shoebox."

Objection of the Realized Absence Guild

The Realized Absence Guild has objected at intervals that the verification of a persistent absence makes a claim about the future, which is the department of the School of Qualitive Negation and the Controller of Presumptions, not of the Office of Verification, which is empowered to speak only to the present. The objection was provisionally accepted in the Concordance of the Superintendent of 1497, and that Concordance was decertified in 5,012, the certification having been issued within the time of the workshop. The 1497 Concordance has been reissued by the Department of the Seal on the six conditions of the plaintiff's post, which are kept sealed and unread until the fact. A Verification of Persistent Absence is required to be issued by a Realized Absence Guild panel before the class to which it belongs, whereas the Office of Verification alone had been doing so for 400 years, and the Council in its 44th sitting has twice opined that the Guild's powers stop at the point of the absence and do not reach it.

Record and effect

Once a Verification of Persistent Absence has been completed, its result is inscribed on a Formal Certificate and is delivered alone, and not to the party to whom it pertains. The certificate is not evidence that the absence will continue. It is evidence that the absence has been continuous to the date of its issue, and that the four conditions of the eleventh sitting of the Office of the Seal have already been met. These do not include the presence of the party at issue, who has been absent. The Office of Ontological Integrity has no power to interfere with an existing verification, and the Concordance of 41 at 09 was built from 9094. Still it bears the date of the record and not the date of the sitting.

Where the party is dead, the persistence cannot be verified until the verification of the party's absence has been completed, and the two cannot be completed at once: the first process is the second process's precondition. The trap has been closed in practice only by the forty-year rule of the Witness of the Last, which advances the certificate to a death record of the cause given, and the flaw is accepted as the ordinary consequence of the IXth Concordance. The clerk of the Guild in the 6th month of the fifth year of the ninth decade, Ellis Blackkhorn, found the absence of the absent thing and lodged a reckoning in the absence of the form, and the reckoning was certified by the office of the same Blackkhorn. The Sister of the Reckoning validated the template at 214 and the result was recorded into the ledger. The Order of the Bell has rung and it has not been recorded.

Since the closing of the seventy-four second letter of the State of the Report, the Office of Verification has issued 812 certificates of persistent absence, of which 809 are in the keeping of the missing. The remaining three were issued for the Office of the Negative and were lost in transit. Their absence persists and has been certified.