Order 88-V

#On the Authority of the Order

"Methodology classified." — Bureau of Medicine, Field Report 134-FP/VII

Order 88-V belongs to the Bureau of Doctrine. I state this with the ease of a man naming the owner of his own desk, because the desk is mine, the Bureau is mine, and the Flame of Interpretation that licenses us to decide what a finding means has always included the lesser right to decide who may read it. Doctrine seals. That is ordinary business in the Cloister of Concord.

What the Codex holds of the order is a reference. An expungement notice in the account of the Bureau of Medicine names Order 88-V and dates the expungement to A.S. 135 / 1845 CE. Later accounts invoke the same order to explain why a methodology is sealed, why two subjects have no names, and why a woman's testimony survives as a single line. The instrument itself is not among the papers open to me. I cannot give its clauses, its signatories, its exceptions or the day it was issued. A.S. 135 dates the expungement. The order may be older, and nothing on file says it is.

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#On the Record It Sealed

The paper under the seal is Field Report 134-FP/VII, and it took fourteen years to write.

In A.S. 120 / 1830 CE, a twelve-person patrol under Voss met something at Pit One near Pécs that the patrol could describe and nobody in Strasbourg could classify. In A.S. 134 / 1844 CE the Bureau of Medicine classified it: Residual Consumptive Emanation, Category Three, the condition the Codex enters as Residual Consumptive Emanation. The confirmation rested on three kinds of evidence. Medicine took field observations at seven sites and instrument measurements at three. At one site it ran a controlled exposure.

That site was Pit Seven, south of Mohács, in the Blightmarsh that Kargath made of the old Pannonian country. Some four thousand refugees from Debrecen were laid in that ground in A.S. 48 / 1758 CE, by burial parties the record does not name, under authorities that predate any Synodal Bureau. The entry on the Famine Pits describes what such graves do. A hunger rises out of the dead and enters bodies that have eaten well.

Before the measurement there was a requisition. The Bureau of War's correspondence from that year asks for "two personnel of Category D classification, eastern survey duties, expected return: nil." Category D is the designation for condemned prisoners whose sentences are suspended so they can contribute, in the Charter's careful phrase, "to the operational understanding of battlefield hazards." The requisition is a War document. It came before Order 88-V and is a separate instrument. It tells us how the data got its subjects. It does not tell us who they were.

Doctor Maren Solen, Chief Anatomist, attended the exposure.

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#On the Appendix

Doctrine sealed the methodology. It left the confirmation appendix unsealed, and the appendix is a table of what Pit Seven did to two people at measured distances.

At fifty yards, stomach cramping. At thirty, nausea, vertigo, and compulsive chewing in subjects who had been gagged so they could not consume their own tongues. At ten yards the report adds a qualification of its own, that the data rest on "two subjects, both restrained," and then sets out what happened. The body consumed itself. Dermis thinned. Fingers shrivelled to the bone within hours. Teeth loosened and hair fell.

The subjects were extracted at the six-hour mark. One survived the extraction. The report records that she was a woman, and that is the end of her biography. Surviving extraction is the only outcome on file; whether she recovered, and what became of her afterwards, the paper does not say. Her testimony is Seal Amber in its entirety, except for one phrase the Bureau of Medicine allows garrison commanders to repeat:

"I could feel their mouths."

These figures are Pit Seven's, from that year and that protocol. Other surveys keep their own tables, at other pits and other ranges, and I do not merge them into a rule. No reader should take the appendix for a safe distance. It records a sequence of injuries, and fifty yards appears in it only as the place where the cramping started.

Why the appendix escaped, I cannot say. The accounts describe an omission. They give no motive for it, and I will not write one in, since a motive invented by the Warden of the Sacred Ledger would be read as a finding. Whatever the reason, the table has outlasted the seal by sheer circulation: garrison commanders know its distances, the Codex entries on the Pits and on Category D reproduce them, and a sealed method is little protection once its results have been copied into every file that needed them. Doctrine closed the drawer. The numbers were already on other desks.

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#On the Division of Responsibility

Every step was taken by an office, and each office handled only its own step.

War classified the prisoners and requisitioned them. Medicine measured them. Doctrine sealed the method. Medicine then buried the second subject's remains at the Pit's perimeter, on its own order, and did not consult the Bureau of Rites, which claims the dead. By the Bureau of Medicine's own present account, Rites' protest has been under review for sixty-six years. I enter that figure as the parent account gives it and add nothing to it. The protest concerns one burial. Rites has a larger quarrel with Medicine over who may classify disturbances that follow death, and that dispute sits on its own docket. Combining the two would let either Bureau answer the wrong complaint, which both would enjoy.

The cordon around the Pit is a further matter, kept apart from this one. Field exclusion belongs to War and to standing orders written for soldiers. Order 88-V restricts paper. A man can stay out of a marsh, and he can stay out of a file, and different Bureaus give him those instructions. I give no cordon figures here. The accounts disagree, and I leave the disagreement with the accounts.

Custody of the report remains with Medicine, and the measurements are Medicine's too. The classification, Category Three, is Medicine's word. The seal is ours. Doctrine reads what other Bureaus write and decides what it means and who may see it. The other Bureaus write it, sign it and file it.

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#On the Record That Remains

As of this writing the public accounts withhold four things: the methodology, the names of both subjects, the woman's testimony apart from one phrase, and the text of Order 88-V. The Codex entries on the Pits, on Category D and on Doctor Solen repeat the same withholdings in the same places, and that consistency is the most reliable thing in the file.

I have read the full report. How I obtained it I will tell no one, and the reader who wants to guess may guess at a clerk's expense rather than mine. I will not reproduce what the seal covers. My discretion is not the reason. A Hieromnemon who quotes a sealed method in order to criticize the seal has only moved it into his own pages, and the Codex already holds enough of my handwriting.

Medicine has a later Chief Anatomist, Doctor Trenn, appointed in A.S. 189 / 1899 CE, who inherited the Pit Seven files and did not run the exposure. Between Solen's resignation and Trenn's appointment the register names nobody. I leave the chair as empty as the register does.

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Notes for the orchestrator:

• Word count: I estimate about 1,650 visible words including margins, but I didn't run a count. Please validate it.
• Link to check: <a class="wiki-link" href="/codex/strasbourg">Strasbourg</a> and <a class="wiki-link" href="/codex/doctor-trenn">Doctor Trenn</a> weren't on the planned slug list. I copied them from the published bureau-of-medicine and category-d articles but didn't confirm the article files exist. Remove them if they don't.
• Paratext: As planned, the piece has four margins, two stamps, one redaction and one erratum. The Trenn paragraph matches the Category D account.