The Marrow Tape

A DC300-format quarter-inch cartridge, grease-pencil label, no case. It has been in the hands of fourteen people since 1995 and is currently held by the person who received it at the 2019 meet, whose handle is not recorded here at their request. Twelve blocks of it have been read. The thirteenth has not, and the reason is the only technically interesting thing about the object.

The label

   ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │                                             │
   │   M A R R O W                               │
   │                                             │
   │   blk 0-11  ....  index, partial            │
   │   blk 12    ....  hdr says 4096, is 512     │
   │   blk 13+   ....  ---                       │
   │                                             │
   │   DO NOT RETENSION                          │
   │   DO NOT COPY                                │
   │   ONE YEAR. HAND IT ON.                     │
   │                                             │
   │                             — hand mark —   │
   │                                  \|/        │
   │                                 --+--       │
   └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Three hands are visible in the lettering. The DO NOT RETENSION is in a different pencil from the rest and was added after 2003, following the incident at the eleventh custodian's, which is described in lore/sources and which nobody enjoys discussing.

The header

The volume header declares a length that the medium does not have. A DC300 cartridge of this vintage holds what it holds; the header asks for roughly four times that. Every custodian who has run a drive at it has stopped at the same place, in the same way: block 12 begins, reports a size of 4096 bytes, delivers 512, and the drive waits for the rest until it is told to stop waiting.

There are three readings.

1. The header was written by a program that expected a different medium and the tape is simply short. Dull, likely, and unpopular.
2. The tape is one volume of a set and the header describes the set. This is the reading that produces the interesting question, which is what happened to volumes two through four.
3. Block 12 is not truncated but padded, and the declared size is the padding — that is, the object is a claim about how much there was, made by someone who no longer had it.

The contents

Blocks 0 through 11 are card records in a fixed 96-byte layout: a class, a status, up to four citations, and one contradiction field. The layout matches the specimen card that lore/sisken printed in 1988, field for field, including the separate contra line.

This is the whole basis of the claim that the Marrow Tape is a dump of the Sisken Index. It is a good deal weaker than it is usually stated. What has actually been shown is that somebody who knew the card format wrote a file in it, some time before 1995, and that the file is incomplete. Roughly 2,100 cards are present against an Index reputed to run to four thousand.

The custody rules

Three, and they are stated as a single sentence when the tape changes hands: one year, hand it on, do not copy.

The first two are observed. The third is not, and this is understood by everybody involved. At least three copies exist. Two are acknowledged. The rule survives anyway because its function has drifted: it no longer protects the contents, which are widely available, but it keeps the object in circulation, and the object is what the meets are actually for. A cartridge that everyone has copied and that must still be physically carried to a room once a year is a very efficient way of ensuring the room keeps happening.

graph TD
  S["Sisken, 7 shoeboxes<br/>(4 unaccounted)"] -.->|claimed, unproven| W["writer of the card file<br/>pre-1995, unidentified"]
  W --> C1["1. Ossuary, 1995"]
  C1 --> C2["2. Halberd, 1996"]
  C2 --> C3["3–5, Fallow meets 97–99"]
  C3 --> C6["6. the retensioning, 2003"]
  C6 --> C7["7–13, meets 04–18"]
  C7 --> C14["14. current holder, 2019–"]
  C1 -.->|copy| K1[copy A, acknowledged]
  C6 -.->|copy| K2[copy B, acknowledged]
  C7 -.->|copy| K3[copy C, denied]

The first hand-off is the one that matters and is the one least explained. Ossuary received the tape in 1995 and gave it to Halberd in 1996, in the middle of the feud, ten months before the Armistice. Neither ever said why. See lore/halberd-and-ossuary, where it is treated as the turn.

Related

• lore/index — the collection
• lore/sisken — the card format, and the shoeboxes
• lore/halberd-and-ossuary — the 1996 hand-off
• lore/armistice-banner — the other object that circulates by being copied
• lore/lineage — the custody chain as part of a larger graph