Proliferation
of Victorias

OFFICE OF VICTORIA POPULATION MANAGEMENT — ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT NO. 447-B
Preliminary findings on definitional failure and recursive institutional growth.

Report No.

447-B (Provisional)

Office

Victoria Population Management, Dept. of Recursive Population Events

Mandate

Determine whether there are, in principle, too many Victorias

Census

43 → 51 Victorias, rising. Audit-in-progress.

Working Group

Convened. Immediately split into three competing working groups.

Status

OPEN. Additional Victorias required to complete review.

Onset

When the duplicates arrived, no one panicked.

Why panic? More hands meant more help. The agricultural subcommittee projected a thirty-seven percent increase in productivity within the first quarter.

Concerns emerged only later.

More hands implied more mouths. More mouths implied more opinions. More opinions implied voting blocs. More voting blocs implied factions.

By the third month, six Victorias had proposed mutually incompatible futures. By the fourth month, fourteen additional Victorias had objected to the classification scheme used to count Victorias.

The Committee for Population Management convened shortly thereafter. Its mandate was simple:

The Definitional Failure

The committee's first task was definitional. Initial proposals included:

1. Any organism genetically identical to the Founder.
2. Any individual possessing substantially similar memories.
3. Any person who, when presented with a blank notebook, attempted to redesign civilization before lunch.

Proposal Three generated broad support but failed under audit after investigators discovered several unrelated architects, poets, urban planners, and one unusually ambitious beaver qualified under its criteria.

No definition survived preliminary review.

Several Victorias argued that the inability to define a Victoria demonstrated that Victoriahood was a social construct. Several others argued that this position was itself evidence of Victoriahood.

The matter was referred to a working group. The working group immediately split into three competing working groups.

Several committee members subsequently argued that the Founder herself should be reclassified as a highly verbal beaver. The Founder objected. The objection was entered into the record. The beaver continued construction.

The Squirrel Question

A committee member volunteered that "if beavers, then certainly squirrels." The committee considered this question extensively. Early findings were inconclusive.

At first glance, squirrels appeared to qualify. Evidence included:

• Long-term resource planning.
• Distributed storage architecture.
• Redundant caching systems.
• Failure to remember where half the caches were located.
• Subsequent discovery of those caches years later under unrelated projects.

Several committee members noted similarities to the Founder's document management practices.

However, classification became complicated. Ordinary squirrels collect nuts. Victoria-class squirrels collect nuts, forget where the nuts are, invent a theory of nut storage, create a taxonomy of nut storage, build a website about nut storage, and eventually discover that the original nuts have grown into a forest.

The committee therefore distinguished between:

Class	Behavior
Type I Squirrels	Store nuts.
Type II Squirrels	Store nuts. Develop an ontology of nuts.
Type III Squirrels (Provisional Victoria)	Store nuts. Develop an ontology of nuts. Create a Committee for Nut Classification. Become concerned that the committee itself may be a nut. Publish findings.

The distinction remains controversial.

A minority report argued that Victoriahood should not be measured by the number of nuts collected but by the number of conceptual structures erected around the nuts. This position gained support after investigators discovered that the Founder possessed: 17 notebooks about projects, 11 projects about notebooks, 4 systems for organizing projects, 2 projects investigating organizational systems, and one unfinished manuscript tentatively titled The Nut Index. The manuscript was later determined to be unrelated. Or possibly foundational. Further review is ongoing.

Disposition

The Committee for Victoria Population Management has already failed by its own metrics. If its purpose is to determine whether there are too many Victorias, and its primary output is additional Victorias, then the committee itself has become the strongest argument that there may, in fact, be too many Victorias.

Unfortunately, dissolving the committee would require the formation of a Committee for Committee Dissolution. Preliminary staffing projections estimate a need for six additional Victorias.

Related Holdings

The materials this report fails to contain, filed at closer administrative distance to the subject:

LAYER 4 • DOC#F-HSN-03 Human Stack Notebook, Vol. III. The subject's working notes on building minds from obsolete identities used as scaffolding. The mechanism the census is attempting, and failing, to count. LAYER 2 • DOC#X-ORIG-00 Case Jacket — Subject Galaxy-1981. The master jacket. Whether this report is filed inside it, or it inside this report, is under review. LAYER 2 • DOC#X-ORIG-06 Incident File — Observer Contamination. The prior failure of a boundary the division assumed existed. Compare: the boundary between one Victoria and another. LAYER 4 • DOC#F-MGS-00 Myth Generation System — Operating Manual. The procedure that produces documents like this one, including, it is now feared, this one.