Power is not who speaks. Power is who decides whom you sit beside. – Handbook of State Protocol, preliminary remark
STATE PROTOCOL – SEATING PLAN OCCASION: Reception on the twelfth anniversary of the Hierarchical Convergence Protocol PLACE: Chancellor's Palace, Banqueting Hall (concrete slab 14 of 20), access through the steel gate, the only one PREPARED BY: J. Asmus, Head of State Protocol. The marginal notes are handwritten and not part of the file. They are in the card index nonetheless. PRELIMINARY REMARK OF PROTOCOL The anniversary commemorates the crisis of 2161, in which three Bureaux simultaneously issued contradictory directives and the administration of Velgarien stood still for seventy-two hours. Nothing was allocated, nothing was authorised, nothing was revised. Citizens reported afterwards that it had been very quiet. Bureau 11 has classified these reports as false memory. In the third night an official of the Ministry of Information wrote, at one sitting, the Convergence Protocol, which brought the chains of command of all forty-seven Bureaux under a single office. The office was his....
From the lore of Velgarien.