One skill set, one number, issued once.

The name in front is part of it: write Tacit Tessera, then the number, never the number alone. Only the register issues numbers, and a number not in the register is not a Tacit Tessera number, however it is written. A retired number stays reserved forever. On the Hands track the person's name leads and the number sits beside it, never instead of it.

One skill set gets one number, one sealed Card and one tile. The Card is the published formula for an edition. The tile is the machined plate that carries the number, and the mark on it is the collector's: ES for Even Steven, SE for Steady Eddie, SA for Strategic Agent. Even Steven owns what is made of every skill, and collects hands as well.

The first letter says which part of working life

C — Construction holds machines, the people who run them, and the paper a job leaves behind. O — Office holds the back office of a business, seat by seat. A — Agriculture holds farm machines, the ground and the herd, and the records that follow them. P — Professions holds a practice that is licensed or registered, and the files it works from. T — Trades & crafts holds work done by hand at a bench or a station rather than from a seat. S — Self holds one household's own way of running itself.

Each sector carries its own tracks, its own family table on each track, and its own list of trades. A family belongs to one sector and is never shared across sectors. Opening a sector, a family or a trade is a register decision, recorded in the standard; a code is never renamed and never reused.

Construction and Office are what the Book holds today. Agriculture, Professions, Trades & crafts and Self are open, with nothing filed yet.

One entry from each sector that holds entries · Tacit Tessera C M 1 001 CV · 2, Construction; Tacit Tessera O R 1 001 GN · 2, Office.

The family is one digit; the trade is two letters

On Hands and Machine a family is a family of machine. On Records a family is the kind of record — or, in Office, the seat, and in Professions, the profession. The two sectors that hold entries today are printed below from the register itself. The other four carry tables of their own, written the same way.

A trade code says what field the work is in, not what machine it runs on. Construction uses HD horizontal directional drilling, PL pipeline, CV civil and earthworks, MN mining, EL electrical, OG oil and gas facilities and GN general. Office and Professions use the field the business works in, or the field practised in. Agriculture adds GR grain and oilseed, LV livestock, EQ equine and HT horticulture. Trades & crafts draws on the civil, electrical, pipeline, oil and gas and mining codes; Self uses GN alone.

A set is a shelf, not a stew.

Digit zero is reserved on every track of every sector for a Set, which this register calls a Mosaic. A Mosaic gathers several numbers under one licence and leaves each of them whole. It takes a number of its own with family 0, and its Card lists its members by number and edition.

Every member keeps its own count, its own Source and its own withdrawal. A member is asked for by its own number, and it is never put together with another. A withdrawal reaches that member and no other, on that member's own timing. On the Hands and Machine tracks: It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes. On the Records track it takes effect at the next serve.

Two Mosaics EXAMPLE · Tacit Tessera C H 0 001 GN · 1, a Construction Hands Mosaic; Tacit Tessera O R 0 001 GN · 1, the Office Mosaic.

Which one a change earns is a rule, not a judgment

An edition is a dated, frozen version of a number. The same number and edition behave the same way everywhere, or the register says why not.

A licence pins an edition, and that is what makes a result reproducible years later. A Card is sealed when its edition is frozen, and its seal can be checked.

The sector letter arrives before the first issue

The Book's entries were written in a shorter form while the sector table was being settled. They now read with the sector letter in front, and that is the one form the register accepts. Nothing anyone holds is renumbered, because no number has been issued to anyone: no Card has gone out, no printed card is in a wallet, and no licence pins an edition.

No capture session has been recorded, no operator has been signed, nothing has been metered and nobody has been paid.