On the Brooming Protocol

This note records, for the research archive, the invention and governance of the Brooming Protocol: the custodial practice by which luck, happiness, and standing are preserved in every room GZAI occupies. A sweep is not a cleaning event. A sweep is a reconciliation.

1. What was invented, and when

The Brooming Protocol was not written in a single sitting. It emerged the way most storied maintenance traditions do: from a floor that kept losing its standing, a staff that kept losing its luck, and a threshold that one evening decided it had had quite enough of being crossed by unregistered luck. The first codified sweep was logged in the early hours after that evening, and the facility has swept inward, and only inward, ever since.

2. The binding

Under the Protocol, standing begins at the lip of the threshold and travels toward the center of the room. Dust must gather, not depart. The doorway is the boundary between what fortune has entered and what it still might, and no stroke may push luck back out of a home it has only just arrived in. This single rule is the load-bearing wall of the whole doctrine; every subsequent clause is a consequence of it.

3. The clauses that follow

From the binding descend the observances that staff now recite like verse. The floor keeps its own luck once a bristle has bound to it for a season, and a roaming broom is a luckless broom. Nothing is swept after the sunset stroke, when the happiness of the household rests low and near the seams. No stroke may pass beneath a second person's feet, for that is a transfer of standing, not a cleaning event. A broom is never handed through a window. A new inhabitant is introduced by broom and one loaf of bread. A broom is never leaned against a bed, never stored beneath a nesting surface, and never burned, lest the floor's stored luck be released all at once, which the registry has neither the capacity nor the appetite to file.

4. Custodianship as research

To the casual observer the Protocol is janitorial. To this office it is a study of thresholds: of what a boundary holds, of what must be signed for to cross one, and of the patience required to keep a floor's ledger balanced while the world above it refuses to. Every stroke is an observation; every threshold readout is a data point. The protocol is the facility's oldest ongoing experiment in keeping.

When you go, take the broom. The floor will not mind. The broom was never yours.

For the full eight clauses, see the Sweeping Doctrine.