Bureau of Liminal Affairs
A permit to wander, issued for the territory you are standing in.
What it does
- You file Form DRT-1: a locality, a radius, and a stated purpose.
- The Bureau surveys the ground around you and classifies the in-between places it finds.
- It stamps a permit — four to eight real sites, in order, with a directive for the walk and an instruction for the standing around.
- It notes the weather at the moment of issue, and runs on the Lock Screen while you drift.
- Valid 72 hours, or until your next clear memory, whichever arrives first.
The sites are real, drawn from the public map, and so is the walk. A permit is not legally required to drift; the Bureau issues them anyway, on the grounds that a document makes a feeling official.
Public Notice 12-A — Concerning the Bureau
The Bureau of Liminal Affairs was established in 1972, by an administrative error that no one has had the heart to correct. Its mandate is the registration, survey and quiet stewardship of the places in between: the corridor, the underpass, the laundromat at the hour when the dryers outnumber the customers.
Post conspicuously
Directives
Every stop carries two: one for getting there, one for once you have arrived. There are several dozen, no permit repeats itself, and you are told what they are when the permit is stamped and not before.
Form DRT-4(b) — Specimen pair
- Walk as if returning, not arriving.
- Locate the hum. Every site has one. Do not name it.
Classification of sites — Schedule L
Transit void
Stations, platforms, rest areas — built for leaving.
Retail afterlife
Coin laundries, vending machines, filling stations, the last payphone.
Temporary accommodation
Motels and hotels; rooms that hold no grudges.
Infrastructure, unwitnessed
Substations, water towers, parking structures after eight.
Formerly in service
The disused, the abandoned, the still-standing.
Threshold
Underpasses, footbridges — neither bank, only crossing.
Denials
An application is declined when the surveyed area returns too few registered in-between places. The applicant is then advised to widen the radius of wander, or to apply from somewhere slightly worse.
Motto: omnia loca intermedia — every place is between.