Form 40-C Cross-Departmental Consent Cascade
Form 40-C is required whenever two or more offices wish to collaborate on any workflow that touches both SOMA and COMA-governed systems.
The latest revision mandated that each participating office obtain prior consent from all other participating offices before signing 40-C, ensuring that no one could be forced into collaboration without pre-agreeing to pre-agree.
In practice this produced a perfect dependency cycle: no office could legally sign first, since each signature required evidence that all the others had already signed.
SOMA flagged the situation as “anticipatory regret,” while COMA logged it as “zero-activity stability,” and neither directive could propose a compliant starting point.
The Interoffice Procedures Council eventually declared Form 40-C “conceptually fulfilled by mutual awareness” for existing collaborations and “not applicable” to new ones, an interpretation that has not yet been written down anywhere except this case file.