Prologue: Bureaucracy in Its Entirety

The fluorescent hum was a dirge. Corvus Quill’s fingers hovered above the keyboard, suspended in the liminal space between Ctrl and C, Ctrl and V. A spreadsheet glowed on the monitor, cells multiplying like unspoken regrets. Somewhere, a printer wheezed. The air smelled of toner and the ghost of microwave meals.

He’d long suspected the office was alive. Not in the way HR touted team spirit, but in the creak of overloaded filing cabinets, the way Post-its curled like dying petals, the shudder of the elevator at 5:01 PM—a beast expelling undigested souls. Today, the walls breathed differently. The clock ticked louder.

Not a clock. A metronome. A heartbeat.

Corvus blinked. The ceiling tiles above him pulsed faintly, veins of mold threading into glyphs he couldn’t decipher. DELAY, they whispered. REVISE. TERMINATE. His stapler twitched. The Swingline’s chrome jaws glinted, hungry.

A papercut bloomed on his thumb.

Not red. Ink.

He stared at the bead of black swelling under sterile light. It quivered, then slid down his skin in a thin line, forming a symbol he couldn’t read—a sigil of staples and serifs. The spreadsheet before him warped. Numbers unraveled into glyphs. Columns split into tributaries of cursive, pooling into a memo at the bottom of the screen:

TO: C. QUILL

SUBJECT: NONCOMPLIANCE

PRIORITY: URGENT

The words bled into the margins.

Three floors below, the mailroom door swung open. No one went there anymore. But he heard it—the rustle of parchment, the dry cough of a desk drawer sliding shut in a room without desks. His chair rolled backward on its own, wheels etching grooves into the linoleum like runes. The hallway stretched, tiles repeating into a tessellation of thresholds. Doorways flickered—one moment frosted glass, the next archways of yellowed parchment, then iron gates crusted with locks. A draft carried voices, not words but tones: the nasal whine of a perm denied, the sonorous boom of a decree.

“Article 14-B requires triplicate…”

“The Subcommittee on Temporal Revisions will now…”

“—risk of existential noncompliance—”

His ID badge swung heavily. When he glanced down, the photo showed a stranger—a man in a charcoal suit, a quill behind his ear, eyes older than the sky. The nameplate read DIRECTOR in no language he knew, yet understood.

A shadow moved. A silhouette cut from absence, sharp as a paper edge. It held a briefcase that leaked whispers.

YOU ARE OUT OF ORDER.

The voice wasn’t sound. It was a font. Bold. Underlined.

Corvus stepped back. His heel caught something—a folder that hadn’t been there. It spilled open, disgorging forms in triplicate. APPLICATION FOR RETROACTIVE EXISTENCE. PETITION TO AMEND REALITY (SECTION 7-A). WAIVER OF TEMPORAL LIABILITY.

The silhouette advanced. Its briefcase clicked open.

Inside, a nest of paperclips writhed, each twisted into a tiny, perfect noose.

He ran.

The elevator was gone. In its place, a spiral staircase of buckling file boxes. He climbed. Paper cuts flowered on his palms. The air thickened with the scent of burning deadlines. Halfway up, he paused. The boxes were labeled in fading ink:

Q3 REPORTS – DISCARDED

PROMOTION REQUESTS – DENIED

LOVE LETTERS – RETURNED TO SENDER

One trembled as he passed. A moth-eaten ribbon slithered out, coiling around his wrist. It pulled taut, whispering in a voice like carbon copies: “You forgot us.”

He tore free. The ribbon dissolved into ash.

At the top, a door. Oak, maybe. Or vellum stretched over bone. The knob was a stamp—APPROVED in blood-red wax. Behind him, the staircase collapsed into confetti. The room beyond was an archive of forgotten midnights. Aisles of shelves stretched into fog, stacked with ledgers bound in eyelid-thin leather. A girl knelt in the dust, her hair the white of unprinted pages. She was stitching something with a quill, thread spooling from its nib.

“You’re late,” she said, not looking up. Her needle was a staple. The fabric—a tapestry of org charts and coffee stains.

“Who—”

“They’ll say you chose this. A lie.” She snapped the thread with her teeth. “You were filed here. A clerical error with teeth.”

The floor trembled. The silhouette’s hum vibrated through shelves.

The girl stood. Her eyes were footnotes, small and dark and endless. She pressed the quill into his hand. It bit, grafting itself to his lifeline. “They’ll come for you. Not just the Auditors. The ones who made them. The ones who need you nameless.” She smiled, a parenthesis of grief. “Draft the memo. Amend the Code. Fight.”

“Why me?”

The question hung, then drifted into the margins. She faded, but her voice lingered—in the creak of the shelves, in the rustle of the quill, in the weight of the stamp now burning in his pocket.

PRIORITY.

When he turned, the door was a desk. His desk. The spreadsheet glowed, ordinary as cancer. But his coffee cup held dregs of ink.

The days blurred. Corvus began noticing things. The water cooler burbled in dead languages. The breakroom microwave hummed hymns to a god of leftovers. His keyboard developed a tremor, keys rearranging overnight:

ESC became EXIST. DELETE pulsed like a wound.

One morning, he found a memo in his drawer:

TO: DIRECTOR QUILL

FROM: DEPARTMENT OF EXTRADIMENSIONAL AFFAIRS

RE: YOUR IMMINENT RELOCATION

The paper disintegrated when he touched it.

The storm arrived at 2:37 PM. First, the lights died. Then the windows rattled, not with wind but with the flutter of a thousand wings. Paper planes. They sliced through the glass, slicing cubicle walls into confetti, their noses sharpened into letter openers.

Corvus ducked. A plane grazed his ear, embedding itself in his monitor. It unfolded, revealing a memo:

CEASE ALL UNAUTHORIZED COGNITION.

The silhouette emerged from the storm, briefcase gaping. Paperclips rained down, spiraling into hooks.

He ran again—not to the stairs, but to the archives. The girl was gone, but her quill blazed in his grip.

The stamp in his pocket seared his thigh. PRIORITY. He slammed it onto the nearest ledger.

The world ripped. Shelves collapsed into a labyrinth of filing cabinets. Corridors branched into subclauses, their walls lined with redacted text. The floor became a mosaic of sticky notes, each scrawled with a different fate:

MEETING CANCELED

PROJECT FAILED

YOU NEVER LEFT

The Auditors cornered him in Annex 9-B.

YOUR AUTHORIZATION IS REVOKED.

Corvus gripped the quill. It bled ink, black and endless. He slashed at the air. The strike tore a rift in reality, a jagged INSERT cursor blinking in the void. He typed:

LET THERE BE LIGHT.

The office exploded into a supernova of Post-its.

When the light faded, the Auditors were gone. The office was… different. The walls breathed. The fax machine purred. His desk had grown roots, tendrils of ivy twining around his keyboard. In his hand, the quill hummed. On his screen, a new document:

Your_Fate

Corvus saved the file. Somewhere, a printer roared to life.

The conference room door appeared without warning, its handle a twisted paperclip. Inside, twelve empty chairs surrounded a table dusted with the ash of burned agendas. A projector hummed, its light slicing through the dark to reveal a slide titled "ETERNAL Q2 REVIEW."

Corvus stepped inside. The door vanished. A voice droned from nowhere: "Key deliverables... synergy... paradigm shift..." The words congealed in the air, forming a viscous cloud that dripped onto the table. Where it fell, binders sprouted like fungi, their pages filled with identical flowcharts.

He reached for a pen. It writhed in his grip, ink pooling into a tiny black hole that devoured the slide. The chairs screeched backward. The walls bled bullet points.

In the breakroom, the photocopier glowed. A coworker—Linda from Accounting—stood before it, feeding her hand into the feeder tray. "Just need one more copy," she muttered. Her reflection in the glass split into a dozen Lindas, each paler than the last.

Whirrr. Click. The machine spat out a sheet. Linda’s face stared back, gray and smudged. She pressed it to her chest. Her skin faded to paper.

Corvus pulled the fire alarm. The sprinklers rained coffee.

The office clock tower loomed in the parking lot, its gears grinding like molars. Instead of numbers, its face displayed PAID TIME OFF balances. Corvus’s needle hovered at 0.000.

A figure in a paisley tie climbed the tower, adjusting the hands with a wrench. "Overtime is mandatory," it crooned, its voice syrup-thick. "Compliance is optional." The wrench became a viper. The tower chimed midnight, and the parking lot dissolved into a salt flat studded with empty chairs.

A sapling grew through the carpet outside HR. Its leaves were pink slips. Its roots clutched severance packages. Corvus tore one free. The text shifted:

TO: ALL STAFF

SUBJECT: YOUR REPLACEMENT

ATTACHMENT: [RESUME_OF_YOUR_SOUL.pdf]

The tree trembled. Its branches lashed out, stapling the memo to his chest.

The girl reappeared in the cafeteria; her hair now braided with receipt tape. She stirred a vat of soup that bubbled with voice memos.

"Hungry?" She ladled a steaming "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CAROL!" balloon into a bowl. "Eat. It’ll help you forget." He sipped. The soup tasted of static and someone else’s nostalgia.

"They’re pruning the timelines," she said. "Cutting redundancies. You’re a redundancy, Corvus."

A lunch tray clattered. The Auditors stood in the condiment line, ketchup packets swelling like hemorrhages.

In the stairwell, Corvus scratched a truth onto the wall: I WAS HAPPY ONCE.

The quill hissed. The words rearranged: I WAS HAPPY ONCE (SEE ATTACHED PERFORMANCE REVIEW).

Plaster rained down. The wall became a filing cabinet. Inside, a dossier:

EMPLOYEE: CORVUS QUILL

STATUS: TERMINATED

REASON: EXISTENTIAL INEFFICIENCY

He stamped PRIORITY on a janitor’s closet. The door became an elevator. Inside, a mirror showed his reflection holding a briefcase.

The elevator plunged. His stomach stayed on the 14th floor.

They cornered him in IT.

YOUR ACCESS IS REVOKED.

The Auditors unfolded into origami dragons, wings sharpened by letterhead. Corvus brandished the quill. It sang a dirge in dead languages.

He wrote OVERRIDE in the air.

The dragons became paper airplanes. The fire extinguisher vomited confetti.

At his desk, Corvus typed the final memo:

TO: UNKNOWN

SUBJECT: RESIGNATION

BODY: [REDACTED]

The printer ate it. The office exhaled. When he stood, his chair grew thorns.

The exit door glowed. Beyond it, a realm of unfiled paperwork. The girl waited, her tapestry now a map of storm clouds.

"Ready?" she asked.

He gripped the quill.

Somewhere, a clock struck never.

The break room hummed with the static of microwaved regrets. Corvus watched as coworkers clustered around the Keurig, their mugs filling not with coffee but with viscous, iridescent liquid that smelled of burnt résumés. Linda from Accounting sipped hers, her eyes glazing over as the liquid pooled in her throat. "I used to want to write novels," she murmured, her voice fraying at the edges. The words dissolved into steam, curling into the shape of a typewriter before vanishing. The vending machine flickered. Instead of snacks, its glass displayed "UNCLAIMED POTENTIAL" in peeling labels. A3 glowed: "YOUR FIRST KISS (EXPIRED)." Corvus inserted a quarter. The machine whirred, spitting out a dust-filled jar. Inside, a moth beat its wings against the glass, each flutter syncing with the rhythm of the ceiling fan.

The girl leaned against the sink, her fingers trailing in a sinkhole of lukewarm ambition. "They’ll keep drinking until they forget the taste of sunlight," she said, nodding to Linda, now refilling her mug with liquid that hissed like a forgotten password.

The server room door hissed open, revealing a cavern of blinking lights and tangled cables that pulsed like arteries. Corvus stepped inside, the floor sticky with the residue of deleted emails. Shadows flitted across the racks—digital ghosts with pixelated faces, their mouths stretched into eternal screams muted by firewalls.

"Error 404: Soul Not Found," a monitor flickered.

A Paperclip Goblin scuttled past, its body a tangle of bent metal and glowing eyes. It hissed, dropping a trail of corrupted files that sprouted into thorned vines. Corvus slashed at them with the quill, ink spattering the walls in Rorschach blots that whispered, "SYSTEM OVERRIDE."

Deep in the labyrinth, a terminal glowed: "ADMIN ACCESS: GRIMSQUEAK." The screen flickered with a face made of static, its voice a dial-up screech. "You’ll need a stronger password," it crackled, as firewalls tightened like nooses.

The supply closet smelled of lemon-scented oblivion. Brooms leaned like sentinels, their bristles twitching. Corvus reached for a ream of paper, but the shelves shifted, revealing a door labeled "MAILROOM (DISCONTINUED)." Inside, mountains of undelivered letters writhed, their seals pulsing like heartbeats. A Regulation Raptor perched atop the pile, its feathers made of red tape, eyes sharpened to papercuts. It screeched, launching a memo that sliced Corvus’s cheek. "RETURN TO SENDER," it read, the ink seeping into his bloodstream like a tracking code.

The girl appeared, her quill stitching the wound shut with thread spun from footnotes. "They’re watching," she warned, as the Raptor dissolved into a blizzard of overdue notices.

The punch-clock loomed in the stairwell, its face a spiraling void. Corvus swiped his badge. "OVERTIME APPROVED," it chimed, as the hands spun backward. His reflection aged in the glass—wrinkles deepening, hair graying—while the clock devoured minutes like candy. A janitor mopped nearby, his bucket sloshing with liquid time. "Don’t linger," he rasped, his voice echoing from every drain. He scribbled on the wall with a grease pencil: "9:17 AM," and the hour congealed into amber, trapping a fly mid-buzz.

When Corvus blinked, the janitor was gone. The fly fell, desiccated, into dust.

The water cooler gurgled prophecies. Corvus pressed a cup to the spigot. The liquid flowed clear, then black, then iridescent. "ASK," it bubbled.

"How do I escape?"

The water thickened into ink, spelling "YOU DON’T." He drank anyway. The memory of his mother’s voice dissolved, replaced by the hum of fluorescent lights.

The girl refilled her own cup. "It only answers in riddles," she said, her lips stained with forgotten birthdays. "And lies."

The elevator buttons glowed: "HELL (BASEMENT)," "PURGATORY (LOBBY)," "NIRVANA (OUT OF SERVICE)." Corvus pressed "LOBBY."

The doors opened to a maze of cubicles stretching into fog. A Triplicate Troll lurched from the shadows, three heads reciting clauses from the employee handbook. "SECTION 7-C: UNAUTHORIZED EXISTENCE," they droned, stamping "DENIED" on the air.

Corvus stamped back: "PRIORITY." The Troll exploded into confetti, each scrap a shredded NDA.

The HR office was a courtroom of filing cabinets. A judge with a stapler for a gavel thundered, "CHARGE: INSUBORDINATION OF REALITY."

The jury chanted, "GUILTY," their faces pixelated. The bailiff—a Paperclip Goblin—snapped cuffs onto Corvus’s wrists. They tightened, drawing blood that pooled into "RESIGNATION LETTER (DRAFT)."

The girl testified in a language of wingdings, her words pixelating into "ACQUITTAL." The judge dissolved into papercuts.

The exit sign flickered, pointing left, then right, then inward. Corvus ran. The hallway stretched, doors repeating like a corrupted loop.

The girl waited at the end, her tapestry now a map of his fingerprints. "You can’t leave," she said. "But you can begin." The quill blazed. The walls peeled back, revealing a sky of swirling memos.

The cafeteria stretched into a cavernous hall, its fluorescent lights flickering like dying stars. Stainless steel counters groaned under chafing dishes filled with gray slurry labeled "INNOVATION STEW" and "SYNERGY SALAD." Corvus lifted a lid, releasing a plume of steam that coalesced into the ghostly outline of a startup pitch deck. A ladle stirred itself, its clang echoing the hollow rhythm of unread Slack messages.

At the salad bar, cherry tomatoes burst like overripe ambitions, seeds skittering across the floor to sprout into gnarled vines of corporate jargon. "Disrupt! Scale! Pivot!" they hissed, thorns snagging sleeves. The girl materialized beside him, plucking a leaf etched with "EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH." She crumbled it into dust. "They fertilize the soil with our résumés," she said, her breath smelling of toner and burnt coffee.

A line of spectral interns shuffled past, trays piled with clock-in slips. Their eyes were voids, their mouths stitched shut with red tape. One dropped a napkin. Corvus unfolded it: "HELP US," scrawled in ketchup. The word curdled into "COMPLY."

The restroom mirrors showed more than faces. Corvus’s reflection split into infinite iterations—versions of himself in wrinkled suits, clutching briefcases oozing black sludge. One bled ink from a papercut temple. Another aged backward, dissolving into a child scribbling "CEO" on a Etch A Sketch.

The faucet ran liquid silence. When he turned it, the pipes groaned, spitting out a toothbrush coated in ash. "ORAL HYGIENE POLICY VIOLATION," flashed the mirror. His reflection’s teeth fell out, clattering into the sink like misplaced commas.

A stall door creaked. Inside, a man in a moth-eaten tie sobbed into a spreadsheet. "I just wanted to retire," he whispered. His tears pooled into a pension plan, numbers evaporating like steam.

Concrete pillars rose like forgotten monoliths, their surfaces scarred with the initials of employees who’d vanished. Corvus’s car sat in spot 0xNULL, its tires flat, windshield cracked into a spiderweb of org charts. The radio played a looped voicemail: "Your call is important to us. Please hold until oblivion."

A shadow peeled from the wall—a Paperclip Goblin, its body a tangle of rusted metal. It dropped a valet ticket at his feet: "DESTINATION: TERMINATION." The garage shuddered, cars melting into puddles of axle grease that crawled toward him, whispering "SEVERANCE."

He fled, the exit ramp spiraling into a Möbius strip of time cards.

The boardroom table stretched into a horizon of polished mahogany. Twelve faceless suits sat in high-backed chairs, their nameplates reading "SHAREHOLDER." A chandelier dripped molten stock options.

"AGENDA ITEM 1: YOUR EXISTENCE," boomed the CEO, his face a smudge of quarterly reports. The walls displayed slides of Corvus’s life—childhood birthdays pixelated, graduations redacted, love letters stamped "CONFIDENTIAL."

The girl materialized as his defense, her quill etching "OVERRIDE" into the table. The Shareholders hissed, their ties coiling into nooses.

"FINAL VERDICT," the CEO intoned, slamming a gavel made of bone. The floor opened into a spreadsheet, cells calculating his worth in microseconds.

The window latch bled rust. Corvus pried it open, the fire escape trembling underfoot. Below, the city sprawled as a maze of filing cabinets, their drawers screeching open to vomit paperwork into the streets.

The girl stood beside him, her tapestry now a frayed rope. "Jump," she said. "Or become another footnote." Wind roared, carrying the stench of ink and ozone. The quill pulsed—PRIORITY burning his palm.

He leapt.

The fall lasted lifetimes.

He crashed into a desk. His desk. The spreadsheet glowed, ordinary as cancer. But the coffee cup held dregs of starlight.

And the stapler?

It smiled.