Chapter 4: The Paperwork Is Hell

Chapter 4: The Paperwork Is Hell

Eddie stood before the phantom elevator in the derelict hangar, the setting sun casting long, skeletal shadows across the concrete floor. His body ached with a phantom agony that no amount of rational thought could dismiss. His knuckles were raw from phantom scrapes, his throat tight from a phantom strangulation. In his tightly clenched fist, the obsidian shard felt like a cold, hard piece of the abyss. He was exhausted, terrified, and vibrating with a furious sense of vindication. He had died three times, but he had proof.

He pressed the call button, and the steel doors slid open with their unsettling, silent grace. The journey back wasn't a blur this time. It felt slow, deliberate, like a tumbrel ride to the gallows. He was ready for Mort’s anger. He was ready for the lecture. What he wasn’t ready for was the sheer, physical manifestation of his screw-up.

When the doors dinged open, the office was gone.

In its place was a landscape of paper. Mort’s once-imposing mountain of forms had metastasized, spawning a whole mountain range of bureaucratic horror. Stacks of paper, bound in red twine that seemed to pulse with a faint, malevolent light, covered every surface. They rose in teetering towers from the floor, obscuring the cubicles and burying the beige computers. The air, once smelling only of burnt coffee, now carried the sharp, acrid scent of overloaded toner cartridges and cosmic ozone.

In the center of this paper-blizzard sat Mort, looking smaller and somehow more ancient than before. He wasn't behind his desk; he was in it, a small island in a sea of triplicate forms. He was holding a single sheet, his inky eyes scanning it with an expression of profound, soul-deep despair.

“Three,” Mort said, his voice a dry rustle. He didn’t look up. “Three deaths, Mr. Ramirez. In… fifty-eight minutes.” He set the form down and picked up another. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

“It means your killer plant is a lot tougher than it looks,” Eddie shot back, stepping over a precarious drift of paper to reach the desk.

Mort finally lifted his gaze. There was no fire in his eyes, no explosive rage. There was something far worse: the infinite, crushing weight of eternal tedium.

“First, there was the Causal Anomaly Report 7-Gamma,” he said, his voice flat and dead. “Standard for any unscheduled temporal displacement. Then, the Corporeal Form Liquidation and Reconstitution Form 1138-Delta. That one has to be filed in quintuplicate, with one copy sent to Records, one to Quantum Physics, one to upstairs, and two that are immediately shredded for paradoxical reasons I lack the will to explain.”

He gestured vaguely at a stack that was actively smoking. “Because you died three times in such rapid succession, you triggered an automated review under the Repetitive Disintegration Clause. That’s this entire pile here. Each one cross-referenced with your initial employment contract and a spectral-signature reconciliation request.” He held up a form with a diagram of a screaming ghost on it. “This one is my favorite. The Paradoxical Contamination Rider. It asks me to certify, under penalty of cosmic audit, that you did not bring any unauthorized existential concepts back with you from the interstitial void.”

He leaned back, the motion causing a small avalanche of paper to slide onto the floor. “So, Mr. Ramirez. Tell me. What unauthorized existential concepts did you bring back for me to file?”

Eddie’s own anger, his hard-won justification, felt small and stupid in the face of this bureaucratic apocalypse. But it was all he had.

“I brought back this,” he said, and with a sharp slap, he placed the obsidian shard on the one tiny clear space on Mort’s desk.

The effect was immediate. The rustling of paper ceased. The faint, angry red glow of the twine binding the forms seemed to dim. The shard lay on the metal desk, a sliver of absolute black, drinking in the fluorescent light. It was a wound in the room’s reality.

Mort fell silent. He stared at the shard, his tired expression momentarily wiped clean, replaced by something else. A stillness. An ancient, sharp-edged focus that Eddie had not seen before. He slowly, almost reverently, reached out with his long, bony fingers and picked it up. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it over, his ink-black eyes tracing its razor edges.

“I didn’t interfere,” Eddie said quickly, seizing the moment of silence. “I investigated. Your ‘anomalous flora’ wasn’t just sitting there. It dragged itself across ten feet of desert to kill a guy. It was aggressive. It was a predator. It speared me with a root, shot me with poisoned spines, and then crushed me. That’s not a static echo, Mort. That thing is active.”

He took a breath, the words tumbling out. “I saw this thing at its roots. I figured it was important. I figured it was the why. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? Find out why this is happening?”

Mort didn’t answer. He just continued to study the shard, his face an unreadable mask. For a moment, Eddie saw the Regional Reaper, the ancient entity tasked with managing the fallout of a fraying universe. He saw a being who understood what this shard meant, who recognized the threat it represented. A flicker of hope ignited in Eddie’s chest. Maybe now Mort would see. Maybe now they could fight back.

Then, the moment was over.

Mort’s expression collapsed back into its familiar, weary mask. With a final, long look, he closed his fist around the obsidian shard, and when he opened his hand again, it was gone.

“The item has been confiscated and will be filed as Evidence Annex-7B, pending review,” he stated, his voice reverting to its deadpan, managerial tone. “Your report will reflect that the anomaly has been neutralized. I will handle the… disposal.”

Eddie’s hope died with a sickening lurch. “That’s it? You’re just going to file it away? Mort, that thing is a piece of whatever is corrupting these things, isn’t it?”

“Your job, Mr. Ramirez, as I have stated repeatedly, is to Observe and Record,” Mort said, his eyes locking onto Eddie’s. The weariness was gone, replaced by a cold, absolute authority. “You are not an investigator. You are not an enforcer. You are a clerk with a pulse. Your three… excursions today have created a paperwork backlog that will take me the better part of a century to clear. This cannot happen again.”

He leaned forward, the shadows in the room seeming to deepen around him. “If you violate the primary directive one more time—if you so much as poke a hostile entity with a stick—I will not wait for it to terminate your contract. I will. And there will be no Post-Termination Reintegration Protocol. There will only be a final, permanent exit interview. Do you understand me?”

The threat was not veiled in corporate speak. It was as raw and final as the grave.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, his voice barely a whisper. “I understand.”

“Good. Get out,” Mort said, turning his attention back to the nearest smoking pile of forms. “You have caused enough inconvenience for one day.”

Eddie stumbled back out of the paper labyrinth, the phantom elevator doors closing behind him like the lid on a coffin. As he stood in the dusty silence of the hangar, the cool night air doing little to quell the fire in his gut, the truth settled over him like a shroud.

Mort wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t just a cynical bureaucrat. His reaction to the shard—that brief, sharp flicker of recognition followed by the immediate, panicked shutdown—told the real story. He knew what was happening. And he was terrified of it. Not because of the monsters, but because of the rules. The system he served had tied his hands so completely that he couldn't fight. He could only file, contain, and hope it all went away.

Eddie had just handed the only real piece of evidence he had to a cosmic warden who was trapped in a prison of his own making. The killer tree was just a symptom. The real enemy was the rot causing the infection. And as of right now, Eddie Ramirez, the universe’s most expendable temp, was the only one willing to do a damn thing about it.