The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T2.1 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 1)

Editor's Note: ArQive contains names and words from Kàé Lán. Kàé Lán is a tonal language and  uses the letter "v" to signify the tonally flat "u". Vowels accented like "à" are tonally shifted down, vowels accented like "á" are tonally shifted up, and vowels accented "ä" are tonally shifted down then up (dip tone). Vowels with no accent are unshifted or tonally flat. The Fh digraph signifies the sound assigned to the IPA character ɸ.

QSI-N_0266801c
Fhá Vngví - Hàkétzü DZ-C_060041386

Part 1
Priority 1

It was another abysmal day of redundancies, triplicate, and tedium at the Ministry of Provincial Administration. Copy machines whirred away as they spat out interminable reams of paperwork. Boxes of unprocessed documents and filings stood in stacks and slightly slumped piles as their cardboard deformed under the crushing weight of the Imperium's bureaucracy. The MPA, like any proper government office, refused adamantly to digitise anything it absolutely did not have to, and ensured to make paper copies of everything it could. If each MPA office didn't raze an entire forest each day to satisfy its boundless lust for unoptimised ineffeciencies, excessive packratting, and the most magnificent music to any paper-pusher's ears—the whirring of shredders—then all was indeed not well with the worlds.

This day, however, was not such a day. Paper flowed like an endless river. The copiers sang the song of their people to symphonies of shredders. There was no better soundtrack, thought Fhá Vngví, as she shoved another box of flawlessly processed, intensely insipid site inspection reports off her desk. No better music to focus the mind when grading reports detailing nothing of any real relevance in jargon so dense if it were a stellar body it would have collapsed into a black hole. The green bean in the cubicle next to hers passed out at his data terminal was proof positive of this.

How efficient he must have been with his assignment of last month's water quality assessment reports from Tvchàmeitè. He was clearly made for this job. Such zeal and passion. Twenty-seven thousand of the most dull, abstruse, insufferable readouts couldn't have inspired a state of such soul-sucking, brain melting, eye bleeding boredom as to have put him straight to sleep without finishing his work. Not this one. He was born for this job.

Fhà gave him two weeks tops.

Only the most stubborn, desperate, or hopeless lasted in the Imperium's most bureaucratic bureau of bureaucracy. But never all three. Those possessed of such distinguished personalities could usually be found around 18:00 that evening at Bureaucrat's Bridge.

"Fhá!" a shrill voice shrieked, startling her.

"Yes, Ngèza?" Fhá replied in her best faux-polite tone.

"Did you look over that report I sent?"

"Which one?"

"I sent it...let's see here," Ngèza said, "seventy-one seconds ago."

"No."

"I expect it reviewed ASAP," Ngèza barked.

"It's lunch time," Fhá complained.

Ngèza pushed her corpulent mass halfway into the cubicle before getting stuck and resorting to leaning over Fhá's shoulder. The smell of cheap perfume saturated the air like her cubicle had played home to a muskrat orgy. Like a well trained bureaucrat, Fhà resisted the urge to pinch her nostrils shut. Enduring the stench of senior bureaucrats was, after all, in her contract. Somewhere.

One of Ngèza's titanic tits squashed onto her shoulder before pooling over it like some kind of gelatinous fleshy cocoon. Fhà suppressed a grimace as she felt a damp spot forming on her shoulder. It was too late to stop the thought forming in her head, though. Fhà surreptitiously slid her rubbish bin closer.