The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.3 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 4)

"Fhá! Language!" Ngèza barked from the front of the room.

Rage surged through Fhá as she, without thinking, shouted to the boss she loathed with more passion than Bvrák Fànfheí poured into his music, "Stuff it, Ngèza!"

Pushing past Hvang, Fhá rushed to the bathroom, fighting back tears. Practically at a sprint, she reached the corner at the end of the cluster just as her vision began to blur. She rounded the corner and felt her foot slip in the sole of her stiletto, still slick with sweat. A lance of pain shot into her ankle as her foot rolled over. Careening over, Fhá slammed into a stack of boxes, likely containing last lune's unprocessed Collective Farm Yield Reports. The low-quality, overloaded cardboard file boxes, barely kept together with packing tape and all the prayers of the Imperial Church, immediately exploded, sending papers flying in every direction like confetti at the Emperor's birthday parade, and Fhá to the floor. What boxes hadn't exploded on impact buried her under a deluge of pointless bureaucratic inefficiencies.

As she lay dazed on the floor, Fhá felt dampness spreading over her blouse and blazer. The smell of stale coffee reached her nose as she realised one of the ancient greybeards, whose seniority had given him the choicest seat—at the end of the cluster, as far from Ngèza as possible—had been using the stack of boxes as an improvised waste receptacle for half-finished cups of coffee. Obviously suffering from late stage clerical dementia, the quantity of stale, cold, and malodorous liquid, had soaked her to the bone in what must have been an entire lune's worth of laziness, apathy, and memory loss.

Today, it seemed, had very much turned into her day of judgement. It was as if she'd died in her sleep and this was the hell she was condemned to inhabit. Complete with every measure of divine wrath from all the emperors she had spent so long silently cursing as she processed endless reams of stupid, all being dispensed upon her in a series of magnanimous acts of omnibenevolent pettiness. Anything that had previously been spared her urinary catastrophe was no more undefiled. Her entire outfit was either soaked with piss or equally as saturated with low-quality, bureaucrat-grade scarabica—a fate so slightly less unpleasant as to be debatable at best.

Covered in liquid filth and the weight of equal parts triplicate forms, crippling shame, and the despair only working for the Imperium could bring, Fhá attempted to exhume herself from the pileup of now equally sodden paperwork and file boxes. All of this to the rapt attention, boundless amusement, and persistent verbal abuse of her peers, who never once missed an opportunity to unload their suppressed self-loathing onto whomever their supervisor wouldn't issue them an HR-78(c) Harassment Report for.

"Watch your step, fuckhead!" one greybeard heckled, as Fhá wobbled back to her feet.

Ngèza, never one to miss an opportunity at verbally abusing her inferiors, parroted the invective, "Yeah! Watch it, fuckhead!"

Encouraged by their boss, the remaining greybeards escalated their streams of expletive laced, yet somehow entirely witless, abuse.

Crass bastards.

Eyes burning, Fhá sprinted away, passing the elevators just as the staplers started flying. She slammed her shoulder into the bathroom door, flinging it open. The door struck the wall with a loud bang, startling her and incurring a second wrathful issuance from her bladder. Fresh urine trickled down her legs as she rushed to the last stall and pushed open the door. She threw herself inside and slammed the door shut, before curling on the floor, tears flowing down her cheeks.

For a moment, she sat there, knees to her chest, mind as blank as her gaze into a distant nowhere—if nowhere was a banal, off-blue, plastic stall door covered in graffiti and a large penis she just knew was Ngèza's handiwork.