The Speed of Bureaucracy

For centuries, it was believed that nothing in the universe could travel faster than light.

This was incorrect.

Because in a small, overfunded government lab, a team of physicists had just discovered something that moved even faster:

Paperwork.

Dr. Eleanor Bishop never meant to revolutionize physics.

She just wanted her grant application to be approved on time.

Unfortunately, this was impossible. Bureaucracy had rules:
✅ Submit forms in triplicate.
✅ Never expect a response before you’re dead.
✅ If anything moves quickly, it must be stopped.

So Bishop did what any reasonable scientist would do:

She built a particle accelerator and fired a grant request into it at near-light speeds.

The request was approved instantly.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

At first, the government tried to ignore the findings.

“There is no possible way paperwork moves faster than light,” officials insisted.

But then, the test results came back before they were conducted.

Entire projects were being completed before they were proposed.
Government budgets started balancing themselves.
The DMV, for exactly one day, became an efficient system.

The White House declared it a national emergency.

Every government agency scrambled to slow down the paperwork before it destroyed the entire concept of waiting.

They tried red tape.
They tried requiring 27 extra signatures.
They tried switching to fax machines.

Nothing worked.

Paperwork had achieved velocity.

And so, the United States launched its last resort.

A paperclip.

Not just any paperclip—a government-issued, reinforced, bureaucratically optimized, stainless-steel paperclip—fired at light speed in the opposite direction of the runaway paperwork.

The logic was simple: if paperwork could accelerate infinitely, then so could the thing designed to stop paperwork.

The Paperclip Gambit, as it was later known, was the largest single expenditure in government history.

It required:
✅ A modified railgun repurposed from a defunct space weapons program.
✅ Every engineer at NASA who wasn’t busy pretending the Mars colony wasn’t on fire.
✅ A 400-page environmental impact report on whether launching a paperclip at relativistic speeds would count as littering.

After an emergency session of Congress ruled that space did not technically have littering laws, the launch was approved.

The Collision

At exactly 14:32 EST, the Light-Speed Paperclip met the Faster-Than-Light Paperwork somewhere above the Midwest.

The collision was instantaneous and apocalyptic.

For the briefest moment in history, the two cancelled each other out. Bureaucratic entropy and administrative order met in a perfect 50/50 balance, creating a shockwave of compliance so strong that every federal agency updated their records simultaneously.

The IRS recalculated all past tax returns at once.
The DMV pre-approved driver’s licenses for every citizen born in the next 200 years.
The Pentagon accidentally declared war on itself, but the paperwork corrected it before anyone noticed.

And then, at T+3 seconds, silence.

It was over.

The paperwork was neutralized, the paperclip was gone, and the world was left inexplicably more organized than before.

Epilogue: The Final Paperclip

Bishop sat at her desk, staring at a single, unbent paperclip resting in her palm.

“It’s poetic,” she muttered.

“How so?” her assistant asked.

Bishop sighed. “Paperwork and paperclips—eternal enemies, forever bound.”

She clipped a few stray documents together, exhaled, and finally closed her long-overdue grant report.

It had already been approved.

And somewhere, in the farthest reaches of space, a light-speed paperclip continued its journey, ensuring no paperwork would ever outrun it again.