The Processing Station

You dock expecting the usual dance of cosmic bureaucracy. It is a station where ships refuel on recycled hope. Exhausted pilgrims nurse synthetic coffee that tastes like regret. Someone has probably legislated the precise decibel level of acceptable despair.

Instead, you step into the alimentary canal of something that dreams in triplicate.

Listen: the station isn’t a station. It’s a processor—a bureaucratic carnivore built by committee and fed on the screaming mathematics of pure administrative logic. Every surface vibrates with the hunger of ten thousand paper cuts. The air tastes of iron filings and broken promises, thick with the particulate matter of dissolved identities. Far below—so far below—the endless CHRRRK-CHRRRK-CHRRRK of industrial mastication devours the hopes of every fool who believed in safe harbor.

The corridors stretch like the throat of Moloch himself, lined with filing cabinets that tower into darkness, each drawer a mouth that opens and vomits forms that scream when you touch them. The forms writhe in your fingers, begging—actually begging—not to be completed, their text shifting like living things, rearranging themselves into suicide notes.

At the reception desk squats a clerk constructed entirely from staplers and resentment, its voice the wet sound of bureaucracy climaxing. It slams down a form with the enthusiasm of entropy itself:

“APPLICATION FOR THE RECOVERY OF YOUR SHIP, SOUL, OR OTHER MISPLACED PROPERTIES.”

Section A demands you describe your vessel in exactly seventeen languages, three of which don’t exist yet. Section B asks if you’ve made peace with your inevitable conversion to office supplies. Section C is a single checkbox labeled: “I hereby consent to being processed into confetti.”

You want to laugh—Christ, you need to laugh—because this is absurd territory, the cosmic joke about the funeral director who accidentally embalms the living. But the laughter crystallizes in your throat like powdered glass, because while you’re reading, the form is signing itself in your handwriting, and the handwriting is better than yours has ever been.

The floor digests. The entire station lurches like a stomach processing something too large, too stubborn, too aware of what’s happening to it. Through hairline fractures in the tiles, you glimpse the processing pit: an ocean of shredded souls writhing like maggots in sawdust, each strip of paper a voice cut off mid-scream, every scrap a passenger who filed incorrectly—or correctly, which amounts to the same terminal condition.

The intercom crackles with your mother’s voice, if your mother had been strangled by red tape:

“Attention, valued customers. Due to overwhelming enthusiasm for our services, all appeals have been pre-denied for your convenience. Processing will commence in order of decreasing relevance to the universe. Thank you for choosing ECHO 9, where your dissolution is our dedication.”

You run.

Left, right, left—but the geometry here operates on principles borrowed from nightmare logic. Elevators open into supply closets. Supply closets open into interrogation rooms. Interrogation rooms open into more throats. The station isn’t infinite—it’s recursive, trapped in a loop of its own making. You aren’t lost. You’ve already been filed under “Processed.”

You find others. Refugees from meaning itself, faces bleached by fluorescent terror, eyes like empty forms waiting for the right signature. One traveler has been completely converted—skin become paper, blood become ink. He tries to speak but only manages to fold himself into an origami crane, flapping once before dissolving into confetti that spells out “HELP ME” in fourteen point Times New Roman.

Another passenger feeds her completed application into a slot, but the machine belches bureaucratic flame and spits back a receipt stamped: “INSUFFICIENT SUFFERING—PLEASE RESUBMIT.”

A bug wearing a fedora slowly arrives, pushing a cart loaded with processed dreams. It speaks in a voice like shredded constitutions: “Everything terminates in paperwork, friend. And all paperwork terminates in consumption.”

The teeth grind closer. You feel them in your marrow, in the spaces between your thoughts. Looking down, you watch ink seep up your arms like infection, your veins rearranging themselves into dotted lines—cut here for easy removal. Instructions for disassembly bloom across your skin in elegant serif font.

The station has decided you need editing.

And when it finally processes you—body, soul, and the memory of both reduced to administrative strips—you’ll become part of the system. Fresh forms for the next fool who believes in sanctuary. Another passenger will clutch you, sign you, and begin the same beautiful, terrible joke.

ECHO 9 laughs through every speaker simultaneously, a sound like ten million typewriters eating the Gettysburg Address:

“WELCOME TO THE STATION THAT EATS. PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER. YOUR ESTIMATED PROCESSING TIME IS: FOREVER.”

And somewhere, in a dimension where cosmic accountants tally the cost of dreams, a cosmic bureaucrat stamps your file: COMPLETE.