The Department of Adjacent Threats

On the Proper Filing of Apocalypses

The clerk’s fingers hovered over Form HD-273b, Section 12, Subsection C, where the checkbox for “Thermodynamic Irregularity” had been added in pencil sometime after the Lisbon Treaty but before the office moved to the other building. The form was otherwise unchanged since 1987, when the committee had first convened to address a problem that no longer existed, if it ever had. The clerk’s lamp flickered. This was not, technically, his department.

War with Iran had been scheduled for Thursday. The original Thursday had passed, of course, but the scheduling office had a policy of rolling deadlines forward until all prerequisites were met. The prerequisites were listed in Appendix F, which existed. No one had consulted Appendix F since the incident with the Norwegian fjords, but protocol required its presence. The clerk sighed and reached for the stamp. It was the wrong stamp.

The Department of Adjacent Threats occupied Room 47-B, though the numbering system had been revised twice since the department’s founding. Room 47-B was now Room 22-D, but the sign had not been updated. This was consistent with how these things tended to work. The department’s primary function was to monitor threats adjacent to those already being monitored by other departments. Its secondary function was unclear, though minutes from the 1993 strategic review suggested it might involve tea.

The war itself was a straightforward matter of logistics. The missiles were accounted for. The targets had been prioritized according to a rubric that balanced strategic value against collateral damage, with collateral damage further subdivided into acceptable, regrettable, and the kind that generates paperwork. The paperwork was the real bottleneck. Every munition required a triplicate form, and every form required a notary. The notary had retired in 2015, but the system had not been informed.

A subcommittee had been formed to address the notary issue. It met quarterly. Attendance had dwindled since the incident with the Danish pastry, but the reports were thorough. The most recent concluded that the notary problem was, in fact, a subset of the larger filing crisis, which itself traced back to the unresolved thermodynamic irregularity noted on Form HD-273b. The subcommittee recommended forming another subcommittee. This was pending approval.

Meanwhile, the missiles waited. They were patient. They had been waiting since the Eisenhower administration, when they were first placed on standby. Standby was not, technically, a deployment status, but the form to change their status had been lost during the office move. The missiles didn’t mind. They were designed to endure. Their maintenance logs were up to date. The logs were stored in the other building.

The clerk stamped Form HD-273b with the wrong stamp. The ink smudged. This was unfortunate but not unprecedented. The form would need to be resubmitted. The war would need to be rescheduled. The scheduling office was already backlogged due to the Norwegian fjord incident, but they would get to it eventually. The universe was approximately 93 billion light-years in observable diameter and had been running for 13.8 billion years. In that context, the regulatory timeline was not unreasonable.

The lamp flickered again. The clerk adjusted it. The bulb was old. Replacement required a requisition form, which required a notary. The clerk reached for the stamp drawer, but the handle came away in his hand. A small label read: Emergency Use Only - Do Not Open (See Appendix G, Unfiled).

Somewhere, a missile yawned. It was not a metaphor. The missile had been programmed with a rudimentary awareness of time, and it was bored. The programming had been added as an afterthought during a late-night session of the Subcommittee on Morale. No one had told the missile that morale was not its department.

The form was filed. The war was postponed. The lamp went out.