[FLASH FICTION] The Clerical Eternal
Clerical obedience in a system designed for no one
In a world where hospital bureaucracy runs on ritual rather than reason, one man continues to hit “Submit” long after the system stopped listening, because they still pay him, and no one told him to stop.
He was assigned to the sub-basement of Billing and Intake, an annex of the hospital that smelled faintly of toner and burnt coffee, where time had no particular direction and the light flickered in Morse code, no one bothering to translate it. His badge read K. Wendell, Data Operations Associate III, though no one called him that. Most people didn’t call him anything.
His job, as explained during orientation, was to process intake forms from the ED: handwritten scrawls by nurses with wrist pain and poor penmanship, forms documenting coughs, amputations, unexplained twitches, full-body hives, occasional goat-related injuries.
He would transcribe them into the System, hit SUBMIT, and the machine, the great electronic brain in the ceiling, would route them to Billing, Triage, Pharmacy, Risk Management, Legal, “or wherever they need to go,” said the training tape narrator.
For twenty years, he clicked SUBMIT. With reverence. With speed. With minor carpal tunnel flare-ups mitigated by two ibuprofen and a wrist brace he stole from Orthopedics.
Then, one late evening (census low, only two stabbings and one man trying to claim he was pregnant), he noticed something. The confirmation screen—the little window that popped up and chirped “Record accepted!” was gone. In its place: nothing. No error. No approval. Just a void.
He called IT. IT transferred him to Informatics. Informatics sent him a Word doc with “Workflow Redesign” in the header and a bullet point that read:
Legacy data pipeline deprecated. No current endpoint required for submission task. Please continue to document as usual.
He stared at that line for the better part of his shift. Then he minimized it, opened a new record, typed:
“Patient arrived with shoe embedded in left cheek. No signs of infection. Antibiotics deferred due to insurance lapse.”
[SUBMIT]
Again.
And again.
They still paid him every other Friday via Direct Deposit. He still got the all-staff birthday email (Subject: 🎉 You’re Part of the Team!). He once asked HR if his job still mattered. They said, “Of course! Without documentation, how would we ever prove the care happened?”
He nodded like a man listening to the ocean through a conch shell. Then he went back to work.
They eventually moved his desk into a supply closet when the office needed space for new AI Compliance Monitors. He didn’t complain. The SUBMIT button followed him wherever he logged in.
He died sometime in his 60s—peacefully, mid-form.
His last entry:
“Unknown male, fell into lobby fountain. Alert and oriented x1. Denied being a metaphor.”
[SUBMIT]
The system accepted it without comment.
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