My name is Belay Last and I have a terrible secret.

When I ran for Comptroller I didn’t think that I would win. I was running against 10 term incumbent and nobody was aware that a regular citizen could vote for a comptroller. It was at least one punchline in every municipal civics poetry slam I attended. I had to stop going when it became too esoteric. Too much about parallel morals. Parallel worlds. They had a big banner over the entrance that read “NO SARCASM.” That’s the world you live in working public sector, absolutely genuine at all times. Subversive ideas rode upon chariots of memetic irony. So when they made fun of me I knew it was serious business.

I was voted in by the people you would expect to care about this position; some financial experts, but mostly fringe types. I field calls from them daily. Do you have any idea – the slightest notion – how much money disappears every year? It’s not one giant hole, it’s modest holes at every single level of government, and as far as I can tell it’s not embezzlement or for personal gain.

There’s a hivemind operating behind this thing, a cellular queen consciousness that looks like a grid of fractals once you catch a glimpse. It’s aligned with the cosmos and runs close to nature, it’s the airlock between our world and the natural world we’ve insulated ourselves from. It wants money, though. Millions of dollars and each department pays in. I don’t know how it works in other parts of the world but it can’t just be this city. Not long after I was elected I discovered that comptrollers aren’t voted in, typically. So I don’t need to be subject to a reelection. I can stay here forever.

I told a joke about it at the slam night and nobody laughed. It wasn’t different than any other joke but I got the sense they opened the airlocks of their eyes and sucked the oxygen from the room.