Susan arrived in our world through a rip in reality so small it could have been mistaken for a hairline crack in a neglected tile floor. From a hellscape on another planet, she slithered into existence, her lizard-like body constantly shifting: scales into pinstripes, claws into hands that could hold a ballpoint pen. She wore a name badge - Susan, Caseworker - but her smile was something no human mouth could muster. Her teeth glinted like shattered glass, and her eyes blinked horizontally, scanning for her next prey.

Her mission was simple: to make the labyrinth of council bureaucracy so convoluted that real humans—those she and her army of Mr. and Mrs. Smith agents could never quite mimic—would lose themselves in its depths. This wasn’t just paperwork; it was psychological warfare, a Kafkaesque nightmare designed to grind souls into dust.

I first met Susan when a brown envelope appeared through my letterbox. It demanded immediate attention to an issue I’d never heard of, related to a place I didn’t own, and addressed to a name I didn’t recognize. The instructions led me to a council office whose address, upon arrival, turned out to be an empty lot overgrown with weeds. Next to the rusted gate was an intercom bolted to a cracked brick wall.

I pressed the button.

"This office no longer exists," said a calm, robotic voice. "We have no record of where it relocated."

“Where should I go, then?” I asked.

"Please hold."

After a pause that stretched into absurdity, the intercom simply clicked off.

I spent the next three days wandering through a series of offices that were not where they were meant to be. Each address on each hastily scrawled map led to places more surreal than the last. One was a Laundromat filled with washing machines spinning forms instead of clothes. Another was a disused swimming pool where a Mrs Smith in a grey suit floated on her back, clutching a clipboard as though it were a life raft.

Every intercom told me the same thing: "This office no longer exists."

By the fourth day, delirium set in. I no longer knew if I was lost or if I had been lost so long that I was now a permanent fixture of the system itself.

Finally, a breakthrough: an actual Mr. Smith sat behind a desk, enclosed in a plastic wall—a leftover relic from a pandemic everyone was so traumatised by they couldn't discuss it. His face was smooth, his expression utterly blank, as though it had been copy-pasted onto his head.

"I’d like to deliver this letter," I said, sliding it under the gap in the plastic barrier.

He stared at me, unmoving, then snatched the envelope with a speed that made me flinch. With a shaky hand, he scrawled something on a receipt and passed it back. The ink bled into the paper, the letters twisting like worms.

“When will it be processed?” I asked.

“Everyone works from home now,” he said flatly. “It’s hard to say.”

Before I could respond, the letter began to tremble. It pulsed, expanding and contracting like a breathing creature. Then, with an almost audible sigh, it disintegrated into a swarm of butterflies -dozens of them, in vibrant, kaleidoscopic colours.

The butterflies darted upward, passing through cracks in the ceiling tiles, leaving me clutching an empty receipt.

“What does this mean?” I asked.

Mr. Smith stared at me, unblinking. “The letter has been delivered,” he said, his voice devoid of meaning.

I left the building - or whatever it was - and stepped outside into a world that suddenly seemed less real than the one I’d just escaped. I turned a corner, only to find Susan standing there, smiling her shattered-glass smile. She held a clipboard, and her form flickered - lizard scales briefly visible under her human guise.

“You’ve done well,” she hissed, her voice like static on an untuned radio. “But we’re not done yet. There’s another form.”

She handed me a piece of paper. It was blank.

“You’ll find the instructions,” she said, and before I could ask where, she vanished, leaving only the faint smell of burnt paper and despair.

I looked down at the blank form in my hands, feeling the weight of something I couldn’t name. Somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard laughter - soft, serpentine, and unending.