When bureaucracy becomes cosmic law, even friendship requires the right paperwork.
Sid thought he was finished with the universe's nonsense. After helping accountant Alan survive his accidental bonding with a reality-rewriting Stylus and preventing a piece of cosmic marriage fraud, he was hoping for a quiet Friday night.
The universe disagreed.
Bob is missing.
Not lost.
Not late.
Filed.
Bob207, the bureaucratic clerk who helped them navigate eleven universes of paperwork, has been processed somewhere he should not be. Somewhere between "completed" and "archived."
Unfortunately, Bob has a son.
And Bob207a's naming ceremony, the moment he officially becomes a person instead of a provisional entry, is in three days.
If Bob misses it, his son loses his number for an entire cycle.
Sid cannot let that happen.
Which means navigating:
• A garbage disposal system that sorts reality
• A quantum computer that forgot how to finish counting
• The Scowl — transport for things too broken to fix
• A machine built before the universe had proper rules
Because in a cosmos where paperwork has power, the most dangerous thing is not chaos.
It is a system that believes your case is already resolved.
Chapter Twenty-Two continues the comic science fiction series where the universe runs on procedures, and someone really should have read the forms first.
