Status: RESOLVED // Year: 2025
The case doesn't announce itself.
It looks like any other file at first. A name. A date. A status line that says resolved in a font no one questions anymore. It doesn't sit at the top of the list. It doesn't flash. It doesn't demand attention.
It waits.
In 2025, the person disappears in a way that doesn't feel like a disappearance at all. No sirens. No breaking news. No one says the word missing out loud for weeks, because there are other words that feel more appropriate. Delayed. Unreachable. Pending.
They were meant to be somewhere specific.
They weren't.
That absence matters, not emotionally, but procedurally. Something cannot complete without them. A chain stops one link short. A process hangs, polite but insistent. A system designed to move forward finds itself waiting.
At first, people assume it will resolve itself. Things usually do.
Then a meeting is scheduled.
Someone asks whether the absence can be bypassed. Someone else says it shouldn't be, strictly speaking, but there are pressures. Deadlines. Dependencies. The sense that the system will suffer more if it waits than if it moves on imperfectly.
No one says future.
No one says cost.
They say pragmatic.
The label doesn't matter — alive, deceased, relocated, returned. What matters is that the box is ticked and the process continues. The system exhales. The backlog clears. People go home.
For a while, everything seems fine.
The trouble doesn't begin until later, and even then it doesn't look like trouble.
In 2033, analysts notice a pattern. Returns are cleaner than expected. Efficient. Quiet. People come back and slot into place with minimal disruption. Fewer complications. Fewer messy edges. The numbers look good.
Too good.
Someone notices that damaged returns are becoming rare. Someone else points out that unresolved cases are almost nonexistent. This is presented as progress. Optimisation. Maturity of the system.
No one celebrates.
Something feels thinner.
The case file resurfaces the first time by accident.
A junior analyst opens it while clearing a dependency chain. The system hesitates. A spinner appears where it shouldn't. When the file loads, it looks unchanged. Still marked resolved. Still dated 2025.
The analyst closes it.
The next morning, three meetings are scheduled that weren't on the calendar the day before. No one mentions the file. They talk instead about throughput, stability, and the need to reduce variance. The analyst is reassigned to another team by the end of the week.
No one says they did anything wrong.
They just stop touching that area of the system.
By the time the pattern becomes obvious, everyone already knows.
There is a case you don't open.
It reopens itself if you do.
It causes meetings that never reach decisions.
It creates ripples that show up everywhere except where they started.
People who keep finding it in their queue tend to stall. Promotions evaporate. Projects drift. Careers develop a strange flatness, as if momentum has been siphoned off elsewhere.
Officially, there is no blacklist.
Unofficially, people learn to recognise the signs.
Bartleby encounters the case without meaning to.
He's assigned adjacent work — reroutes, cleanups, follow-ups that refuse to close cleanly. He touches the file the way you touch a door that hasn't been labelled do not enter. Not curiosity. Habit.
The system doesn't punish him.
It routes around him.
Tasks complete without him. Deliveries register without arrival. Failures log as successes. The case remains open for just long enough to matter, then closes itself again, quietly, as if embarrassed.
Bartleby doesn't investigate.
He simply stops completing things the way they expect.
Procrastinatrix appears later.
Not at the file, but around it.
Her voice surfaces in meetings that should escalate and don't. In broadcasts that deflate urgency without naming why. In rooms where people sit a little longer than planned and leave without conclusions.
She never mentions the case.
She doesn't need to.
The effect is measurable. Pressure dissipates. Escalation protocols fail to fire. The system remains stable — just stable enough to keep going.
This is why she's tolerated.
The truth, when it begins to form, is never spoken aloud.
Budgets. Thresholds. Return conditions. The decision to classify more exits as clean. The increasing number of people who come back functional but hollow.
All of it balances against that one resolution.
If the case were reopened properly — not accessed, but corrected — the system would have to admit something it cannot afford to admit.
That the cost has been externalised.
That people have been returned empty to compensate for one unresolved absence.
That the present has been shaped by a decision made to avoid inconvenience eight years earlier.
The file still exists.
It is still marked resolved.
Every so often, someone in 2025 notices that processes around them never quite complete. That meetings repeat. That they are quietly removed from systems they used to belong to, without accusation or explanation.
They don't know why.
They don't know that somewhere ahead of them, the future is built on the assumption that they no longer matter.
And they don't know that the case bearing their name is the one no one is supposed to look at — because if it stays open too long, the world that depends on it might finally have to change.
For now.