(Well wasn't that a lousy try at mirroring a text? Anyways, ignore it, and enjoy the story!)
The one who audited the stars
In the far reaches of our known universe, a lonely entity was counting stars into a ledger.
Purtsumpon’s deadline was near. He knew he had to complete the audit for his long-time client, Papulin — an intergalactic organization known for aggressive expansion and suspiciously creative cosmological bookkeeping.
“We will keep in touch,” had Papulin's secretary (or goon) said in a sharp, ominous luminescence, ending their last correspondence. Papulin always delivered their photon threats in luminous messaging. This one had been quite persuasive indeed. Cold shivers (if you could call them that) ran all over Purtsumpon's void.
Only one stavak (roughly three billion Earth years) remained before Papulin would send their cohorts to fill his void with fresh galaxies — an accounting nightmare that would completely invalidate his progress. Spacetime clearly wasn't on his side.
Purtsumpon was an entity — more specifically, a void composed of condensed dark matter, with a mind for numbers and a soul full of gravitational despair.
Purtsumpon was an accountant.
He was frantically shifting stars around his galactic calculus, trying to balance Papulin’s profits and losses, all while wondering where the two million missing star systems near their territory had disappeared to.
Frustrated, he crumpled a handful of dense stellar notes and tossed them into a nearby black hole — his personal shredder.
The universe is a computation.
Purtsumpon’s job: audit existence itself.
Papulin, the client, had been quietly offsetting entropy liabilities by backdating reality — in human terms, by eating star systems like they never existed.
But Purtsumpon’s final audit flagged a quantum discrepancy. Too many systems were gone — and worse, one of the survivors — System ε-39A7 — had just declared sentience (possibly out of self-preservation), by submitting a tax form in binary poetry to the Intergalactic Revenue Anomaly..
Now it had to be ethically accounted for.
Distracted, Purtsumpon failed to notice a grave mistake: one of the crumpled stars was a binary system.
Binary stars, when tossed into a black hole, tend to splinter — and this one did so with elegant chaos, flaring into recursive sub-novae that briefly resembled Vivaldi’s La tempesta di mare, refracted through twelve dimensions of screaming light.
The resulting space-time ripple triggered a cosmic alert in the Bureau of Ontological Compliance, whose sole job is to intervene in events that might cause a fracture in the logic of the universe.
The Bureau sent trillions of investigators (many of them abstract principles in trench coats) to audit the auditor.
Their conclusion:
Unwitnessed Adjustment to Causality (code 𝛥Δ-9c).
The Bureau’s lead investigator — a probability curve in a necktie — flipped through dimensions with an inaudible crackle.
The Principle of Causality adjusted his trench coat before speaking…
“You filed Form V-entropy-six?”
“I... shredded it.”
“We see. That contradicts Clause 𝒜∮7.2 — the anti-unshredding rule.”
“That rule didn’t exist yestermak.”
“Precisely. Tampering with retrocausality is an offense.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Indeed. Such recklessness warrants a hefty fine. I am thinking of 3 dumbugs, no less.”
“Three dumbugs? You must be kidding me, that's a tik-stavak worth of work for me!” (A “tik” is three-quarters. A dumbug is money. The pain is real.)
Purtsumpon, now under investigation, had a dreadful realization:
He was not the one keeping the ledger. He was a variable in it.
A self-aware checksum in a collapsing universe.
Sometimes I feel like throwing myself into the shredder, he sighed.
But alas, no black hole is large enough. I’d create a singularity so dense it would evaporate itself.
After a long moment of metaphysical bookkeeping depression, he reached a decision.
“Very well,” he murmured. “I’ll release the books. Let the Bureau deal with Papulin. I won’t get paid — but at least there’ll be no more intergalactic fraud. I hope they won’t hold it against me.”
Somewhere in quadrant epsilon-39, a lonely sentient star system exhaled. It had just been granted moral status and sovereignty by an accountant made of void.