The Shredder, by Matt Rowan

Everyone who worked there enjoyed the work they did, for the most part. It was a graphics interface firm. They specialized in the interfacing of graphics, which usually was more than enough explanation for anyone outside the firm who inquired about what happened within it. 

Their employees did all the regular things you’d imagine happen during office hours in a fairly ordinary white-collar business: ate lunch in the breakroom or ventured to a local Applebee’s, congregated at different people’s workspaces to gossip about the latest office drama or how to navigate certain office politics, took longer than was probably necessary to use the bathroom in order to carve out a break from the tedium of their workday.

There was only one aspect of the work they did that anyone would say brought down morale. That was everything that happened after the incident with The Shredder. 

It is important to relate that this incident began with a paper shredder no different from the ones all corporations have made ample use of over the years, but in time it became something more. In time it was involved in the incident that turned it from a paper shredder into The Shredder.

After the incident, which everyone was instructed not to talk about, The Shredder operated very differently. Besides shredding important documents that no one outside of the company ever needed to look at, the shredder shredded employees. It did this because it could now also sneak up on people by use of the legs it had acquired in the incident. A lot of interesting and unfortunate twists and turns were part of the incident, but unfortunately, due to corporate mandate, no one was allowed to recall them in any specific detail by threat of immediate termination / likely prosecution. So the incident remained the incident, and little more was said of it. 

The shredding started with Greg Ensvoys, whose cubicle was discovered coated in gore by the night janitor. Ensovys had been shredded beyond recognition, just a pile of mulch, basically. They had to carry him out in garbage bags. The Shredder must have gotten his whole head first because nobody heard any screaming. 

Everyone knew Greg was always daydreaming about being free of a 9-to-5 job. They figured that must have been why he was targeted by the machine. People trained themselves to stop yearning. Yearning among company employees fell by more than eight percent in the second quarter of that fiscal year. 

But still more people were shredded. The Shredder didn’t care that they’d stopped yearning. 

People tried even harder to yearn less. The quality of their work began to suffer, because they'd become so accustomed to lying constantly about everything, as they lied to themselves about what they wanted out of life. Most people’s work consisted of many, many lies, lies that made it impossible to tell what was true, and so, in many cases, what was actually useful, particularly from a graphic interface perspective. 

But mostly they just lied about the tolerability of the existence of The Shredder, which everyone felt a palpitating sense of dread over its unknown whereabouts (it was remarkably difficult to track for a now-ambulatory machine that was more like a feral animal than possessing any manner of sophisticated intellect). 

Employees kept working right on through this nagging awareness. What else could they do? Some in leadership roles in the company had suggested they’d fix the issue, but there wasn’t any clearly outlined plan, and most people had gotten used to cowering.

Brian Haas thought differently. He was smarter than all the others in the herd. He believed it was all about productivity. He imagined if he was simply productive enough, he’d be spared. But he also worried that being too productive might make him stand out, so he avoided that and sought a position right in the middle. 

Every night when Haas ended work for the day and prepared to leave, he would remove exactly one marble from a glass terrarium filled with them that he kept on his desk. Every morning he’d return the marble to its place among the others. He did this at random. No marble more important or special to this process than the others. Once a coworker noticed him doing it, and he explained it was a silly ritual, meant more as a metaphor for the balance he sought to attain through his work, hoping that the logic of sufficient plenitude would keep him safe from shredding (although he kept that part to himself).

Haas did this ritual until they found his bloody remains at the bottom of a stairwell, thin strands of human flesh draping the railings. 

Some employees started worshiping The Shredder as though it were a deity. They considered each new slaying a ritualistic sacrifice, even if they knew enough not to say so out loud. 

A vice president of the company was cornered by an overeager temp, who herself was just trying to learn all she could about what it would take for her to survive.

The vice president placid, eyes as glassy as the windows he stared through from his fifth-floor office, answered the temp elliptically, “The walls and cubicles, so pristine and beige, would rarely ever look the same after The Shredder. In a way that was The Shredder’s art, the gruesomeness it cultivated. That is, if it could care for something like art, which it cannot. But neither can I. I, along with so many, share that in common with The Shredder. But it’s not because I can’t feel. It’s because I must not.

“I had an English teacher in high school who loved Kurt Vonnegut and went on and on about the food that art can be for your soul — but there was no money in his description, so I only felt sorry for this man.” The temp went away unsatisfied and filled with the knowledge that they never would be satisfied, either. 

Talk surrounded whether to try to find and dismantle The Shredder before it shredded again. This was quickly put to rest by powerful factions within the company who still needed documents destroyed.

It was revealed The Shredder still shredded paper pretty effectively, despite its preference for people. It had been determined it was easier replacing the occasional employee than The Shredder from a cost-benefit perspective. Plus, The Shredder ensured a high level of fear existed among the staff, which proved fairly useful to the needs of the business overall. Instead of getting rid of The Shredder the corporation began manufacturing and selling them to other corporations. 

The Shredder wasn’t a bug of the system but woven into the fabric of the ways in which it was supposed to work. To that extent the incident that gave birth to The Shredder was inevitable.

Nancy Dryer knew one day it would get her. She’d told her husband he shouldn’t be surprised if one night she didn’t return from work. That hadn’t made it any easier to explain to their young son, just two years old at the time of her shredding, who continued to wonder when mommy would be there, and whether they could all go to the park together after dinner.

There was no fixing it.

The Shredder shredded. That’s what it did.

The Shredder would shred you for any reason or really for no reason. The Shredder didn’t care. You could make up a reason after it did what it did. 

The Shredder didn’t care. 

Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, TRNSFR, HAD and Necessary Fiction, among others.