Every letter to the department got a reply within the hour, typed in the same even hand, signed only "the correspondent." No one had met them. No one had been told to expect them. The mail simply started arriving answered.
The first complaint
It was three months before anyone thought to ask who was answering. By then the correspondent had cleared a backlog eleven years deep, cross-referenced a filing error from before most of the staff were hired, and settled a dispute about a missing specimen crate using a receipt no one remembered keeping.
What the returned envelope said
A junior clerk, more out of boredom than suspicion, sent a letter addressed to no one — just a blank page, folded and sealed. It came back three days later with a single line: "I have nothing to add to this. Neither, I think, do you."
Nobody sent a blank envelope again.
Correspondence regarding this file is welcome, though replies may be slow to arrive.
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