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There was once a boy named Mendacio, born not so much in a hospital as in a footnote—under a thundercloud of paperwork and the stench of institutional perfume. His birthplace was a marble tower suspended somewhere between Geneva and irrelevance, where human rights are defined mainly by who gets the nicer lunch.
His birth certificate, filed in triplicate, was redacted into haiku by a junior bureaucrat and then promptly lost in the same cabinet as accountability. His parents, both self-declared legal scholars with diplomas harvested from door-to-door, single-student diploma mills, gave him a pacifier shaped like a gavel.
He gnawed through it in two days and used it to assault the family dog—his first documented abuse of process.
Promising,” his father muttered.
Young Mendacio showed early signs of brilliance—not in truth, but in its performance. He could recite an entire HR policy backwards while juggling empty manila folders and humming the Magna Carta. At age nine, he created a peer-review tribunal that expelled all his classmates for “non-compliance with best practices of shared governance.”
At twelve, he filed his first amicus curiae brief—against his grandmother, for excessive affection.
He was twice expelled from law school for impersonating a Dean, but he found himself far more suited for a more inventive trade, not law, philosophy, or politics. No, young Mendacio chose the manufacturing of injustice.
And so he built it.
The Factory.
Tucked between the Ministry of Apologies and the Committee Forum for Inclusive Censorship, the Injustice Factory appeared to outsiders as a whimsical bureaucratic playground: pastel walls, rusted moral compasses hung like clocks, and corridors that bent back on themselves like ethics in a committee meeting. But inside—oh inside—it pulsed with malicious efficiency.
Scurilka, his middle name, was a legacy from his mother’s side. It was a legacy of an old Roman trickster who used humour to conceal executions. Mendacio wore it like a lapel pin, always on the left. Scurilka taught him that duplicity wrapped in civility is twice as potent.
When people think they are treated fairly, they are less likely to see that they might be bleeding.
And Arbitrika? That surname was no accident. In every tribunal, every kangaroo court, every external investigation, every HR “conversation,” the final judgment would always fall with arbitrary delight. A flourish of “due process” and a well-timed sigh, and boom—the innocent condemned, the guilty promoted.
“Not because it’s true,” he’d say with a wink, “but because it’s properly formatted.”
Mendacio Scurilka Arbitrika didn’t just preside over injustice.
He franchised it.
From university tribunals to diversity councils, ethics boards to anonymous complaint portals, Mendacio’s fingerprints are on every rulebook nobody reads. His proudest invention? The Redundancy Loop™: where complaints are investigated by the accused, appeals reviewed by the original author, and justice filed under “Other.”
He trains his Oompa-Loophole minions to sing when firing people, always in passive voice:
“You have not violated what we say you have /
Though there’s no exact offender, it’s enough that someone bled.”
And he doesn’t punish through cruelty—he does it through silence. His genius lies in the machine that runs itself: rules that no one checks, accusations no one names, a process where the attempt to seek truth is proof of guilt.
His office has no door, just a QR code that crashes when scanned.
And when questioned?
He smiles and says:
“This is justice, my dear. You simply don’t understand how it’s meant to feel.”
The Factory Tour
The gates creaked open—not to chocolate dreams — but to a factory where justice dies with a smile. Mr. Mendacio Scurilka Arbitrika himself, in his velvet robe and bureaucratic cane, extended a bony hand to the lucky few granted a tour of his magnificent Injustice Factory.
“Welcome, my dear litigants and liabilities,” he purred. “Here at Injustice Industries, we manufacture something far sweeter than toffee: plausible deniability.”
Trailing him were five blithely anesthetised guests: Veruca Vendetta, shrieking entitlement in every syllable; Augustus Accuser, stuffed with grievance and self-importance; Violet Procedureguard, puffed up with rules she couldn’t spell; Mike Microaggressions, whose every twitch longed to be offended; and poor, bewildered Charlie Dueprocess—wide-eyed as a calf at the abattoir. Each had been issued a golden subpoena, though none could recall requesting one. But that’s bureaucracy for you: involuntary voluntarism is its finest party trick.
The velvet corridor curled and twisted like an HR manual on mescaline—decorative, impenetrable, and written in a dialect only the morally constipated can decipher. Fluorescent lights sputtered overhead like ethical clarity in a grievance committee. Doors loomed with splendid titles: “Due Process Intake Unit,” “Natural Justice Simulacrum,” “Hearsay Amplifier,” “Unsubstantiated Allegation Printer”—each more self-parodic than the last, the whole façade a grotesque Disneyland of due process cosplay.
Mendacio Scurilka Arbitrika clicked his heels with synthetic glee. “Shall we?” he purred, like a cat introducing itself to a canary. “You’ll find, my precious litigants and liabilities, that injustice—real, structural, unfalsifiable-is rarely committed in rage. Rage is gauche. No, our injustice is administrative. Sanitised. We call it policy.”
He spun on his heels, baton slicing through the air.
“Everyone thinks this is the Justice Factory. But nobody reads the footnotes. Our product isn’t malevolence—it’s efficiency. We don’t persecute. We procedure.”
He twirled toward a display of leather chairs and digital grievance portals.
“Our investigators are marvels of modern amnesia: no names, no times, no evidence—just judgments wrapped in jargon. The trick isn’t proof, my darlings. It’s posture.”
A puff of steam hissed from a pipe labelled “Neutrality Optics.”
“And the pièce de résistance? The Redundancy Loop. An appeal heard by the same hand that passed judgment. Justice eats its tail while nodding solemnly.”
He paused and whispered:
“You see, the accused is guilty when they enter. And guilty when they leave. But the beauty is—they might thank us for it.”
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