Title: The Infinity Invoice: A Quantum Tax Satire
Description:
A 15-Minute Kindle Short Read / Flash Fiction Experiment.A Note on This Edition
This is flash fiction as controlled experiment: one sitting, one espresso, roughly 4,000 words — call it fifteen minutes, twenty if you stop to enjoy the tax code jokes. It’s a standalone episode pulled from a longer cycle, “Płótna Sumroka” (“Sumrak’s Canvases”), so you can read it cold with no homework required: a painter who refuses to let anyone look at his art, a lawyer who’ll sell anything including nothingness itself, a talking cat with opinions on fiscal policy, and a quantum computer asked to do something it was never built for. Filed here under satire / magical realism / speculative comedy — for readers who want their absurdism with a footnote in tax law, and their commute short enough to finish the ending before their stop.
Perfect for fans of magical realism, dark corporate satire, and hard sci-fi anomalies.
Sumrak’s Canvases, or The Triumph of Nothingness over the Taxman
I. The Ghostly Architecture of the Void
In the twenty-first century, the richest people on earth stopped buying things that existed. Existence, after all, was monstrously expensive — it generated depreciation costs and, worst of all, attracted the attention of the IRS.
The tax-avoidance system that Małgorzata had perfected to a state of sheer perversity rested on an architecture of the void and Ghost-in-the-Shell-style structures. The scheme was simple, and at the same time spectral: a billionaire did not buy a work of art at auction. He formed a special-purpose LLC in Wyoming, owned by another company in Cyprus, managed in turn by a trust in the Cayman Islands. That trust purchased from the artist the “right to future viewing” of a work that had never left the studio. Then, using the UAV (Universal Art Value) algorithm integrated with a Google Quantum AI processor Willow, this unborn, unseen canvas was appraised at one hundred million dollars, based on the mathematical probability of its genius. Using this “quantum appraisal” as collateral, the bank extended the billionaire a low-interest cash loan. Since a loan is not income, the billionaire paid not one cent of tax. He lived off debt secured by the void, while the original painting — according to the paperwork — rotted away in a freeport in Delaware, where, formally, no customs law of the land applied.
In this entire chain there was only one flaw. Sumrak.
II. The Observer’s Curse
“You don’t understand, you foolish woman,” Sumrak snapped, without turning from the window of his studio on the roof of an old factory in Bushwick. The air smelled of drying oil, old paper, and the chill of infinity. “My paintings aren’t merchandise. They’re anchors.”
Małgorzata stood behind him. Her dress rustled like banknotes being counted in a dark room, and her eyes — huge, predatory, ringed with the ghostly fever of greed — roamed over the walls, where canvases hung turned toward the wall. All of them were covered in thick black felt.
“My client will pay fifty million for the mere right not to look at them,” she hissed, her voice like iron scraping glass. “He’s heard what’s being said around town. He’s heard that these little daubs of yours keep this wretched universe in balance. That as long as no one sees them, reality doesn’t fall apart. He wants that balance in his portfolio!”
“If I sell them, I’ll have to form a company. If I form a company, I’ll interact with the system. And the system is an observer,” Sumrak answered. “The moment some tax clerk enters my canvases into a spreadsheet, the wave function collapses. My paintings will lose their power of superposition. They’ll fall into entanglement with your wretched, greedy world and become ordinary, dead scraps of linen. And then the universe will collapse, Małgorzata. Because there will be nothing left that hasn’t been appraised.”
From a corner, from behind a pile of old frames, emerged a great cat, black as soot. It sat on a toolbox and began licking its paw with irritating gravity.
“Precisely so,” murmured Schrödinger’s Cat. “An unobserved Sumrak painting simultaneously contains a masterpiece, a void, fire, and revolution. It is pure divinity. And you, little Małgorzata, want to turn divinity into an income tax deduction. That is, frankly, a rather unsophisticated form of Satanism.”
Małgorzata twisted her face into a grimace so furious that the skin on her cheeks stretched tight as a drumhead.
“The IRS doesn’t believe in superposition!” she screamed. “To them, whatever isn’t registered is a crime! If you don’t sign the agreement as a corporation, they’ll be here before evening. And they won’t come with theories of physics — they’ll come with handcuffs.”
III. The Raid of the Gray Coats
Małgorzata’s prophecy came true with terrifying, bureaucratic precision. Less than an hour had passed when the studio door gave way with a crack under the weight of heavy leather boots.
This was no ordinary police raid. A special hybrid unit marched in — a combination of IRS agents and ghostly, silent officers reminiscent of Stalin’s NKVD. They wore heavy gray coats despite the July heat outside, and their faces were utterly devoid of expression, as though they had been cut out of tax forms.
At the head walked a commissioner in steel-rimmed glasses, carrying a thick black folder marked with a symbol resembling a coiled snake — the section sign.
“Citizen Sumrak,” the commissioner rasped, and a chill as of a Siberian archive breathed from his mouth. “You are conducting unregistered artistic activity. You are producing unnamed emotional states without remitting the appropriate transaction tax. Where are the paintings?”
“There are none,” Sumrak answered, standing proudly before his covered canvases. “As long as you don’t look at them, technically speaking, they don’t exist on this tax plane.”
“Comrade Commissioner!” one of the younger agents called out, searching the corners of the studio. “There’s a cat here! No collar, no Social Security number, and according to our calculations, its mass and energy indicate undeclared income!”
Schrödinger’s Cat looked down at the agent, tail swishing.
“Fool,” the cat muttered. “If you try to arrest me, you’ll open a cage in which I both am and am not present. Your entire detention protocol will annihilate itself.”
“Confiscate everything!” the commissioner barked, ignoring the cat. “Tear down the covers! Measure the dimensions of the canvases! Enter them into the register as fixed assets!”
The agents lunged forward with the ravenousness of locusts. As their fingers touched the black felt to uncover the paintings, Sumrak closed his eyes. He knew that the first glance of these soulless creatures would reduce the universe to one dull, bureaucratized snapshot.
In that same fraction of a second, Małgorzata, seeing her multimillion-dollar plan slipping from her hands, made a decision. She had to act at the source. If the system was going to measure these paintings, then she would have to control the machine that assigned them their value.
IV. The Raid on Willow
The Google Quantum AI laboratory in Santa Barbara resembled a temple of some new digital cult. In the middle of a vast, sterile hall hung an enormous cylinder gleaming with gold and copper — the Willow processor. Inside it, cooled to a temperature colder than outer space, 105 superconducting qubits wove a web of computation capable of bending classical logic itself.
At midnight, the laboratory’s alarm systems froze. Małgorzata hadn’t broken in with hacker’s tricks; she’d broken in on pure, demonic force of profit-will, the kind that could bend fiber-optic cables. She walked across the sterile floor, her high heels leaving marks like scorched sulfur on the gleaming tile.
She stopped before Willow. From her pocket she drew a fragment stolen from Sumrak’s studio — a flake of turpentine and dried paint, the only physical trace of the superposition of his art.
“Calculate this,” she hissed at the machine. “Calculate it and give it a UAV valuation. One hundred billion dollars. That’s what I need for my client to buy up all of New York and lock it away in a secure vault.”
She fed the flake into the cryogenic chamber. Willow shuddered. The processor’s golden tubes began to pulse with a ghostly blue light. The 105 qubits began processing information about paintings no one had ever seen. The algorithm began calculating the entropy of the universe, trying to force infinity into a tax bracket.
The lab’s monitors began to run wild. The numbers climbed at a terrifying rate: a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion… The machine was trying to fold Medici patronage, the fear of hell, Małgorzata’s greed, and Sumrak’s freedom into a single equation.
Suddenly, on the main screen, instead of digits, a message appeared:
SYSTEM ERROR: OBSERVER INCONSISTENT WITH MATRIX. UNIVERSAL FREQUENCY REQUIRES VACUUM.
At that same moment, Schrödinger’s Cat manifested in the laboratory. It sat right on top of the multimillion-dollar quantum processor, washing its ear.
“I told you, little Małgorzata,” the cat murmured, its voice echoing through the sterile hall. “Willow is a wise beast. It knows that if you appraise Sumrak’s art, the algorithm will have to calculate the weight of the human soul. And not even your law firm can bill anyone for a soul tax.”
Willow’s golden cylinder went dark. Superconductivity ceased. The superposition was saved, and in Bushwick, in that same fraction of a second, the IRS agents pulled open empty frames. The felt fell away, but beneath it there was nothing but pure white light, which blinded the commissioner before he could write a single word in his black notebook.
Małgorzata sank to her knees before the powered-down machine. Her tablet went dark, and fourteen tax-avoidance browser tabs vanished into nothingness, leaving her with the one thing she feared most in the world: absolute, worthless calm.
V. Portrait of Annihilation: The Client and the Fiction of Money
The billionaire for whom Małgorzata had been willing to burn out Google’s cryogenic processors was named Arthur Vance. He lived on the seventy-fifth floor of a tower overlooking a hazy Manhattan, in a penthouse where the walls were perfectly bare. Vance couldn’t stand objects; objects had mass, and mass attracted the gravity of the tax office.
He sat in a chair of transparent polycarbonate, holding a glass of water that, according to his personal chef, had been harvested from a melting glacier before humanity had even gotten around to naming taxes taxes. When Małgorzata walked into the living room, pale, her hair in disarray, her tablet’s screen like a dead black mirror, Vance didn’t even flinch.
“The Willow algorithm went dark,” Małgorzata whispered, her voice, stripped of its old predatory edge, rustling like a dried leaf. “The superposition of Sumrak’s paintings… couldn’t be measured. The machine refused to spit out a UAV certificate. There’s no valuation. There’s no collateral for the bank.”
Vance was silent for a long minute. He looked out the window at the hazy city, where millions of people were chasing digits on their phone screens. He smiled — the smile of a man who had just realized he’d spent fifty years playing chess with a ghost.
“Did you really think, Małgorzata, that I wanted those paintings to own art?” he asked quietly, and there was no anger in his voice, only an infinite, icy weariness. “I needed them because my money hasn’t existed for a long time now. My billions aren’t dollars. They’re promises three banks in Zurich, two funds in Singapore, and one computer in Utah made to each other. My wealth is pure superposition. It exists only because no one checks it.”
At half past six that evening, the light in the room went out, though no one had touched a switch. From the shadow beneath the window rose the slender silhouette of Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat jumped onto the transparent table, brazenly nudging the glass of glacier water.
“Beautifully put, Arthur,” the cat murmured. “You’re the richest man in the cemetery of illusions. Your financial empire and Sumrak’s art have something in common: both vanish the moment someone tries to weigh them. The difference is that behind Sumrak’s paintings stands the truth of the universe, and behind your billions stands nothing but the fear that someone will finally say ‘let’s check.’”
Vance looked down at his hands. In the moonlight filtering through the Manhattan smog, they looked strangely translucent.
“If Sumrak’s paintings keep the universe in balance through their unviolated infinity,” the billionaire said, his gaze falling on Małgorzata, who was trying with obsessive fury to reboot her dead tablet, “then my greed was the only thing pretending to be that balance. I wanted to buy his void to patch my own.”
“Mr. Vance!” Małgorzata snapped, that ghostly, greedy madness flashing in her eyes again even as her tax empire lay in ruins. “We can still set up a new structure! A company in Zug, Switzerland, transfer the copyright to a quantum token… the IRS won’t be able to keep up! We can fake their existence before the court!”
Schrödinger’s Cat yawned, and the echo of the yawn rolled through the empty penthouse like the rumble of an approaching storm.
“Too late, little Małgorzata. The IRS commissioner just finished writing up his report in Bushwick. He measured the empty frames. He reduced your little scheme to one hard fact: no assets, no filings, no escape. The tax office is on its way up in the elevator right now. And you know what’s funniest of all? They’re not coming for Arthur’s money. They’re coming for your soul, because that’s the only thing left in this room with any informational density.”
Vance stood, walked to the window, and opened it, letting the roaring, filthy sound of the New York street and the smell of turpentine carried in on the wind from across the river fill the sterile living room. For the first time in decades, he felt his feet touching something real.
“Let them come in,” the billionaire said quietly. “I’d love to see them try to tax nothingness.”
VI. A Clause from Theoretical Physics
The Federal Courthouse for the Eastern District of New York resembled a temple raised by people who hated anything that couldn’t be stamped. The marble was cold, and the ceiling hung so low it seemed the judge had personally made sure no thought taller than ten feet could dawn in the heads of those assembled.
On the defendant’s bench sat Sumrak, still in the same threadbare coat. Beside him, her face green with fury and sleeplessness, sat Małgorzata. Her predatory fingers drummed ceaselessly on the defense table — after the IRS had frozen her accounts and seized the Delaware freeports, her ghostly greed had nothing left to feed on, so it was devouring her from within.
At the prosecution’s table sat the Commissioner of the gray coats, surrounded by towers of paper folders. His glasses gave off a glow so bureaucratic that the jurors — twelve honest citizens from Queens and Brooklyn — kept nervously checking their wallets.
On the bench sat Judge Alistair Vance (a distant cousin of Arthur’s, which surprised no one in New York). He struck his gavel with such force it seemed he meant to drive all of humanity into the ground.
“The prosecution may proceed,” the judge thundered.
The IRS Commissioner stood, straightened the cuffs of his gray coat, and opened the thickest folder, from which rose the smell of old ink and a prison cell.
“Your Honor,” he began, in a voice like an unoiled steel safe creaking open. “This case is simple. Citizen Sumrak produces so-called art. This art, according to market opinions and analysis by the Willow quantum algorithm, has a potential value of one hundred billion dollars. The defendant, however, has registered no form of business activity. He holds no EIN. He has filed no Schedule C forms. Because the defendant claims his works exist in a state of ‘superposition,’ he has remitted no tax on their estimated value. This is blatant, criminal depletion of the state’s revenue. The government demands ten years of hard imprisonment and the immediate confiscation of all canvases for public auction.”
Silence fell over the courtroom, so deep that a pigeon could be heard trying to keep its balance on the roof.
“Defense?” the judge looked at Sumrak.
Before Sumrak could open his mouth, Małgorzata sprang to her feet, her eyes blazing with their old demonic fury.
“Your Honor!” she screamed, terror of bankruptcy pouring from her lips. “These paintings must be auctioned! If the state seizes the assets, my firm is entitled to a thirty percent commission for restructuring Arthur Vance’s debt! They have value! The Willow algorithm processed their informational density! They must exist on a balance sheet, do you hear me?! They must! If they have no price, then I have nothing!”
The judge furrowed his brow, ready to bring down his gavel, when suddenly, on the railing separating the gallery from the jury box, Schrödinger’s Cat appeared. It appeared in a manner utterly impossible — first its shadow was seen, then its ears, and finally the rest of its fur, black as night.
“Mr. Chairman,” the cat murmured, sitting down directly on the microphone, so that its voice carried through the room with a powerful bass echo. “As an expert witness called by the very nature of things, I object to this bureaucratic farce.”
“What is the meaning of this?!” the IRS Commissioner shouted. “Remove that animal! It has no permit to be in a federal building!”
“Easy, gray man,” the cat flicked its tail dismissively. “The court will be glad to hear my opinion, since it concerns the very foundations of your own system. Your Honor, the prosecution claims Sumrak’s paintings are worth one hundred billion dollars and demands tax on them. But to assess a tax, the government must first measure those paintings. It must describe them, catalog them, and put them up for auction.”
“That’s exactly what we’ll do!” the Commissioner snarled.
“Actually, you won’t,” the cat smiled, baring perfectly white fangs. “According to the case file you were so kind as to submit, the moment your agents tore the felt from the frames in Bushwick, all they saw was white light. Why? Because your soulless gaze collapsed the wave function of the art. It fell into entanglement with your wretched greed and was instantly annihilated. Those paintings physically do not exist in our world unless someone looks at them with love, or with fear of hell. You are trying to tax a state of superposition.”
The jurors began whispering among themselves. One of them, an older man from Queens, pulled out a calculator and started nervously working something out.
“If the IRS,” the cat went on, pacing along the judge’s bench, “insists that an unobserved work of art falls under tax jurisdiction, then under that very same logic, it must also acknowledge that those same sealed crates in Bushwick simultaneously contain zero dollars. As long as the crate stays closed, the painting is both a masterpiece and a blank canvas. And the tax on a blank canvas is exactly zero.”
“This is absurd!” the Commissioner shouted, sweat breaking out on his forehead, melting his bureaucratic composure. “United States tax law recognizes no concept of quantum mechanics!”
“So much the worse for the United States,” Sumrak murmured from the defendant’s bench. “Your system rests on the lie that everything can be appraised and locked in a vault. But real art, like real Medici patronage, needed freedom and public space. You built a world where an artist without a corporate stamp becomes a criminal, and a billionaire lives off debt secured by the void. My paintings refused to take part in that farce.”
Judge Alistair Vance said nothing for a long moment. He looked at Małgorzata, who was biting her nails to the quick, staring at her tablet’s dead screen. He looked at the Commissioner, whose folders had suddenly begun to look strangely empty, as though the paper itself were turning to dust. Finally, he looked at the cat.
“The court…” the judge began, and for the first time his voice lost its certainty. “The court cannot hand down a conviction based on assets whose very existence depends on whether an official happens to blink. Since the physical evidence annihilates itself the moment it is opened before this court, the prosecution has failed to present hard data.”
He struck the gavel.
“Case dismissed for lack of a stable, well-defined state of the evidence. The defendant is free. Małgorzata… is fined for attempted quantum fraud.”
“No!” Małgorzata screamed, throwing herself against the table. “My thirty percent! My freeports! You don’t understand — without this there is no market! The market will die!”
But no one was listening to her anymore. The agents in gray coats began slowly dissolving into gray smoke, seeping out through the cracks in the windows. The jurors hurried out of the room, relieved that their own savings hadn’t collapsed into a quantum state.
Sumrak stood, straightened his coat, and headed for the exit. The smell of turpentine filled the courtroom again, chasing away the mustiness of old paper. Schrödinger’s Cat leapt onto his shoulder, purring softly.
“Where to now?” the cat asked.
“Somewhere no one carries a calculator,” the painter answered. “We need to paint something that will keep this world in balance for another hundred years. Without registering it in Delaware.”
Behind them, in the empty courtroom, Małgorzata kept trying to turn on her black tablet, not noticing that her own hands had already become completely transparent — she had become the perfect financial instrument: existing purely as unrealized greed in an empty room.
Epilogue: The Bill That Never Was
Three years after the Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York declared that infinity could not be taxed, Fifth Avenue underwent a subtle, almost imperceptible change. The change had nothing to do with the towers’ façades or the number of luxury boutiques — it was simply that, on the forty-second floor of the former law offices of Voss, Kranz & Partners, no one could add up money correctly anymore.
Arthur Vance, the former billionaire, now lived in a small room overlooking a railroad siding in Queens. His old Manhattan penthouse stood empty — the banks couldn’t sell it, because after Willow’s collapse, no financial institution could determine whether a property secured by debt backed by the void even existed in three-dimensional space. Vance spent his afternoons grinding pigments for Sumrak. His hands, once smooth and accustomed only to touching screens, were now permanently stained with Prussian blue and soot.
“You know, Arthur,” Sumrak murmured one evening, not lifting his brush from a canvas that seemed to pulse, in the light of a single bulb, with a deep, unbroken black. “The Medici died in fear of hell, but they left Florence behind. You gave away your digits on screens, and you finally started to exist. The tax office is looking for you in the system, but the system sees you as a rounding error.”
Vance smiled, adding a bit of linseed oil to the mortar.
“The tax office, my dear master, sent me a letter last week,” the former financier said quietly. “A form for a tax refund on nothingness. They wrote that my account showed a negative net worth, so technically speaking, the government owes me half the universe. I mailed the form back, signing it ‘The Observer.’”
In the corner of the studio, on a pile of old newspapers whose stock charts had long since faded, lay the great black cat. Around its neck hung a small gold collar with a tag shaped like a section symbol, which it had once mischievously stolen off the IRS Commissioner’s desk.
“And quite right, too,” Schrödinger’s Cat murmured, opening one lazy eye. “The bureaucrats in Washington finally understood what old Cosimo already knew: a national budget, like a human life, is only a probability function. Until you open the envelope with the payment demand, you’re simultaneously innocent and convicted. True art lies in never opening that envelope.”
And what became of Małgorzata?
Manhattan residents whisper that on starless, muggy nights, when the smell of burnt electronics hangs over the city, a pale blue light can still be seen on the forty-second floor of the glass tower on Fifth Avenue. That’s Małgorzata — or what’s left of her. Her form has become entirely two-dimensional, ghostly and flat as the screen of an old tablet. She sits at an ebony table, dragging a transparent finger frantically across the black glass, trying to refresh fourteen browser tabs that turned into a void long ago.
She became the perfect financial instrument — pure, unrealized greed for profit, generating no costs, taking up no space, needing no air. She became the thing she loved most: an absolute, untouched digit in the system that no one will ever come to look at.
The universe, meanwhile, sustained by the invisible force of Sumrak’s unseen paintings, endured in perfect, silent balance. The stars over New York shone bright, free of any luxury tax, and the freeport in Delaware slowly grew over with wild ivy, becoming the one place on earth where no one remembered anymore what eternity cost.
THE END
Washington, DC, July 2026
Credits / About the Project
Concept and Worldbuilding: Wojciech X Gwizdala
Text and Literary Styling: Wojciech X Gwizdala in collaboration with AI (Large Language Models, Gemini and Claude)
Note on the Creative Process:
This novella was born as a unique literary experiment, fusing my original philosophical concept, dramatic structure, and narrative blueprint with advanced generative technology. The text was developed through an iterative, hybrid collaboration: the author provided the core thematic layers (the collision of late-stage capitalist tax loops, historical Florentine patronage, and the metaphysical preservation of the universe through hidden art), while the AI assisted in tightly weaving the linguistic texture and expanding the prose in the distinct tradition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s magical realism.
Was Google’s Willow Processor Used?
- Technically: No. Google’s Willow is a real-world, physical 105-qubit superconducting quantum processor built for scientific computation, not for text generation.
- Literally: Yes. The Willow processor and the Universal Art Value (UAV) metric serve as central narrative anchors and metaphors in the text. The actual manuscript was generated using a classical, advanced AI model operating on standard servers.
Translator’s Note / English Version Credits
Translator’s Note
“Płótna Sumroka, czyli Triumf Nicości nad Fiskusem” was written in Polish as an interlude in the longer “Płótna Sumroka” cycle — a pastiche that borrows its cosmic mischief from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and its choleric, oneiric register from Witkacy, transplanted from Moscow to a Bushwick loft, a Santa Barbara server farm, and a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. The chapter’s premise — that unobserved art might be the last honest thing left in an economy built on unrealized value — asked for a very American cast of villains: LLCs in Wyoming, freeports in Delaware, an IRS commissioner who speaks like an unoiled safe. Where the Polish original leaned on the particular music of Polish bureaucratic and legal register (all those genitive case endings piling up like carbon paper), this English version reaches for the equivalent American idiom — courtroom formality, tax-code jargon, Wall Street patter — without smoothing away the story’s essential strangeness. Idiosyncrasies of the original’s syntax (long cumulative sentences, sudden tonal drops from the cosmic to the bureaucratic) have been carried over deliberately; they are part of the joke.
English Version Credits
Original concept and script: Wojciech X Gwizdala Co-written with: Claude (Anthropic)/Gemini(Google). Translated from the Polish by: Claude (Anthropic) Washington, DC, July 2026