Or the internals of the eldrich sorting machine in Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett: > "Let me guess," said Moist. "The postmen had to work too hard?" > "Oh,

Or the internals of the eldrich sorting machine in Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett: > "Let me guess," said Moist. "The postmen had to work too hard?" > "Oh, postmen always work too hard, sir," said Groat, without blinking. "No, what got people worried was finding letters in the sorting tray a year before they were due to be written." [...] > Moist moved a little closer to the machine and peered into the machinery. He could just make out, at the heart of the glow, a little wheel. It was turning, slowly. [...] > "Three and a bit, that's the ticket. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson said that was untidy, so he designed a wheel where the pie was exactly three. And that's it, in there." > "But that's impossible!" said Moist. "You can't do that! Pi is like... built in! You can't change it. You'd have to change the universe!" > "Yes, sir. They tell me that's what happened". [...] > Words spilled out of Mr Groat like stashed mail from a crack in the wall. Sometimes the machine had produced a thousand copies of the same letter, or filled the room with letters from next Tuesday, next month, next year. Sometimes they were letters that hadn’t been written, or might have been written, or were meant to have been written, or letters which people had once sworn that they had written and hadn’t really, but which nevertheless had a shadowy existence in some strange invisible letter world and were made real by the machine.