The Last Letter by Fritz Leiber

In a bizarre future where machines handle the mail and human beings are a nervous minority, one tiny handwritten envelope throws an entire postal station into chaos. A rugged sorter can chew through thousands of ads without complaint, but a refined machine collapses after encountering a personal letter addressed from one person to another—a form of communication so rare it seems almost forbidden. As repair machines fail and a human technician is called in, the crisis becomes a darkly comic revelation: ordinary handwriting, pens, and private expression have become anomalies capable of shocking the system to death. Technician Potshelter reports the disaster to SBI man Krumbine, who can barely grasp the existence of a real letter. When Krumbine reads the sender's name, Richard Rowe, he reacts as though he has uncovered a relic from a primitive age and launches a massive security response around both sender and recipient. Satirical and suspenseful, the story imagines a paranoid civilization where mass messaging has replaced intimacy, and where personal contact is treated as espionage, sabotage, or worse. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.