It was a day that was not like any other, and Jimmy Davies, janitor-in-chief of the U.N.N Sanctum, appreciated it with gusto. Breakfast, for once, was not moving when he ate it, and he was thus spared from having to plead to the Completely Invincible Lizard that he safely digest it without exploding or emitting strange vapours from his tear ducts.
After that exciting moment, things pretty much went back to normal – insofar as a day containing such an extraordinary event can be labelled “normal.” Jimmy cleaned out the old tin he used as bowl, plate, and cutlery in the dirtiest corner of the two-fifths-full reservoir, had a good fortifying gulp of quasiwater liquid from the cleanest corner, and was off to tighten bolts, screws, and security all across the majestic hull of the Sanctum, mostly with his fingers nowadays, since he only had the one screwdriver left and it was a large flake of rust attached to a plastic handle.
After that, the outside of the main fusion reactor was given a careful spit-polish. Over the years this behaviour had gradually worn away every single one of the innumerable safety warnings and descriptive emergency instructions that had once coated its hide, probably because of the interesting diet that Jimmy enjoyed. It also allowed him to hawk exceptional loogies when the mood struck him to engage in a solo spitting contest.
This was rarer every day.
Too many bolts and rivets. Too much rust to spit-shine until you could pretend it was actual metal. Sanctum had been built to last, but the dangling coda was “for fifty years,” and the space station’s centennial was coming up, twenty years of which had been with no maintenance crew bar Jimmy, the Sleek Shark, the Completely Invincible Lizard, the Mind All Light, and the Older. Not that they seemed to do much on their own until he prodded them, and certainly not all together. Jimmy knew it wasn’t their fault, but he still felt annoyed about the whole arrangement.
It was the Older he was feeling particularly annoyed with today, when the rust seemed thicker and more desperate than ever. He did his duty without grumbling (much), he chewed off excess flakes and spat them out, he licked the rest clean, he intoned and politely requested the aid of the Older to make the Sanctum fall apart just a little slower, and, well, nothing happened.
He was starting to think he was the only person on the station with a work ethic. Why look at that! Number five docking bay was still receiving power, and after he’d told the Sleek Shark to cut the juice to it no less than maybe five possibly one none times yesterday! The cheek. If the Shark weren’t a terrifying and unpredictable unknowable known, he’d give it a piece of his mind.
Well, if you want something done right, Jimmy’s got to do it himself. And so he did. He marched all the way down to the big old circuit breaker board, which he delighted in saying as many times as he could until it grew unclear and mushy in his mouth (seven hundred thirty-eight a personal best set seven years ago). Four hundred and twenty-two little tiny electronic locks and dams in a waterway web that Jimmy couldn’t understand and never could. He was by far not Sleek enough.
But the Shark was. The Sleek Shark was the Sleekest.
“So it’d be real nice if you gave me a hand uh fin uh whatever here, okay?” he implored. “Just chip in. Just chip in for a bit, a bite, a nibble, a whatever. Swim.”
He pulled a breaker that was probably the right one, and the lights went out.
“Nope.”
Flip it back. Try another. The ventilation system shut down.
“Nope.”
Third time’s the charm. And the PA system, which began playing a song from Jimmy’s youth that had been just popular enough to be unpopular.
“No.”
Fourth time was not charming, but at last the Sleek Shark looked benevolently upon Jimmy, and number five docking bay shut down noisily and without grace. Now all Jimmy had to do was go down there and unscrew all nine thousand bolts sealing the useless module to the rest of the station, turning it into free-floating space junk that he would no longer have to sweep with the stick that was his one remaining broom, just like the other two-thirds of the original Sanctum.
You have time to think, when you’re using your time to unscrew nine thousand (rounded down) bolts by hand. Mostly about how much your fingers hurt, and if your arm has always hurt that particular way, and if the seal on the airlock’s still good enough that it won’t just pop away with the module you’re detaching and spin you out into a part of space that had been scientifically measured to be at least forty-eight percent emptier than normal empty space.
That was important, for some reason. Jimmy tried not to think about why nowadays. Do not think into the too-empty, lest the too-empty think into you. And who knows what happens then. Maybe it’d be like that physicist, the one whose eyes did that….thing he shouldn’t think about or the engineer, with her hand, and the hand went, no, no bad idea.
Jimmy quietly started mumbling a vague request to the Mind All Light to empty his head of thoughts so he could have some peace and quiet. After a few minutes it was the only thing in his head at all, and that was more results than he usually got. It was a blissfully blank existence, where Jimmy was nothing but a pair of ever-working hands, a mantra inside his noggin, and a pair of ears that politely told him that someone had been hammering on the inside of the airlock door for ten minutes and there were two bolts holding the module on.
“Oops,” said Jimmy. “Shark?”
There was a detour to be made, before Jimmy went to the switchboard. He wandered his way to a conspicuously inconspicuous yet well-tidied maintenance panel near his mounded and tangled bedding, opened it up, and counted out one, two, three little helpers from a bottle that had been mended with scotch tape three times. The rest of the maintenance crew had their places, but other people weren’t one of them. Even if they’d all come from other people to begin with.
One, two, three. With no glass of water, because all Jimmy had was quasiwater liquid.
A surprisingly short time later – the Sleek Shark had been feeling helpful just before it winked out of existence for a vacation – the door was open, Jimmy was being Mr. Davies, and Mr. Davies was politely offering his new friend his second-favourite and second-best seat, which was one of only two-and-a-half chairs on the whole space station.
The new friend gave it a dubious look that suited his face nicely and remained standing. He had dramatic eyebrows and hair that was slightly too long and styled to belong to a proper astronaut. His environment suit somehow managed to look much like a business suit, down to the oddly tie-like patterning on its front.
Also, his nose whistled in a way that made Jimmy not quite comfortable. Which meant it was certainly a good thing that he was too busy being Mr. Davies right now to be Jimmy.
“What happened?” asked the man.
Mr. Davies was clearer-headed than Jimmy, but the parting of the fog had left him stranded on a mountaintop. He fumbled in his social memories, and came up with “It’s a pleasure to meet you, what’s your name?”
The man gave him a look that he would’ve been able to identify at some point long in the past. “I am Edward Hemlock. Ed. And you are the janitor of this station, mister…?”
“Davies,” said Mr. Davies. “I’m Mr. Davies.”
“First name?”
“Not right now, Ed, not right now. Wait a few hours and he’ll be back.”
Another, different look. Mr. Davies hoped he was doing this right; he had a feeling he’d either explained too much or too little.
“Mr. Davies,” said Ed, clearly ready to try a different tack, “what happened to the rest of the crew?”
“Oh, you know the way it goes, Ed. One got fired. A few quit. A lot went mad. Some got between the ones that went mad and the silverware drawers. And some just sort of vanished away.”
“Mr. Davies, I had to go through eighteen levels of government classification to get the location of this station, and there were two cavity searches involved. Two. There was at least two hundred pages of paperwork in a very small font involved, and I, Mr. Davies, I LOATHE paperwork, and I tolerated this all without so much as a peep because it let me come here.” He shuddered dramatically. “The most anomalously empty-of-anything-at-all quadrant of the known universe has one man-made outpost in it, and this was it. This was not an unimportant place, the people chosen to crew it were not selected casually. They were calm people. Level-headed, reasonable people possessed of much equanimity. And you’re telling me that most of them went crazy?”
“No, mad. Crazy’s more passive. Technical terms.” Mr. Davies felt the Mind All Light hovering over his shoulder, where it definitely wasn’t. “Can we talk about something else, Ed?”
“Fair enough. How long have you been alone then, Mr. Davies?”
“Nineteen years and eight months. For a little while there it was just me and one of the security guards, but then Breakfast took poorly to him, and that was that.”
“Did he ever say anything about creatures?”
“No. Mostly he just screamed.”
“Hmm. And do you ever see any unusual creatures around here?”
Mr. Davies thought about the Mind All Light and its cronies. But they were probably staff by now, and they didn’t exist at the moment. And even if they did exist, he wouldn’t see them. And even if he could see them, they weren’t his problems, not originally. He just gave them room and board, and a fat lot of thanks he got for it.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And you’re the janitor? You clean and dust and polish and that’s the extent of your technical skills”
“Yeah, I guess, if you want to put it that way. I handle the plumbing too, on the small scale. And I’ve been checking all the bolts, screws, and rivets. There’s four hundred ninety five thousand six hundred and thirty-six of them, so it takes a while to make a full rotation, but -”
“Mr. Davies, has this station’s fusion reactor been untended for two decades?”
“Nah. I spit-shine it every morning.” Mr. Davies scratched the back of his neck, then considered his last statement of belief, which made a lot less sense to him than it had to Jimmy.
“Hang on,” he said, but he was too late because Ed had hanged onto him first, and was towing them both towards the reactor as fast as he could.
“It’s itchy in here,” said Mr. Davies.
“I’m sure. There was a lot of dust.”
“I hadn’t been dusting inside radiation suits no one ever wore. Besides, none of them fit me.”
“This one does.”
“Yeah, but it’s a woman’s.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr. Davies. Now, remember: once you’re through the airlock, you need to check for cracks on the reactor core. If there are any, you need to…”
The explanation that followed was extremely long and complicated. Mr. Davies tried to remember it, but then that hovering feeling over his shoulder crept up again and the jar of little helpers was far away and hidden. By the time the lecture was over he was Jimmy again, and not entirely sure what the hell was going on.
“Do you understand?”
Jimmy hesitantly looked to his shoulder, found a receptive audience, and consulted the Mind All Light.
“Sure!” he said.
“Go on in.”
Jimmy went on in, past two airlocks and a broken de-irradiation chemical shower. There were cracks in things, but he wasn’t sure if they were the right sort of things he was meant to be worried about.
“That a problem?” he asked.
The Older, which had muscled its way into his forebrain, told him it wasn’t.
“What was that, Mr. Davies?”
“Huh? Oh. It’s nothing. But listen, it’s Jimmy, okay?”
The silence was hard to read, but even so, Jimmy could feel it shaping itself into another one of those troublesome expressions. He ignored it and foraged onwards, crawling through banks of depilated equipment, most of which had that odd shiny-grime texture that the Older informed him was a telling mark of things that had never really seen heavy use before falling apart in their old age.
Eventually, there was a console that was on. It was also glowing very faintly.
Jimmy poked it.
The Older told him not to be a dope and to press the buttons like THAT.
So Jimmy pressed the buttons like THAT and sure as sure, there was Ed on the suit radio going on about how great everything he’d just done was.
“…power surge without the blowout. Just beautiful. Whole board lit up like a Christmas tree out here. Of course, it’s got the wrong cord of lights on and the decorations are missing, but that’s fixable! You ready to do some more work?”
Jimmy consulted the Older again, but it had lurked itself away when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Sure!”
He wondered if the screen was supposed to be flashing all that red text on it, but everyone seemed happy so he guessed it was all right.
Ed was a different man under the stronger lighting that now scoured the Sanctum‘s innards. His chin appeared larger, his eyes more sparkling, his breath seemed to smell faintly minty, and his footsteps seemed to nearly ring on the deck, or at least they would’ve if the deck wasn’t mostly made of creak nowadays, audibly speaking.
“Right, and now that THAT’S done we can get to some real work. Are you ready to fulfill the purpose for which this station was made, janitor Davies?”
“Jimmy.”
“Jimmy, now is not the time for nitpicking. At any rate, your circuit board here, the one you wore all the labels off through constant dusting-”
“Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine. But we need to get power to the director’s room, and the docking module I left the ship at, and this vault over here that doesn’t exist on the station plan.”
Jimmy looked dutifully at the chart Ed was brandishing. “That vault doesn’t exist on the station plan,” he pointed out.
“Precisely my point! Get cracking!”
Jimmy stared at the circuit board and tried to remember which of the four hundred twenty-two locks and dams moved the waters the ways he needed. Of course, he failed.
“Please?” he asked.
“Eh?”
“Nothing.”
And the Sleek Shark laughed at him as it did the whole thing in a flash, a crackling, juddering, fanged mass of cheer and serrations. It gave Jimmy the shivers as he pushed the right buttons, pulled the right levers, set the tide flowing and gave the moon a good yank. Some of the smaller lights on the board went bright red and then winked out, and he hoped that was supposed to happen.
“Damn, you’re a savant, Jimmy!” Ed gave him a friendly punch in the arm, then froze at the sound of cracking.
“Just my scabs, Ed. Don’t worry.”
Ed removed the punch from his arm and gave him a big, friendly grin instead. “Right, right. Sorry! Sorry. Now, there’s just one more big job, and then we’re all done here. And none too soon – this whole place gives me the creeps. The last ten light-years getting here were no picnic either, I can tell you – too empty. Scientifically interesting, yes, but too empty.”
It was a big job, all right. It took nearly an hour just to get to it.
First Ed had to go to the director’s office and open up the re-powered computer. Whatever he found on there made him sweat an awful lot, but he was a quick reader and Jimmy hadn’t had occasion to use the English language as-written for at least ten years, so whatever was so worrying passed him by. It can’t have been that bad anyways, Ed was smiling his face off when he closed the thing down again.
“Done!” he said, and then he picked up the computer and smashed it briskly against the titanium desk until it was an unrecognizable pile of mangled bits. “Come on now, we’ve got to hurry up.”
“That was important, wasn’t it?” asked Jimmy.
“Oh, yes. Hugely.”
“Then why’d you break it.”
“It was too important for anyone else to see. That reminds me, Jimmy, did you see anything on there?”
Jimmy thought. “No.”
“Good, good,” said Ed, with that big smile. “Ah, we’re here. Just move that pile of filth out of the way, and we’ll be done!”
“That’s my bed,” said Jimmy.
“Nevertheless,” said Ed. “Sacrifices must be made by all if we want to pull through.”
Slowly, reluctantly, with infinite care, Jimmy lugged the disintegrating remnants of his nesting out of place. He’d fashioned it himself from plastic tarps and the innards of expired mattresses, and it was as close to him as a sun.
Or a son.
No, a sun. Those were more important to you.
But not closer.
The Mind All Light told him to knock it off and pay attention, which he did in time to not see Ed push him down the hole he’d uncovered in the deck.
“OW!”
“Sorry, sorry, best if you aren’t tense on impact and all that, surprise was needed, etcetera, etcetera, only fifteen feet down and can you see anything?”
Jimmy looked around. “A notebook on a table.”
“A notebook, hah yes. Had to be paper, of course. Doesn’t need power, and if you suck all the air out of the room until it’s powered up, well, it lasts pretty nicely! Anything else?”
“It’s a pretty bad table. Rusty. If I’d known this was here, I’d have polished that rust ’till you’d swear it was steel, honest truth.”
“Yes, yes, yes, that will do. Here, throw that book back up to me, will you?”
Jimmy picked up the book and weighed it in his hands. It was surprisingly light, and he had to check twice after he’d thrown it to make sure it had left his hands at all.
“Oh lovely,” said Ed, peering at a page. “Oh glorious.” He spun them through his palms and chuckled in a friendly and fatherly manner. “This is just perfect. Jimmy, do you know what this is?”
“Nope!”
“It’s a complete record of every bit of abnormal mental phenomena and wildlife gestated on the station! Who thought it up, what the side effects on the host were, predators and prey and parasites…. oh Jimmy, there’s a goddamned ZOO in here, a zoo that could only have been dreamed up here, in this dank little corner of the universe where space goes runny! And we know exactly what sorts of minds breed these things up now! Engineers to make little psychedelic worker ants, security guards to farm unblinking guardians inside their own heads, doctors to make thoughts that really cut, that really have teeth to them. Good show, Jimmy, good show!”
The Mind All Light proposed a question.
“Uhh….”
“Speak up, Jimmy.”
“Are you going to leave me down here?”
“What a silly question!” Ed shook his head. “Honestly Jimmy, just think. What did I tell you I hated?”
“Paperwork?”
“What do you think bringing back an unexpected missing-declared-dead citizen causes?”
Jimmy thought. “Paperwork?”
“Correct! Goodbye.”
There was a clang, and Jimmy was alone in a dark place.
Which wasn’t really all that novel.
He did feel a bit funny though. And his fists kept curling up into these strange little gnarled things, like they did after he’d tightened his four hundred thousandth bolt.
The Mind All Light made an observation: Jimmy was angry.
“Yup,” agreed Jimmy.
Well, Jimmy needed to get out of there if he wanted to be angry properly. Needed a target for those little balls on his arms.
“Damn straight.” Jimmy squinted up at the ceiling. “How?”
He had to spit.
Jimmy spat, and watched as the hatch went all runny and dripped down to the floor, where it nearly ate the toes of his boots. Apparently Breakfast had been just as nasty as usual, just more subtle. He hated to think of what could’ve happened if he’d belched while talking to Ed, although in retrospect that could’ve been for the best.
“Gross,” he said. And then the gravity went off, then came on again in reverse. It was very exciting, and at the end of it Jimmy was spread-eagled on the ceiling, outside the vault once more, staring at the rubble of his bed, and his head was very sore.
He’d better run fast, advised the Sleek Shark. And then it was gone again, along with half the lights in a shower of sparks.
Number five docking bay was barely any distance at all from there, even with a quick pause to get lost – you think you know a place like the back of your hand, and then it turns upside down on you.
To his right, suggested the Mind All Light.
And he’d want to duck and cling in two seconds, added the Older.
Jimmy turned the corner, saw Ed (surprised), ducked and clung, and winced as a gravitational flux sent a sheet of rust bigger than he was into Ed, who was violently shoved into his own airlock.
Better follow. That was the Mind All Light’s take on it, anyways. He needed off here, after what the Older did to the core. That and the little tidal waves the Sleek Shark had sent through the electrical wiring had probably sent the place under.
“Can I get my chair?” asked Jimmy, as he clumsily dove through Ed’s airlock and into an environment that struck him as dangerously clean.
No he couldn’t. Also, Ed was about to hit him in the face.
“What?” said Jimmy, immediately before Ed hit him in the face. It was a good, solid hit, a real shiner-raiser, and it smacked him over on his ass with a very satisfying thud that he was in no position to appreciate on any level.
Ed was saying something by then, but it was mostly profanity and Jimmy was too busy listening to the Completely Invincible Lizard, who was the one that knew about this sort of thing.
He needed to punch high while kicking low, and use that hesitation to get to his feet.
Jimmy punched high and kicked low, and used that hesitation to get to his feet.
He needed to block that next punch.
Jimmy blocked that next punch, and was knocked over again with another bruise all ready to blossom.
He needed another forty pounds of weight, preferably all muscles.
Jimmy didn’t really have time for that, and Ed had lain hands upon him and was now about to toss him into number five docking bay, which was indistinct in the odd haze of depressurizing atmosphere now filling it.
Oh well just belch then.
Jimmy belched. And because he wasn’t feeling quite proper at the moment, it turned into a yawn. A technicolour yawn, if he remembered his slangs properly.
It set most of Ed’s environment suit on fire. And as he swore and flailed around frantically, attempting to pat out the flames, the Completely Invincible Lizard told Jimmy that now would be a good time to hit him where silly monkeys like him kept their reproductive organs. Jimmy no longer recalled what those were for – at least on his off hours – but he listened. And as he did that, and as Ed toppled and staggered and was rudely shoved back into the docking module, Older gave a happy update on the status of those last two bolts Jimmy had forgotten to tweak up that morning, the only things holding number five docking bay to the rest of the Sanctum.
All rusty, Older told him. Terrible thing.
The next thirty seconds weren’t as alarming as they could’ve been, mostly thanks to the total lack of sound in space, and Jimmy didn’t remember them with any real terror, or, come to that, detail. Suffice it to say that he learned how to input the correct password on an airlock in a total lack of atmosphere very, very quickly. Or at least the Sleek Shark did. As to what happened next, well… most of it was sleep, possibly coma.
After that was breakfast. Not Breakfast, with none of the vivid personality (mostly truculence) that entitled capitalization, just small-b breakfast. Toast. With jam. That was even maybe real jam that had been made or at least been near actual, physical berries at some point.
Jimmy was full. And also out of things to do, except for one important thing.
“Thank you,” he said.
It was asked from a variety of quarters whether this meant that he could stop nagging them so much about stupid things when it wasn’t important.
“Right, right. Right. Uh, thanks.” He scratched his chin, uncertainty weighing down on him for the first time in decades. “I guess I’ll just start checking the bolts then…?”
The Mind All Light told him not to be such a silly. They were all very busy, very important people now, and they had no time to sit around doing silly things. They needed to be doing important things, like examining Ed’s computers and deciding which of the people in the address book needed visits.
“Dunno about revenge,” said Jimmy. “I’m a janitor. I make sure things don’t break and I keep things tidy.”
Those were big loose ends. He probably should be going out to tidy them up. Who knew who could trip on things like that, just lying around.
Jimmy thought about this.
“Fine. But no more Breakfast.”
This was agreed upon.