One Last Cleanup

The Bottomless Bowl had not failed.

It had exceeded demand by six thousand four hundred percent.

At least, that was what Kit Fairweather had written on the bright orange card clipped to the front of his cleaning cart. He had written it beneath the original company slogan — BREAKFAST THAT NEVER ENDS! — and above a smaller note that read:

RELAUNCH PENDING IMPROVED SHUTOFF CONTROLS.

It was only supposed to refill one person’s breakfast bowl automatically.

Instead, it had filled an entire food court with cereal.

The card covered a dent left by the runaway cereal dispenser. Kit considered that efficient branding.

His cousin, Tessa, considered it evidence.

“Take it off before you enter the Chronosphere wing,” she had told him at the beginning of the shift. “And for once, Kit, I need you to hear the entire sentence. Do not touch anything. Do not pitch anything. Do not demonstrate anything. Clean the floors, empty the waste ports, and come home.”

Kit had heard every word.

He simply disagreed with the implication that demonstrating something and cleaning a floor were mutually exclusive activities.

At twenty years old, Kit was nothing if not ambitious. He had founded nine companies, launched six products, attracted three actual investors, and been banned from two food courts. He had lost money on every venture except a temporary umbrella-rental stand during the Acid Rain False Alarm of 2246. That one had earned forty-two credits before the city announced that the rain was ordinary water and his customers demanded the acid-proofing surcharge back.

He had refunded them.

Mostly.

Now he wore the teal-and-gray coveralls of Fairweather Facility Care, the janitorial company Tessa had built through patience, excellent work, and a strict refusal to let Kit anywhere near the accounting software. The Galactic Union contract was the biggest account the company had ever won. It covered six administrative towers, two research stations, the Council chamber, and the highly restricted Chronosphere Facility beneath Union Square.

Kit was allowed in the last one because the regular night cleaner had developed a sudden case of orbital flu.

Also because Kit owed Tessa forty-seven thousand credits.

The debt had once been fifty thousand, but Kit had designed a repayment schedule. Tessa had described the schedule as “optimistic.” Kit had accepted this as praise.

At the supply cupboard, Tessa checked his cart and handed him one more cloth.

“Bring everything back.”

“Including me?”

“Especially you. You’re on the extra floors tomorrow.”

He tucked the cloth beneath the handle.

“And take that card off.”

Kit unclipped the Bottomless Bowl card and laid it facedown on the shelf.

Tessa stepped aside. “There’s food in the refrigerator when you get home.”

“What did you make?”

“Food.”

“Thanks, Tess.”

He waited until she had gone before clipping the card back on.

He guided the cart through Security Door Nine and waited while a blue scanning beam passed from his boots to his hair.

“FAIRWEATHER, CHRISTOPHER A.,” said the door.

“Kit.”

“DESIGNATION: TEMPORARY SANITATION TECHNICIAN, LEVEL ONE.”

“Founder and chief executive between ventures.”

“ACCESS RESTRICTED TO MARKED SERVICE ROUTE.”

“Understood.”

“DO NOT DEVIATE FROM THE MARKED SERVICE ROUTE.”

“That feels unnecessarily personal.”

The door opened.

The Chronosphere Facility stretched ahead in silver curves and quiet light. During the day it contained hundreds of engineers, historians, security officers, temporal physicists, and people whose job titles included words like causality. Tonight, on the eve of the first human journey through history, it felt almost abandoned.

Tomorrow morning, every screen in the Galactic Union would carry the launch. The Union governed humanity’s settled worlds, and apparently every one of those worlds wanted to watch.

Andy Starborn — trained explorer, decorated pilot, youngest certified temporal field operative in Union history — would begin a twenty-four-assignment mission to humanity’s most dangerous historical turning points.

Kit had seen Andy’s face on posters all month.

PREPARED FOR THE PAST, the posters said.

Andy looked extremely prepared. He had a square jaw, serious dark eyes, and the watchful stillness of someone who checked emergency exits before entering a room. He also looked like someone who had never invested his rent money in self-refilling breakfast equipment.

Kit did not hold that against him.

He pushed the cart onto the blue line painted along the corridor floor. The cart hummed unhappily. Its left front wheel had developed a soft clicking noise during the food-court incident, despite never having entered the food court.

“You’re fine,” Kit told it.

The cart clicked harder.

“That’s the attitude that bankrupted us.”

An orange paw reached out from the cart’s bottom shelf and snagged Kit’s trouser cuff.

Kit stopped and bent down.

Bucket stared back at him from between two folded cleaning cloths.

Bucket was a compact orange cat with one white paw, a torn left ear, and the complete conviction that every object in the universe had been placed for his comfort. At that moment, he was curled around three microfiber cloths, a sealed packet of nutrient treats, and a prototype dispensing valve that had once produced enough cereal to bury a family of four.

“No,” Kit whispered.

Bucket blinked.

“You cannot be here.”

Bucket yawned.

“This is a restricted temporal research facility. They have rules about contamination. They probably have rules about fur.”

Bucket placed his chin on the Bottomless Bowl valve.

Kit glanced back at Security Door Nine. It had already sealed. Returning Bucket to the surface meant passing the scanner again, explaining why an unregistered animal had been inside a Level Seven facility, and calling Tessa.

The last option was impossible.

“All right,” Kit said. “You stay hidden. No wandering. No scratching causality. And if anyone asks, you’re a mop attachment.”

Bucket closed his eyes.

They continued.

The marked service route led Kit past observation rooms, equipment bays, and glass-walled laboratories filled with machines that looked expensive enough to resent fingerprints. He cleaned each space precisely as instructed. Kit might have been a terrible businessman, but he made for a very good janitor.

He understood systems.

Not the kind Andy Starborn understood. Kit could not calculate temporal drift or explain why traveling into the past did not cause the traveler’s grandparents to vanish. But he knew which ventilation panel collected dust first, which floor coating streaked under ultraviolet light, and which waste unit had to be kicked twice before it admitted it was full.

People who designed great machines rarely thought about who cleaned beneath them.

Kit always thought about that.

At Equipment Bay Four, he removed a cracked filter from a wall intake and replaced it with the spare clipped beneath his cart handle. At Observation Room Two, he found a loose data stylus under a chair and set it neatly beside the console. At the staff refreshment station, he stopped a leaking drink dispenser with a washer from the Venture Drawer.

The Venture Drawer occupied the cart’s entire middle compartment. Tessa believed it contained replacement scrubber pads.

It contained two replacement scrubber pads.

It also contained seventeen Bottomless Bowl labels, three expired cereal samples, an automatic brand stamper, half of a pocket-sized climate controller, a coil of smart cord, and a small black box from a company Kit no longer discussed, among other odds and ends.

None of it was junk.

Junk was an object without a future.

These objects had several futures. Kit simply had not identified the profitable ones yet.

The drink dispenser stopped leaking. He made a note to charge the facility for one washer, then crossed it out because Tessa would find out.

Far below the floor, something began to hum.

Bucket’s head rose.

“It’s all right,” Kit said. “They’re running tests.”

The cat slid out from beneath the cloths and placed all four paws on the cart shelf. His ears turned toward the center of the facility.

“Bucket.”

Bucket jumped silently to the floor.

“We discussed this.”

The cat trotted down a side corridor.

It was not the marked service route.

Kit abandoned the cart for half a second, reconsidered abandoning forty-seven thousand credits’ worth of cleaning equipment and business history in a Galactic Union hallway, and pushed it after him.

“Bucket,” he hissed. “Come back before you become an international incident.”

The blue line continued straight. Bucket turned right through an open maintenance doorway marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Kit stopped at the threshold.

He considered the sign.

He was personnel.

His authorization was a more philosophical question.

The hum beneath the floor deepened until Kit felt it through the cart handle. The lights along the side corridor brightened one after another, leading toward a circular chamber at the far end.

Bucket sat in the center of the passage, tail wrapped around his paws.

Beyond him, through an open inner door, stood the Chronosphere.

Kit had expected something spherical. The name created certain expectations.

Instead, the machine looked like a room built inside a silver ring. Curved walls surrounded a central platform. Bands of pale light moved across the ceiling like reflections from water. Two narrow doors were set into the wall, one marked SLEEPING BERTH and the other SANITATION. Everything about the machine had been designed for exactly one occupant. A control station rose from the floor, crowded with displays, levers, and one enormous red button.

The button was labeled START.

Kit respected clear branding.

The Chronosphere’s outer chamber should have been spotless. Tomorrow’s launch would be broadcast across thirty-one inhabited worlds. The entire Galactic Union would watch Andy Starborn step into history from this room.

There was a footprint on the central platform.

Kit stared at it.

The print was small. Barely visible. Probably left by an engineer who had crossed the platform after the floor’s final polish. Kit looked for the next mark and found none — no second print, no scuff toward the door, nothing except the faint impression angled toward the control station.

Odd. But engineers did strange things around expensive equipment, usually while blaming the cleaning staff.

Most people would have missed it. Kit now cleaned floors for a living.

He looked at Bucket.

“One footprint,” he said. “Then we leave.”

Bucket’s tail flicked.

Kit retrieved the cart and crossed the threshold.

The instant the front wheel entered the chamber, every hair along Bucket’s back lifted.

“Static,” Kit said.

Bucket backed under the cart.

The far side of the Chronosphere was occupied.

A young man stood at the control station with his back to the door. He wore a fitted dark flight suit traced with silver mission lines. Data flowed across the displays in front of him: dates, coordinates, historical images, and a long glowing route that disappeared into a field of stars.

Andy Starborn.

In person, he looked younger than the posters. Tired, too. One hand rested on the console while the other moved through a final sequence of controls.

Kit considered backing out.

Then the bad wheel clicked.

Andy turned.

His eyes moved from Kit to the cleaning cart, from the cleaning cart to the unauthorized orange tail disappearing beneath it, and finally to the damp mop in Kit’s hand.

For several seconds, humanity’s first temporal field operative said nothing.

Then Andy Starborn asked, very carefully, “What are you doing in here?”

Kit looked down at the footprint.

“You’re going to laugh,” he said.