In all his years in the business, Kudo had never had a complaint he couldn’t handle.
That’s not entirely true — complaints were a constant. But he’d learned to manage them. “You wiped the windows and somehow made the outside dirtier.” “The floor’s so slippery an elderly resident fell.” Most of it fell within the bounds of expectation.
So when the call came in from Antarctica, Kudo didn’t brace himself.
“It’s about yesterday’s cleaning,” said a young voice. “The dust on the floor — what did you do with it?”
“Removed it. Completely.”
Kudo answered crisply. It was all in the report: corner to corner, 99.8% removal of all dirt, dust, and foreign matter. He’d done impeccable work.
”…All of it?”
“Yes. It was the standard package, but we went ahead and cleared the buildup along the walls as a courtesy.”
A strange silence fell on the other end of the line.
“That dust… it’s a sample.”
“A sample?”
“Particles that fall from space — they’d been accumulating on that floor for something like 80,000 years. We spent six months setting up that spot specifically to collect them. Nobody told us a cleaning crew was coming yesterday…”
A miscommunication somewhere, clearly. Kudo was equally certain it wasn’t his fault — something had broken down in management, not on his end. But that didn’t matter right now.
“…80,000 years,” Kudo repeated.
“Yes. Remnants from an explosion that happened very, very far away, drifting through space. The air barely moves inside the Antarctic base, so it’s the perfect collection site.”
“Can we recover it?”
“No. It’s in a trash bag, isn’t it.”
“Yes, we collected it.”
”…Has it already been taken to the disposal facility?”
“This morning, yes.”
A long silence.
Kudo held the receiver to his ear and stared at the invoice on his desk.
”…Shall I quote you for a follow-up visit?”
Another pause. Then the voice came back, on the edge of tears.
“I suppose if we wait about 80,000 years, it’ll accumulate again.”
“Indeed it will,” Kudo said, and set down the receiver.
In the notes field of the invoice, he wrote almost without thinking: Follow-up visit: in approx. 82,000 years (est.)
Then he crossed it out.