Tanaka is, by every measure, an unremarkable man.
Thirty years in land surveying, and not a single glamorous job to show for it. No major commercial complexes, no dams, no expressways. Just residential lot demarcations and municipal boundary checks, one after another, in towns no one had heard of. He’d drifted into the work without much thought, and thirty years passed the same way.
His office is on the second floor of a building fifteen minutes from the station. The paint on the sign has been peeling for five years. He never got around to fixing it. Next month, he won’t need to — he’s closing the place down.
Retirement.
The real headache is the survey notebooks. He kept handwritten records in composition books, seventy-four volumes by this year. Six cardboard boxes’ worth. He can’t clear out the office until they’re gone. He brought the shredder in yesterday.
Thirty-six of those seventy-four notebooks are records of the same location. Midorimachi 3-chome, lot 14-2. An empty lot, vacant for thirty years, owned by someone who just kept paying the property tax. Once a month, Tanaka would go out there, drive in a measurement stake, and record how much the ground had settled. No one asked him to. It was the first site he’d ever worked, and he just kept measuring it. Out of habit, mostly.
A neighborhood cat had moved in at some point. It always got in the way during surveys — rubbing itself against the legs of his tripod. Tanaka never minded.
He was about to feed the first notebook into the shredder when the phone rang.
“Sorry to call out of nowhere. I’m a planetary scientist at T University —”
Young voice. Fast talker. Nervous, clearly.
“There’s an asteroid passing very close to Earth. In 2029 — well, next year, or the year after, depending on how you count. Are you aware of it?”
Tanaka wasn’t. He vaguely remembered something on the office TV, but asteroid news meant nothing to him.
“When it passes, Earth’s crust is going to flex — just slightly, from tidal forces. To model that accurately, we need long-term ground subsidence data from a single consistent location. Monthly readings, thirty years or more without a gap.” A pause. “We searched the whole country. There’s only one site.”
Tanaka looked at the cardboard boxes stacked beside the shredder.
”…Midorimachi?”
“Yes. Lot 14-2, Midorimachi 3-chome. Your data is the only one.”
Pure coincidence. It was his first site, so he kept measuring it. No one ever asked. He never had to write a report. Just one morning a month, a cat bumping into his tripod, a stake in the ground. He wouldn’t have guessed that thirty years of an empty lot could matter to anything beyond the lot itself.
“Could we have the thirty years of data?”
Tanaka held the receiver and said nothing for a while. In the glass frame of his surveying license hanging on the wall, there was a hairline crack running through it.
”…I’ve got them. Six boxes.”
After he hung up, Tanaka reached down to the shredder and slowly pulled the power cord from the wall.