I’m going to tell you this story the way it happened, not the way it should have happened, because the difference matters.

  My name is Jake Callahan and I clean up after immortals who are rotting to death while pretending everything’s fine.

  And before you ask—yes. I know how that sounds. Like a metaphor. Like a moody line you put on a t-shirt under a picture of a crow smoking a cigarette.

  It isn’t that.

  It’s a job description.

  You want the setup? Fine. Here’s the setup:

  I wake up every morning—well, what passes for morning in a place that doesn’t have a sun, just lighting schedules—and there are faces pressed against the observation wall watching me sleep. Sometimes three faces. Sometimes thirty. The Curators. Big luminous things that look like someone tried to draw an angel from memory after a concussion. They don’t blink. They don’t breathe. They just watch.

  And yes, I’m aware you’re watching me too. Different glass. Same hobby.

  The wall on my left disappears when I’m not looking at it. Walk toward it and it reappears three feet in front of you, solid as cancer. Turn around and it’s gone, replaced by another wall that wasn’t there a second ago. The architecture is liquid. The dimensions are suggestions.

  This is World 42. Earth Section. The diorama that keeps on diorama-ing.

  I’ve been here eleven years.

  I was a high school janitor in Tucson. Lived alone. Ate alone. Died alone, probably, in some original timeline where I didn’t get abducted by cosmic museum curators who needed someone to mop up their living exhibits. They took me on a Tuesday. I remember because it was taco Tuesday in the cafeteria and I was cleaning up spilled salsa when everything went sideways and I woke up here with a barcoded wristband that reads: EARTH: MAINTENANCE CLASS / GROUNDSKEEPER VARIANT.

  Groundskeeper. They couldn’t even spring for “Custodial Engineer.”

  They never spring for dignity. They spring for function.

  The diorama, sorry, World 42, is about four square miles of Earth’s “representative cultural moments” frozen in architectural loop-de-loops. There’s a 1950s diner that serves the same burger for eternity. A Victorian parlor where the same argument about inheritance plays out every six hours. A nightclub. A courthouse. A baseball diamond. A surgery theater. A wedding chapel.

  Every room is a stage. Every stage has actors.

  The actors are the upper class. The performers. The immortals.

  Or they were immortal.

  Here’s the thing nobody’s saying out loud: they’re falling apart.

  And here’s the second thing nobody’s saying out loud: some of them have started looking at me like I’m meat.

  Let me back up a second, because you’re going to want to pretend you didn’t hear that part.

  I’m not supposed to be in the wedding chapel during active observation hours, but the Curators don’t care about maintenance schedules, they care about spectacle. So I’m mopping up something that used to be an ear when the bride’s veil starts smoking.

  Not metaphorically. Literally smoking.

  She’s mid-vow, holding hands with a groom whose left pinky finger fell off into the holy water font twenty minutes ago. The priest is missing his lower jaw but still doing the phonemes. The congregation applauds on cue even though two of them are blind and one’s been dead for three days but nobody’s removed her from the pew because that would ruin the verisimilitude.

  The bride notices the smoke. You can see it in her eyes, this little flicker of panic underneath the performance.

  But she keeps going.

  The groom says “I do” through a throat that’s mostly scar tissue and embalming fluid.

  The Curators outside the observation wall shimmer with what I’ve learned to recognize as pleasure.

  I finish mopping up the ear.

  Nobody acknowledges me. That’s the rule. Maintenance is invisible. We’re stagehands in a play that never closes.

  Except invisible doesn’t mean safe.

  It just means no one gets fired when you die.

  ##

  You want to know what they gave the upper class to make them immortal?

  Nobody told me the name. Probably has a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical commercial. Ask your doctor if Eternadrine is right for you. Side effects may include dissociation, structural decay, and eventual consciousness trapped in a pile of wet meat.

  They were supposed to live forever. Perform forever. Be Earth’s greatest hits on infinite loop for the Curators’ edification and entertainment.

  And for a thousand years, it worked.

  Then the drug stopped working.

  Or maybe it kept working exactly as designed, and forever just turned out to be a different shape than advertised.

  You’d be amazed what people will accept as “forever” as long as the brochure is glossy.

  ##

  I’m in the 1950s diner when I talk to Rosie for the first time.

  She’s the waitress. Poodle skirt, saddle shoes, ponytail that’s been the same ponytail for nine hundred years. She’s supposed to be taking orders from a family of four who are supposed to be wholesome and nuclear and representing post-war American optimism.

  The father’s nose is gone. Just two holes where cartilage used to be.

  The mother’s smile is painted on with lipstick because her actual lips peeled off last week.

  One of the kids is fine. The other kid is mostly pelvis.

  Rosie brings them milkshakes. Her hands are shaking. Not from palsy. From effort. From the sheer fucking effort of pretending this is fine.

  She sees me. Makes eye contact.

  Eye contact is forbidden between performers and maintenance. It breaks the fourth wall. It reminds everyone this is a cage.

  She mouths two words: Help me.

  I shake my head.

  There’s nothing I can do. I’m maintenance. I clean up what falls off. I don’t fix what’s falling apart.

  That’s what I tell myself, anyway. It’s cleaner that way.

  Rosie goes back to smiling. Back to pouring coffee that nobody drinks because half the performers don’t have functioning digestive tracts anymore.

  I empty the grease trap and leave.

  ##

  Here’s what the Curators don’t seem to notice:

  The extras are dying faster than the leads.

  Background performers, the ones in crowd scenes, the ones applauding at the baseball game, the ones dancing in the nightclub, they go first. One day they’re waltzing, the next day they’re a pile of designer clothes with some bones inside.

  I collect them. Bag them. Dispose of them in the chutes marked ORGANIC RECLAMATION.

  The chutes hum when I drop bodies in. Sometimes I hear grinding.

  I don’t ask questions.

  Because questions get you promoted into worse suffering.

  ##

  The thing about being maintenance class is you don’t get the immortality drug. You get a lifespan. Fifty years, maybe. Enough to be useful. Not enough to develop relationships with the performers, who’ll be here long after you’re gone.

  So I’m lonely.

  Everyone in my job is lonely. There are forty-seven of us custodians spread across World 42’s four square miles. We pass each other in the service corridors, the spaces between stages, the architectural dead zones where the walls forget to perform. We nod. We don’t talk. What would we say?

  Hey, how about that structural entropy?

  Yeah, really accelerating now.

  Think the Curators will notice before everyone’s soup?

  Probably not.

  Cool. See you at the next biohazard spill.

  I’ve been here eleven years and I don’t know any of their names. That’s not an accident. Names are sticky. Names make you hesitate.

  And hesitation is how you end up dead or worse.

  ##

  Let’s talk about me for a second, since you’re already in my head and I’m not getting paid hazard wages for your comfort.

  I wasn’t always this calm about it.

  Back on Earth I had… episodes. Not the cute kind. The kind where you do the right thing for the wrong reason and the principal pretends he didn’t see the bruise on the kid’s face the next day because technically the bully “fell.”

  I never liked violence. I liked ending violence. I liked the moment the room went quiet after someone learned a lesson.

  That’s a distinction people make when they want to sleep at night. It’s also a distinction that stops mattering the first time you hear bone crack under your own hand and feel relieved.

  So yeah. There’s a streak.

  World 42 didn’t put it in me.

  World 42 just gave it a uniform and a mop.

  ##

  The baseball game is where it gets bad.

  I’m cleaning the dugout when the pitcher’s arm comes off.

  Not falls off. Comes off. Mid-windup. Just detaches at the shoulder and sails toward home plate while the arm itself flops into the dirt still holding the ball.

  The batter swings anyway.

  The crowd cheers.

  The Curators ripple with fascination.

  The pitcher stands on the mound staring at his shoulder socket, and for just a second his face does something I’ve never seen a performer’s face do.

  It stops. Stops smiling. Stops performing. Just stops.

  Then he remembers where he is. Remembers he’s being watched.

  He picks up his arm. Tucks it under his remaining arm like a newspaper. Walks off the field.

  The replacement pitcher comes in. Game continues.

  I bag the blood. Squeegee the bone fragments. Move on.

  Except this time I don’t just bag the blood.

  This time I watch the arm. I watch the fingers flex. Not on cue. Not for the scene.

  The fingers flex like they’re searching.

  And I think: Oh. That’s new.

  ##

  There is a sign in one of the service corridors. Somebody bolted it to a wall that only exists on Wednesdays. I don’t know who did it. Could’ve been a custodian. Could’ve been a performer slipping behind the stage. Could’ve been the architecture itself, trying to warn its own captives.

  It’s got a pictogram. Candy and an arrow.

  ???? SUPPLY DROP

  “Rations may arrive as sweets. Sweets are not nutrition..”

  It’s funny in that way that makes you want to throw up.

  Because the supply drops are real.

  Once a week the Curators dump “nostalgia” into the exhibit. Candy. Popcorn. Little bottles of soda that taste like crap. Sometimes it’s for the performers, props for the scenes. Sometimes it’s for us, nutrition. Control. A reminder that everything we eat comes from their hand.

  Supply drops don’t just feed bodies.

  They feed hierarchies.

  The first time I saw a performer fight over a bag of Skittles like it was oxygen, I stopped believing anyone here was immortal.

  Immortal people don’t scramble. Immortal people don’t bite.

  ##

  Rosie finds me in the service corridor between the nightclub and the Victorian parlor.

  Finding someone in the service corridors is hard. They shift. They reconfigure. The architecture hates witnesses.

  But she finds me anyway.

  She’s still in her waitress uniform. Still smiling. But up close I can see the cracks in her face, literal cracks, like porcelain left in the kiln too long.

  “You’re new,” she says.

  “Eleven years.”

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  “That’s new.” Her voice sounds like wind through a broken window. “I’ve been here since the beginning. Since they opened World 42. I was one of the first performers they collected.”

  “Collected?”

  “Abducted. Harvested. Whatever makes you feel better.” She laughs. It sounds like tearing fabric. “They told us we’d be ambassadors. Representatives of Earth’s finest moments. We’d live forever in comfort and prestige.”

  “How’s that working out?”

  She holds up her hand. Three fingers. The pinky and ring finger are just stumps, cauterized by time.

  “I’m forgetting things,” she says. “Not Earth things. Performance things. I can’t remember my lines anymore. The loop used to be automatic, muscle memory, soul memory, whatever. Now I have to think about every smile. Every step. And thinking breaks the illusion.”

  “So stop performing.”

  “Can’t. Contract’s eternal. Backed by Curator biotech. If I stop, I stop everywhere.” She taps her chest. “Heart, lungs, brain. The drug only works if you’re performing. The moment you quit, you finish dying.”

  I don’t say anything. What is there to say?

  She looks at me with eyes that are starting to film over, going milky at the edges.

  “You know what the worst part is?” she asks.

  “Tell me.”

  “They’re not going to stop watching. Even when we’re just piles of rot on a stage, they’ll keep watching. They’ll catalog our decay. Study our decomposition. Add it to their archives as ‘Terminal Phase Cultural Expression.’”

  She’s right. I know she’s right.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. You’re maintenance. You see the whole grid. You know where the systems connect.”

  “And?”

  “And maybe there’s a way to break this. Not just for me. For everyone.”

  I think about the chutes. The grinding. The singing.

  I think about eleven years of bagging fingers and mopping up spinal fluid.

  I think about the Curators pressed against the glass, shimmering with pleasure while people dissolve.

  And I think about the severed arm in the dirt flexing like a hungry animal.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  She nods. Turns to leave. Then stops.

  “My name’s Rosie.”

  “Jake.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jake.”

  She walks back through the wall. It swallows her like water.

  I start mapping the climate systems.

  That’s what I call them. The Curators probably have a better name. Something like Dimensional Atmosphere Regulation Grid or some shit.

  Every diorama has environmental controls. Temperature. Humidity. Lighting. Gravity, sometimes. The controls are accessible through maintenance panels hidden in the service corridors. Most custodians never touch them, we’re just supposed to clean, not adjust.

  But I’ve got time. And I’ve got anger. And I’ve got an itch that only goes away when something breaks.

  So I start learning the system.

  I mark panels with chalk where chalk will stick. I memorize service corridors that only exist on odd cycles. I listen to the walls. They whisper schedules if you stand still long enough.

  I learn which doors lead to where, and which doors lead to later.

  And because I’m a janitor by trade and a bastard by temperament, I also learn where they keep the things that become weapons.

  A mop handle is a club if you’re tough enough.

  A box cutter is a scalpel if you don’t care.

  A squeegee can break a jaw. Ask me how I know. Actually don’t. You’re not ready for that story and neither am I.

  ##

  The nightclub is where I see the first zombie.

  I mean, they’re all technically zombies, reanimated flesh puppets dancing to someone else’s script. But this is different.

  This is a performer who’s crossed some threshold. Gone from “decaying” to “ambulatory corpse.”

  She’s on the dance floor. Little black dress. Pearls. Hair that’s mostly gone, just patches of scalp and a few determined curls. She’s doing the twist. The twist. Like it’s 1962 and everything’s swinging.

  Her partner’s in better shape, only missing one ear and half his teeth. They’re both smiling. Both moving to music that’s playing from speakers older than plate tectonics.

  The Curators are loving it. There must be two hundred of them pressed against the observation walls, their luminous bodies pulsing in rhythm.

  I’m emptying ashtrays when her jaw falls off. Just drops. Hits the floor with a crack like a breaking plate.

  She keeps dancing. Her partner keeps smiling. The music keeps playing.

  I bend to pick up the jaw. The jaw bites my glove. Not hard. Not enough to break skin. But hard enough to make a point.

  I freeze. Jaw clamped on rubber like a dog on a toy.

  The dancer, jawless, smiling, turns her head toward me.

  The smile isn’t for the scene. The smile is hunger.

  I yank the jaw free and throw it into my cart like it’s garbage. It clicks its teeth against metal, still trying to chew.

  I push the cart away and don’t look back.

  And I know, with the calm certainty of a man who has cleaned blood out of tile grout at 2 a.m., that something is coming.

  ##

  Three days later one of the custodians dies.

  Not a performer. Not an extra. One of us.

  I don’t know his name. I only know the sound his body made when it hit the concrete in the service corridor behind the courthouse.

  It wasn’t dramatic. It was a wet thump and a small sigh.

  The performer that killed him, some “judge” with a powdered wig and a gavel, wasn’t supposed to be back there. Performers aren’t supposed to leave their stages.

  But he did.

  The judge was missing most of his cheeks. His teeth were exposed in a constant grin. His gavel was slick with something dark.

  The custodian’s throat was open like a zipper.

  The judge looked at me and raised the gavel like it was still part of the act. Like this was normal. Like I was supposed to applaud.

  I didn’t. I hit him with the mop handle as hard as I could.

  Action doesn’t feel like you think it feels. It isn’t cinematic. It’s ugly and immediate and full of surprise.

  The mop handle cracked the judge’s temple. His wig flew off. His skull was soft under the rot and it gave way with a sound like stepping on a melon.

  He stumbled into the wall. The wall reappeared behind him, solid and sudden, like the architecture wanted to help.

  He bounced off it and fell at my feet. I put my boot on his throat and leaned down.

  “You’re off script,” I told him.

  Then I drove the box cutter into his eye until the blade hit something hard.

  He stopped moving.

  My hands were shaking when I stood up, but my stomach was calm.,That’s the part you should worry about, by the way. Not the violence. The calm after.

  I dragged the dead custodian to the reclamation chute.

  I dragged the dead judge too, because I’m just cleaning up.

  The chute hummed. Somewhere inside, something sang.

  ##

  Now I’m going to say something you might not care for.

  I liked it.

  Not the dying. Not the blood. But the part where the judge stopped being a problem.

  Because here’s the truth about cages: They teach you what problems can be solved.

  And violence is a type of problem-solving. It’s just the kind people pretend doesn’t exist until it’s happening to them.

  So when Rosie asked me to “break this,” my brain didn’t picture freedom.

  It pictured the control panel. It pictured the system failing. It pictured the Curators finally getting something they couldn’t predict.

  It pictured the exhibit biting back.

  ##

  I find the main climate hub three weeks after talking to Rosie.

  It’s in a service corridor that doesn’t exist except on Tuesdays.

  The hub is beautiful in a threatening way. Crystalline panels. Fiber-optic nervous systems. Controls that look like musical instruments designed by something that’s never heard music.

  There are labels. Not in English. Not in any language. But I understand them anyway, the same way I understand which chute leads where, which door goes when. Maintenance knowledge. Custodian instinct.

  I find the panel marked with something my brain translates as TEMPORAL ATMOSPHERE REGULATION.

  I find the subsection marked PRESERVATION SUBSTRATE DISTRIBUTION.

  I find the override. I don’t touch it. Not yet. But I know where it is.

  And I notice something else. A second slider. A second parameter.

  The Curators didn’t just preserve the performers. They tuned them. Aggression dampening. Pain suppression. Compliance reinforcement. The things you do to make living beings act like props.

  I’m standing there, staring at a control that effectively says MAKE THEM DOCILE, and I hear Rosie’s voice in my head.

  Contract’s eternal. I hear the judge’s gavel thumping wetly in the service corridor.

  And I think: If the Curators want a show, I can give them a show.

  ##

  The surgery theater is the tipping point.

  I’m not supposed to be there during observation hours, but there’s a spill. Spills don’t respect schedules.

  The surgery is supposed to represent “Medical Innovation, Mid-20th Century.” There’s a patient on the table. There’s a surgeon. There are nurses. There are observers in the gallery, other performers playing medical students, all taking notes with hands that are mostly bone.

  The surgery is routine. Appendectomy, maybe. Something wholesome and lifesaving.

  Except the patient is dead.

  Has been dead for weeks, probably. But nobody’s acknowledged it because acknowledging it means the scene can’t continue.

  So the surgeon pretend cuts into a corpse. The nurses hand him instruments with fingers that are falling off into the body cavity. The observers nod and take notes with pens that have fused to their knuckle bones.

  And the Curators watch. And watch. And catalog every second of this nightmare as “cultural preservation.”

  I stand there with my mop and my bucket and my eleven years of swallowed rage, and I think: Fuck this. Fuck all of this.

  The surgeon looks up. Not at the Curators.

  At me.

  His eyes are black pools in a face that shouldn’t still be moving. And he smiles like the jawless dancer smiled.

  Hunger.

  He takes the scalpel, real metal, not prop, and steps off the stage. One of the nurses follows him, dragging an IV pole like a spear.

  The audience of “students” start whispering, the sound wet and eager.

  The Curators press closer to the glass. Of course they do. This isn’t “Medical Innovation” anymore. This is emergent behavior.

  This is content.

  I backpedal into the service corridor. The surgeon follows. The wall behind me disappears. The wall behind him appears.

  He doesn’t hesitate. He knows the corridors now too.

  And that’s when I understand what’s been happening: The performers have been watching us between scenes.

  Learning the seams. Learning where the food goes. Learning where bodies go. Learning where the living people with warm blood do their lonely little rounds.

  I swing the mop handle and crack the surgeon’s wrist. The scalpel clatters.

  He lunges anyway.

  I step in and drive my shoulder into him, hard. He stinks like formaldehyde and old breath. He scrapes his teeth across my cheek.

  I feel the skin tear. I see my blood hit the floor.

  The nurse thrusts the IV pole.

  I catch it and wrench it sideways, ripping her arm out of its socket. It comes free with a sound like pulling a chicken leg off a carcass.

  She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t feel pain anymore. She just tries to hit me with the dangling bone.

  I slam her head into the wall until the wall redecorates itself with gray matter.

  The surgeon claws at my shirt.

  I pull the box cutter.

  You know how this part goes. Don’t pretend you don’t.

  I cut his throat. Not a clean slice. A rough, tearing cut, because my hand is shaking and the corridor is shifting and his nails are in my chest.

  He gurgles and falls. I kick him away and spit blood.

  The service corridor hums like it’s pleased. And somewhere inside the reclamation chute, something sings louder.

  ##

  I tell Rosie what I’m going to do.

  She finds me in the corridor behind the wedding chapel. She’s gotten worse. One eye is gone. Her smile is a crack that goes all the way to her ear.

  But she’s still performing. Still trying.

  “I found the climate controls,” I say. “I can shut down the preservation system.”

  “What happens then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe everyone dies at once. Maybe the drug releases and people get to finish dying on their own terms. Maybe the whole diorama collapses.”

  “And maybe the Curators just fix it and keep watching.”

  “Maybe.”

  I don’t mention the other slider. The docility slider. The one that makes the performers safe.

  Because I don’t trust what I’m thinking about it.,Or maybe I do trust it. That’s the problem.

  Rosie swallows, an audible click, like her throat is sticking.

  “Do it,” she says.

  “You sure?”

  “Jake. I’ve been performing the same shift at the same diner for nine hundred and sixty-three years. I’ve served the same milkshake to the same family seventeen million times. I can’t remember what food tastes like. I can’t remember what sleep feels like. I can’t remember anything except the script.”

  Her remaining eye focuses on me.

  “If you can end this, end it. Please.”

  I nod.

  She reaches out, tries to squeeze my hand with fingers that are mostly wire and willpower.

  Then she goes back through the wall to serve milkshakes forever.

  Or as close to forever as we’re about to allow.

  ##

  Here’s what I know about the Curators:

  They collect. They observe. They catalog.

  They don’t intervene.

  I’ve never seen them stop a performance. Never seen them fix a performer. Never seen them acknowledge that anything’s wrong.

  They just watch. That’s their whole deal. Watching is the point.

  So when I stand in front of the climate hub and put my hand on the override panel, I’m gambling that they won’t stop me.

  I’m gambling that even catastrophic failure is just another thing to observe. I’m gambling that they’d rather watch their museum burn than admit they built it wrong.

  I press the override.

  And because I’m a petty bastard with a violent streak and a sense of artistic responsibility, I also slide the docility dampener all the way down.

  All the way. To zero.

  I tell myself I’m giving them freedom. I tell myself I’m giving them their real selves back. I tell myself whatever I need to tell myself so I can press the final control without flinching.

  You know how humans are. We’ll justify anything as long as we get to call it mercy.

  ##

  Nothing happens.

  For about six seconds, nothing happens.

  Then the walls start screaming.

  Not metaphorically. The architecture itself starts making noise, this low, grinding shriek like metal tearing in slow motion.

  The lighting changes. Goes from warm and theatrical to cold and clinical. Emergency lighting. The kind that says something has gone extremely wrong.

  I run.

  The first diorama I pass is the Victorian parlor.

  The performers are still performing, still arguing about inheritance, still drinking tea, still maintaining the illusion.

  But they’re aging.

  Not decaying. Aging. In fast-forward. Wrinkles spreading like cracks in glass. Hair going white, then falling out. Skin sagging, then sloughing.

  The drug is wearing off.

  All at once. A thousand years of suppressed mortality coming due in minutes.

  One of the performers, a woman in a corset, playing the disapproving aunt, looks down at her hands. Watches them wither. Watches the bones push through like flowers through soil.

  She smiles. A real smile. Not a performance smile.

  Then she collapses into dust.

  The other performers follow.

  One by one. Aging out. Finishing the death they started a millennium ago.

  Except not all of them go peacefully.

  One of the “sons,” a man with mutton chops and a temper, doesn’t dust.

  He freezes mid-argument, eyes wide, like he just realized he’s been inside a play for a thousand years and the audience is still eating popcorn.

  Then he turns. Not toward his family.

  Toward the service corridor.MToward me.

  His mouth opens.

  And he screams, a raw sound full of rage and hunger and the kind of grief that becomes violence because it doesn’t know what else to be.

  He charges.

  I dodge into the corridor.

  He follows.

  The wall behind him reappears and slams shut like a stage door.

  We’re alone in a hallway that hates us.

  He lunges.

  I swing the mop handle.

  It cracks his jaw sideways.

  He doesn’t care.

  He grabs the handle with both hands and yanks, pulling me off balance.

  I let go and step back, empty hands up.

  He pauses, confused, holding the mop like a trophy. Then I kick his knee backward until it breaks the wrong way.

  He drops. He tries to crawl.

  I put my boot on the back of his skull and press until he stops moving.

  Then I keep pressing.

  Because sometimes you have to be sure. Because sometimes “sure” is the only kindness left.

  I hear the Curators through the wall. Not sounds, vibrations. Excitement.

  Applause without hands.

  ##

  The 1950s diner is chaos.

  Not quiet chaos anymore. Real chaos.

  The wholesome nuclear family is gone. Just four piles of clothes and calcium.

  Rosie is still standing.

  She’s at the counter, still holding a coffee pot, still smiling her painted smile.

  But she’s aging. Fast. I can see it happening, skin tightening, then loosening, then cracking like old leather.

  Behind her, the grill flares. The grease trap erupts like it’s vomiting its own history. The soda fountain sprays syrup like arterial blood.MThe smell is sugar and rot and hot metal.

  Rosie sees me through the observation wall.

  Mouths two words: Thank you.

  Then she sets down the coffee pot, takes off her apron, and sits down at the counter like a customer.

  Just sits. Still. No performance. No script.MShe closes her remaining eye.

  Doesn’t open it again.

  I should leave it there.

  A clean ending for her.,But the exhibit doesn’t allow clean endings.

  A man in a letterman jacket, freshly reanimated, barely decayed, stumbles out from the kitchen. He wasn’t part of the scene before. He’s one of the extras. One of the ones who should’ve dusted.

  He looks at Rosie’s still body. He looks at me. He grins.

  He climbs over the counter and falls on her like a starving dog.,He bites into her shoulder and rips.

  Rosie doesn’t scream.

  She’s too tired.

  I vault the counter in two steps, grab him by the collar, and slam his face into the cash register until the keys punch out his teeth.

  He turns, snarling.

  I shove my box cutter into his mouth and slice up through the soft palate.

  His head jerks back.MHe gurgles and collapses.

  Rosie is still.MHer apron is red now.

  I stand there, breathing hard, and realize I’m crying.

  Not because Rosie died. Because I had to stop someone from eating her.

  That’s a different kind of grief. A more humiliating kind.

  You can mourn a death. It’s harder to mourn an indignity.

  I wipe my face with the back of my glove, smearing blood and tears into one honest substance.

  Then I keep running.

  ##

  The baseball diamond has turned into a slaughterhouse.

  The crowd is collapsing into the bleachers like dominoes.

  Except the ones that don’t collapse.

  The ones that stand up. The ones that stop clapping on cue and start screaming off cue.

  The players, some dusting, some aging, some changing, are attacking each other with bats that were supposed to be props.

  A catcher tears into an umpire’s neck. A fan in the front row is chewing on a foam finger like it’s meat.

  A little kid, an extra, runs along the baseline with his intestines dragging behind him like streamers, laughing, because the last thing he remembers is “fun.”

  A pitcher, new one, not the arm-dropper, holds the ball like he’s going to throw it.

  Then he throws his own thumb instead. It hits a Curator observation wall and leaves a wet smear. The Curators surge closer.MThey love this.

  This is the best show they’ve ever had. This is Earth when the mask comes off.

  And I did that. I turned the knob.

  ##

  The nightclub is worse.

  The music is still playing, of course it is, because the system is stubborn and the playlist is eternal.

  The dancers are falling mid-twist, finishing the dance they started before their great-great-grandchildren were born.

  But the ones who don’t fall…

  They bite. They bite because hunger is the only honest line left. They bite because the script is gone and the cage is still here.

  I push through the service entrance, shoulder-checking a swinging door, and a dancer in pearls lunges at me with her jaw missing, teeth bared like a trap.

  I smash her with the mop handle. She bounces off, comes again.

  I stab her in the eye with the broken end of the handle. She drops.

  Two more come.

  Action becomes math: distance, leverage, exits.

  I’m good at it. That’s the part you should worry about.

  I crack one skull. Then another. Then another. The floor is slick. Someone grabs my ankle. I kick until the grip loosens.

  I look down and see a hand, just a hand, grabbing on my boot. I stomp until it stops. I don’t feel heroic. I feel efficient.

  And somewhere, the Curators are taking notes like this is educational.

  Maybe it is. Maybe this is what they wanted all along:

  Not Earth’s best moments. Earth’s truest ones.

  ##

  The surgery theater becomes a blood bath.

  The “surgeon” I killed in the corridor, one of the first to go feral, has followers now. Not him, obviously. He’s dead twice. But the idea of him. The fact that someone finally stepped off stage and did something unscripted.

  The nurses have formed a pack. They use scalpels. They drag custodians into the gallery and cut them open like demonstrations.

  I see one of us on the table. Alive. Mouth taped shut. Eyes pleading.

  The Curators are pressed against the wall like children at an aquarium.

  I should help him. I should. I do.

  I sprint down the aisle, shove a nurse aside, and slam my boot into her knee. It folds.

  I grab the taped custodian by the shoulders and haul him up. He’s light. Too light. Like he’s already half-gone.

  A scalpel slices my forearm. Hot sting. Blood.

  The custodian sobs through the tape. I rip the tape off. He tries to speak but only wheezes.

  I drag him toward the service exit. A nurse tackles me. We hit the floor.

  She claws at my face with fingers that used to hold instruments. I headbutt her. Once. Twice. The third time my forehead hits bone and splits open, but she goes limp.

  I get up, dizzy, and pull the custodian with me. He’s bleeding from the stomach. He’s leaving a trail. He’s going to die.

  “You’re okay,” I tell him, because lies are also a maintenance tool.

  He shakes his head.

  “No,” he whispers. “No, no—Jake, don’t—”

  “Don’t what?”

  He grabs my sleeve hard, surprisingly strong.

  “Don’t let it use you,” he says.

  Then his eyes roll back and he collapses.

  Dead weight. Dead.

  And in the moment between his last breath and the next scream, I realize something clean and terrible:

  The performers aren’t the only ones changing. The exhibit is watching me. It’s cataloging my behavior. It’s going to incorporate this.

  I’m not breaking anything. I’m contributing.

  I make it back to the climate hub, because I’m a stubborn idiot and this world was running out of safe places.

  The corridor to the hub exists today. The walls allow it. That should scare me. It does. It also pisses me off.

  I slap my bloody palm on the crystal panel. The controls flicker. The system responds. Like a dog that finally recognizes its owner.

  I try to push the docility dampener back up. Try to put the teeth back in the mouth, so to speak.

  The slider moves… then snaps back down.

  Locked. A small symbol appears. Not language, but meaning.

  ACCESS DENIED: EVENT IN PROGRESS.

  I laugh. I actually laugh. Because of course. The Curators didn’t build a safety override. They built a feature.

  The emergency lights pulse.

  And I understand, with the clarity of a man who has mopped up too many messes to pretend he didn’t help make them:

  This is a curated apocalypse. A scheduled catastrophe. A feeding event.

  ##

  I run back toward my quarters because I’m not brave enough to die on stage.

  Not today.

  The service corridors buckle around me. Walls appear and disappear like lungs. Doors lead to wrong places. Time hiccups.

  In one hallway I see Rosie again.

  Not alive. Not dead. Something in between.

  She’s standing behind a wall that isn’t there for me but is there for her. A transparent barrier that makes her look like a bug in amber.

  Her face is gone on one side. Teeth exposed. Eye socket empty.

  But she’s still wearing the apron. Still holding the coffee pot. Still trying to smile. Her mouth moves. No sound.

  I step closer. She slams her hands against the barrier, hard. Rage. Panic. Hunger. And then, because the exhibit is cruel and because the Curators are greedy, the barrier drops.

  Rosie lunges at me. I don’t move. I can’t.

  It’s not because I’m sentimental. Don’t give me that. It’s because my brain is doing that human thing where it tries to rewrite the last hour into something that doesn’t make you a monster.

  Rosie’s teeth clamp onto my shoulder.

  Pain. Real pain. I grab her by the hair, what is left of it, and shove her back.

  She comes again. I slam her into the wall. She bounces off and snarls.

  And I see it. Behind the hunger. Behind the rot.

  A flicker of awareness. Like she knows what she is. Like she hates it. Like she’s asking me to finish the job.

  So I do.

  I swing the mop handle like I’m putting down a dog I loved too late. It caves her skull in.

  She drops.

  I kneel beside her, breathing hard, blood dripping off my chin, and I say, quietly, to you or to the Curators or to whoever the hell is listening:

  “I’m sorry.”

  Then I stand up and keep moving, because apologies don’t reverse physics.

  ##

  I reach my quarters.

  The faces are still there. Still watching. The Curators press against the glass like they’re trying to crawl inside my room.

  I sit on my bed, the bed they gave me eleven years ago, the bed I’ll sleep in for another thirty-nine years if I’m lucky.

  My hands are shaking. My shirt is torn. My cheek is split. My shoulder is bleeding where Rosie bit me.

  And the worst part is this: I feel awake. I feel more awake than I’ve felt in eleven years.

  I wait for them to do something. Punish me. Terminate me. Collapse the whole fucking diorama on my head.

  But they don’t. They just watch. Because that’s all they do.

  I lock my doors and sit and wait.

  Here’s what happens next:

  The preservation system stays offline for forty-six hours.

  Every performer in World 42 either dies… or becomes something that can’t stop moving until it’s forced to.

  Those forty-six hours are a massacre.

  Custodians die in corridors that change their minds mid-scream.

  Performers eat each other on stages that are still brightly lit, because the lighting schedule doesn’t include “shame.”

  The Curators record everything. They celebrate.

  And yes—I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Why didn’t Jake just shut the whole exhibit down? Why didn’t he do something smart?

  Because I’m not the hero in this. I’m the janitor. My job is to clean up the truth after it happens.

  Also, the controls don’t belong to me. They never did.

  After forty-six hours, the system reboots.

  New performers arrive.

  Younger. Fresher. Collected from Earth’s current timeline, 2024, I think, based on the phones they’re holding when they wake up confused in the diorama.

  The upper class gets restocked. The stages reset. The blood disappears.

  The show goes on.

  And I’m still here. Still maintenance. Still mopping up what falls apart.

  Except now there are new rules. I can feel them.

  You can feel when a place like this updates. The corridors get meaner. The air tastes more sterilized. The observation glass feels closer, like it wants to press into your skin.

  And me? I didn’t break the system. I just proved it works exactly as designed.

  There’s a new waitress at the 1950s diner.

  Her name’s not Rosie. Her name’s something modern, Kayla, maybe, or Zoe. Something that sounds wrong in a poodle skirt.

  She’s terrified. Confused. Trying to figure out why she’s serving milkshakes to a family that looks like they’re from a movie.

  She hasn’t figured out she’s in a cage yet. Give her time.

  I’m emptying the grease trap when she sees me. Makes eye contact.

  Eye contact is forbidden. She mouths two words: Help me.

  I shake my head.

  Because there’s nothing I can do.

  I’m maintenance. I clean up what falls apart.

  And now I know what happens when I make it fall apart.

  ##

  Oh, you want the epilogue? The part where I tell you what I learned?

  Fine.

  Here’s what I learned:

  The Curators don’t care if their exhibits die. Death is just another cultural moment to observe. Grief, decay, extinction—it’s all content.

  The preservation drug wasn’t failing. It was designed to fail. Built-in obsolescence. Planned mortality.

  Because watching something live forever is boring. Watching it fall apart is fascinating.

  And here’s the real sting: Three weeks after the reboot, I found a placard in the service corridor.

  Brand new. Bolted to the wall where the climate hub access panel used to be.

  It reads:

  PLEASE DO NOT FEED

  (See Appendix F: Feeding Events)

  I looked up Appendix F.

  Feeding Events are classified as “unauthorized sustenance delivery to exhibit specimens, including but not limited to: emotional support, systemic knowledge, hope.”

  Turns out I didn’t sabotage shit.

  I fed them.

  I fed them the one thing the Curators wanted them to have all along:

  An ending.

  A violent one.

  A memorable one.

  And the Curators loved it so much they’re going to let it happen again.

  And again. And again. Forever.

  My name is Jake Callahan.

  I clean up after immortals who are designed to rot.

  And I just made the show better.

  So it goes.