Unscheduled Erasure

The sun on this backwater dustball wasn’t yellow like they promised. It was green, a nauseating lime that filled the cabin of my ship with the color of sick. I squinted through it, watching the coordinates flash on my dash—Sector 887, Planet Vorga, Rural Zone 12. Another goddamn farm planet.

“You’re early, Scrubber,” my ship’s AI pinged in that metallic voice I’ve grown to resent over fourteen years of blood-work. “Estimated time of incident: forty-three minutes from now.”

“I know I’m early,” I growled, adjusting the straps on my nanite suit. “They pay us for clean, not punctual.”

Garbage work for garbage people. That’s the slogan I should’ve tattooed on my arm instead of “Tabula Rasa,” the high-minded bullshit I chose when I signed on with GalactiClean. We make the universe forget, that’s what they promised. But you can’t forget what you’ve seen, what you’ve mopped, what you’ve atomized into the cruel vacuum of space.

I’m what they call an Erasure Specialist, though the Rigellian mob bosses just call us “Scrubbers.” My job description is simple: make murder disappear. Not prevent it, not report it, not judge it—just erase it from the cosmic record. Make it like it never happened.

Only this time, it hadn’t happened. Yet.

The farmhouse stood alone on a hill of violet grass, its windows reflecting that sickening green sun. Quaint. Rural. Perfect for a killing.

I landed the ship a discreet kilometer away and began unloading my kit. Basic package: molecular dissolvers, DNA scramblers, atmosphere re-composers, blood-seeking nanites, and the heaviest item—the portable incinerator for bodies or body parts the client doesn’t want to take with them. The Syndicate usually leaves the bodies. Sentimental, those murderous bastards.

The quiet was what got me first. No birds—or whatever passed for birds on this rock. No insects buzzing. Just the low hum of my equipment hovering behind me as I approached the house.

“Atmospheric analysis complete,” chirped my suit. “Two life forms detected inside structure. Both currently alive. Blood spatter prediction: seventy percent probability in main living area.”

I sighed. “Time to incident?”

“Thirty-eight minutes,” replied the suit.

This wasn’t in the manual. The cleaner arriving before the mess. But the Syndicate doesn’t make mistakes with their scheduling. If they wanted me here early, there was a reason.

The door wasn’t locked—another rural planet cliché. Inside, the house was simple. Wood furniture, real wood, not the synthetic crap. Someone had money, which explained why the Syndicate was interested. I moved through the rooms, mapping the space, planning my approach like a choreographer of erasure.

That’s when I heard them. Laughter. Coming from the kitchen. A man and a woman. Happy, oblivious to the fact that in thirty-six minutes, at least one of them would be dead. Probably both.

I stood in their living room, invisible in my chameleon suit, wondering what karmic clusterfuck had placed me here, now—the unwilling prophet of their doom.

“Hello?” The woman appeared suddenly in the doorway, wiping her hands on an apron. Middle-aged, kind-faced. “Is someone there?”

My suit was top-of-the-line, military grade. She shouldn’t have sensed me. But there she was, looking almost directly at me, her brow furrowed.

“Honey?” called the man from the kitchen. “Who are you talking to?”

She kept staring, her eyes moving slightly left, then right of where I stood. “I thought I heard something.”

I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. First rule of cleaning: never contaminate the scene. Never interact. We are ghosts, erasing ghosts.

She shrugged and turned back toward the kitchen. But then she paused, looked over her shoulder, and said something that turned my blood to ice:

“If you’re here about the Syndicate payment, tell Grog we’ll have it by sunset.”

Thirty-four minutes until the incident.

Sunset on this planet was in six hours.

The algorithms don’t lie. Someone was going to die here. But maybe, just maybe, the universe had slipped me here early. It was not because of some scheduling error. For once, the cosmos wanted something erased before it happened, not after.

I could leave now. Get back in my ship. Report that the scene was already clean when I arrived. No one would question it. The Scrubber’s word is gospel in this business because who the hell else would do this job?

Instead, I reached for the control on my wrist and deactivated my suit’s camouflage.

The woman’s scream brought the man running, a kitchen knife in his hand. Pathetic defense against what was coming.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said, raising my gloved hands. “I’m here to clean.”

“Clean what?” the man demanded, fear and confusion dancing across his weathered face.

“The murder that’s going to happen in this house in approximately thirty-three minutes.”

They stared at me, uncomprehending, as I explained who I was, what I did, and most importantly, what was going to happen. I told them about the Syndicate, about their methods, about the fact that cleaners like me are always scheduled with precision.

“How much do you owe?” I asked.

The man’s shoulders slumped. “Fifty thousand credits. Farm went bad last season. We borrowed to survive.”

“And now you can’t pay.”

They nodded in unison, that same defeated gesture I’d seen on countless faces. Always after they were dead, of course.

Twenty-nine minutes.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said, making a decision that would either save two lives or end three. “We’re going to stage your deaths.”

The molecular dissolvers could create synthetic DNA matching theirs. The blood synthesizers in my kit could splash enough of the red stuff around to convince anyone they’d been properly executed. My ship had two empty cryopods I used for transporting bodies when necessary. I could get them off-world, drop them somewhere far from Syndicate territory.

“But why would you help us?” the woman asked, tears streaming down her face.

I thought about all the death I’d cleaned. All the lives I’d erased as if they’d never existed. I thought about arriving too late, always too late, to do anything but sweep away the evidence that someone had once lived and breathed and dreamed.

“Because I’m early,” I said simply. “For once in my miserable career, I’m fucking early.”

We worked fast. Me directing, them following orders with the desperate precision of the nearly dead. Blood here. Struggle marks there. Overturned furniture. The perfect scene of Syndicate justice.

Three minutes to scheduled incident time.

“Get in the pods,” I ordered, herding them toward my ship. “Don’t make a sound.”

The woman grabbed my arm before entering her pod. “What’s your name?” she asked.

In fourteen years, no one had ever asked me that. Not the living. Not the dead. Not even the dying.

“I don’t—”

A rumble in the distance cut me off. Ships. Syndicate ships, right on schedule.

“My name doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing her gently into the pod. “What matters is that today, I’m not cleaning up death. I’m cleaning up life.”

As I sealed their pods and prepared for the Syndicate’s arrival, I realized something that fourteen years of blood-work had never shown me: sometimes the universe wants us to break the pattern, to rip up the script, to rebel against the very order we’re paid to maintain.

The Syndicate enforcers would find a bloodbath, but no bodies. I’d tell them I’d already disposed of the corpses—standard procedure for a cleaner of my experience. They wouldn’t question it. Why would they? The universe was cruel and predictable.

Except when it wasn’t.

Except when a cleaner arrived early, and for once—just this once—cleaned up something other than death.

As I waited for the killers to land, I smiled. Today, I wasn’t erasing lives.

I was saving them.

And somehow, that felt like the dirtiest work of all.