Frank Miller's prosthetic leg made a clicking sound every time he walked, a rhythmic mechanical noise that echoed through the corridors of the Space Station Janitor. It was 2157, and Frank was fifty-two years old, twice divorced, and done with bullshit.

He was a cleaner on a near-Earth orbital station. His job was simple: scrape grease off bulkheads, unclog air recyclers, and pretend he didn't hear the scientists and officers talking about things he couldn't afford and didn't care about.

"Frank, you gotta see this," said Little Jack, a twenty-two-year-old kid from the Appalachians whose father had died of silicosis in a coal mine. Jack came to the space station to earn money for his sister's medical treatment. He still believed in something. Frank couldn't remember when he'd stopped believing.

They were in Cargo Bay 4, and there was a ship hull in there that had been cut into thin sheets, like bread from a loaf. The cut was impossibly clean, made by some kind of microscopic filament that no one could explain.

"Another one of those things up there," Frank said, not looking up from the grease he was scraping off the wall. "Whatever the fuck they're fighting, it's getting messier."

***

Things started getting weird around the station. Officers and scientists disappeared without explanation. Some were sent back to Earth. Some were transferred to military vessels. Nobody told the cleaners why.

Frank overheard fragments in the break room: "Sleeper Wall." "Dark Forest." "Deterrence." Words that meant nothing to him. He wasn't a scientist. He wasn't an officer. He was a janitor with a prosthetic leg and a mortgage on a tiny apartment in West Virginia.

"Frank, don't you want to know what's happening?" Little Jack asked one evening, playing a tuneless melody on his old guitar.

"Child," Frank said, "when the war's over, I still gotta come clean this shit. That's all that matters."

***

The Planarization Accident happened on a Thursday. Frank was scraping rust off a bulkhead in Section C when the wall next to him... folded. Not bent. Folded. Like a piece of paper being creased, the three-dimensional metal collapsed into two dimensions, flat as a photograph.

And Old Tom, who had been standing next to it, was now part of the wall. Not dead--flat. His body had been compressed into a two-dimensional image, his face frozen in an expression of surprise, his work uniform rendered in impossible detail on a surface that was now perfectly flat.

Frank stood there for a long time. He didn't scream. He didn't panic. He just said, "I gotta clean this up."

Little Jack went mad. He sat in the corner playing his guitar, a tuneless melody that sounded like crying. Margaret O'Connor, the station commander, ordered Section C sealed, but her hands were shaking.

Frank started cleaning. He used a scraper to peel the two-dimensional image of Old Tom off the wall and put it in a bag. His prosthetic leg clicked and malfunctioned, and he cursed under his breath.

***

The accident report was written. The truth was classified. The cleaners went back to work, scraping grease, repairing equipment, collecting their rations.

Little Jack left the station. His sister's treatment had succeeded. Before he went, he left his guitar with Frank.

Frank sat in the break room and plucked a string on the guitar. It was out of tune. He adjusted the peg. Still out of tune. He put the guitar down and went back to scraping grease.

Outside the window, the Earth flickered in the darkness. Nobody noticed it.