The hospital floors gleamed under the fluorescent lights, a shine that came not from the bustling surgeons or the hurried nurses, but from the slow, deliberate strokes of a mop.
For thirty-two years, those strokes had belonged to Harold Greene.
He was fifty-two now, though the stoop in his back and the faint silver in his hair often made him seem older.
Every day he arrived before dawn, long before patients stirred, and every evening he lingered past visiting hours, when the halls were quiet enough to hear the hum of the machines.
Harold had worked in St. Mary's Hospital since he was eighteen.
Back then, his heart had brimmed with an impossible dream: to wear the white coat, to hold knowledge steady in his hands, and to heal.
He had wanted to be a doctor—not for wealth or recognition, but because saving lives had always seemed to him the noblest pursuit.
But fate had given him nothing to work with.
No parents to encourage him, no money for school, no safety net if he stumbled.
An orphan, raised in a state facility where food was often a luxury and books were rarer still, he had learned quickly that ambition was costly.
By the time he turned eighteen, medical school was out of reach.
But St. Mary's offered him something—a job, however humble, inside the world he longed to enter.
With a mop in his hands, he could at least walk the same halls as the doctors, listen in on their brisk conversations, and witness the small miracles that happened daily.
"Better a broom in the hospital than an office in a place you don't care about," he used to tell himself.
Still, when he lingered too long by the windows of the operating theater, watching men and women his age wield instruments he could only dream of touching, the ache in his chest was almost unbearable.
Three decades had passed this way.
Patients came and went.
Surgeons grew older and retired.
Nurses he'd seen as fresh-faced interns became head nurses with reputations of iron.
Harold remained—forever the quiet shadow in the corner, the one who cleaned the blood but never stopped to ask whose it was.
It was late one evening when it happened.
The trauma ward was unusually noisy that night, filled with the restless shuffle of patients recovering from surgery.
Harold had been assigned to sanitize the room after a particularly messy operation.
He worked quietly, his mop swishing across the tiled floor, his mind adrift as it so often was.
He imagined, as he always did, what it might feel like to stand on the other side of the surgical table.
To be the one holding the scalpel with a patient's life balanced on the edge of each decision.
A sharp noise snapped him back.
From the corner bed, a man sat upright, his eyes glassy, pupils dilated.
He was under heavy medication, but confusion and adrenaline had driven him from his stupor.
"Sir, you should lie back down,"
Harold said gently, setting aside the mop.
The patient muttered something incoherent, then his gaze landed on the surgical tray that had been left too close.
His hand darted forward with surprising speed.
Before Harold could react, a scalpel gleamed in the man's grip.
"Whoa, easy there—"
The blade slashed out.
Pain like fire tore across Harold's forearm.
He staggered back, blood already spilling from the wound, bright and horrifying against the pale floor he had just cleaned.
Another slash came, this one cutting deeper, and Harold felt his legs weaken.
He stumbled against the wall, clutching the gash as crimson soaked through his uniform.
His vision blurred, the edges of the world softening.
Somewhere, alarms were sounding.
Footsteps thundered down the hall.
But to Harold, time slowed to a crawl.
He thought of the boy he once was—the orphan who had stood outside the hospital fence, staring in with wide eyes, promising himself that one day he'd walk those halls as a doctor.
He thought of the decades spent scrubbing floors, convincing himself it was enough just to be near the dream.
He thought of every patient whose life he had not touched, not healed, not saved.
And above all, he thought of the bitter truth: that he had lived his life only half-fulfilled.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed to the cold floor, the mop handle clattering nearby.
His blood pooled around him, warm against the sterile tiles.
So this is how it ends, he thought.
A janitor, forgotten.
Never a doctor.
Never more than a shadow.
Darkness pressed in at the edges of his vision.
His breaths grew shallow, ragged.
The sound of frantic voices calling his name grew distant, like shouts from the far end of a tunnel.
And then—
Ding.
A chime, sharp and clear, cut through the fading haze.
Harold's head lolled to the side, his eyes half-lidded.
In the blackness before him, words appeared, luminous and unearthly, suspended as though written on the air itself.
"Appropriate Host located. Transferring to the required world for optimum growth."
For a moment, confusion warred with disbelief.
His lips twitched into the faintest of smiles.
He had no strength left to question the voice, nor the strange warmth that spread through his body as the blackness swallowed him whole.
Perhaps this was death.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was something else.
And with that fragile thought clutched like a final prayer, Harold Greene let go.
Letting the life he had live for half a century filled with regrets come to an end.
And as the light left his eyes, there was a flash of light within the room, as his soul was whisked away ferried off to another world on the otherside of the galaxy.