Yeah, I Work The Viscera Cleanup Detail

Folks act like taking a job with the Viscera Cleanup Detail is worse than getting fired, a death sentence or something. It really ain’t that bad. I mean, it’s bad. There’s a lot of blood and guts and stuff. But the pay is something else. You could pick a mopjob on some grow station, and you might not find the odd severed head between the watermelons, but you won’t make in a year what I do in ten hours aboard Science Team 6’s experimental surgery labs. And there’s none of this month-long waiting list for assignments — I go into the office and they send me on my way.

The VCD’s not really any different from other janitorial jobs — someone made a mess, you clean it up. The messes are just more…advanced than other places. Maybe a vivisection-gone-wrong led to a station-wide infestation of gut-chewing superparasites. Maybe the waste disposal site wasn’t as abandoned as they thought it was.

At some point, someone realizes things’ve gone sideways, and they call in the Space Marines (or hire some amnesiac supersoldiers with activation phrases as a “repair crew”). Those folks clear out the creepy-crawlies, give the all-clear, and the higher-ups put the cleanup job in the assignment list.

It’s hard to tell exactly what you’ll find when you arrive on a new job, but sometimes you can guess. Greenhouse? Probably carnivorous plants or hallucinogenic spores. Waste disposal plant? Mutated super-rats. Excavation site? Abandoned altars of a long-extinct cult, crystals and ores that cause psychotic break. Medical bays and science stations are wild cards, but you can bet there’ll be blood, and a lot of it.

Luckily, the stuff they provide in the mop buckets is so full of biomatter-dissolving enzymes and what-have-yous that I’ve never found a mess I couldn’t mop away. One time, some poor fool forgot his canteen and decided to drink from a fresh bucket, thinking it was just water. Let me tell you, he made a hell of a mess, running around and knocking shit over and melting from the inside out. Managers banned food and drink on jobsites after that. It’s always someone making it harder for the rest of us because he can’t be bothered to read the warning booklet. Who drinks out of a goddamn bucket anyway?

There are annoyances on the job, of course. Vents are liable to be stuffed with entrails that slop blood everywhere when you fish them out. The late scientists are always leaving half-useful diary pages around, like they’re hoping someone will discover them as the next Great Human Novelist. The dead, when they’re dying, find it important to smear windows or entire walls with their last words, which rarely even make sense.

But I mop it all away, and eventually it’s like no one was ever there. The notes are burned, the bullet holes are welded shut, and in a few days a new team of researchers are shipped in to make another mess.

Sometimes, I’ll get a solo assignment, and those are the best. I can work in whatever order I like without running into anyone, and no one’s there to tell me to turn your music down or to stop running. It’s just me, alone in space, with just the clanks and groans and skittering noises of a completely empty space station to keep me company. Very peaceful.

Viscera Cleanup is a great job. It has everything you could want in a G-tier job: great pay, physical but not strenuous work, travel to exotic locales, paid vacation, job security. Sure, it’s not the most glamorous work, but I can take pride in knowing I’m helping the march of progress, one body-part-filled disposal bin at a time.

I mean, at least I’m not unclogging toilets. Gross.