The hum of the server room was a low, mournful drone, a sound of dying machinery. Red lights blinked in a frantic, accusatory rhythm on the main server rack, a digital heartbeat skipping in catastrophic arrhythmia.
The air was cold, recycled, and utterly devoid of comfort.
For the first time in weeks, Vivi was grateful for her anosmia; she was certain the smell of fried circuits and panicked sweat would be unbearable.
Kenji was a blur of motion, his usual cheerfulness replaced by a grim, focused intensity as he sat before a monitor, lines of code scrolling past his eyes.
“The primary array is gone. Just… gone. I’m trying to access the mirrored backup, but the cascade failure might have corrupted it.”
Alistair stood ramrod straight near the door, his arms crossed so tightly it looked like he was physically holding himself together. He wasn’t looking at the screens.
He was staring at the wall, at a schematic of the station’s network that was now a monument to their failure.
Two days. The committee was arriving in less than forty-eight hours, and their entire digital infrastructure—his life’s work, his presentation, the real-time data that was the entire point of their existence—had vanished into the electronic ether.
Vivi stood awkwardly by a secondary console, feeling as useless as a decorative accessory.
She had offered to make coffee, to fetch manuals, to do anything, but Alistair had shot her a look of such pure, unadulterated fury that she had shrunk back into the corner, wrapping her arms around herself.
It wasn’t just the server. The phantom scents had disappeared. Completely.
After the server crashed, she had retreated to the lab, desperate for a sign, an echo of hope. She had run the atmospheric treatment, her hands trembling as she brought the inhaler to her face.
Nothing. Not the ghost of ozone, not a whisper of anything.
The fragile bridge to her old world had collapsed at the exact moment Alistair’s had. The universe, it seemed, had a flair for cruel symmetry.
“Anything?” Alistair’s voice was gravelly, stripped of all warmth.
“I’m trying a deep diagnostic,” Kenji muttered, his fingers flying across the keyboard. “But Alistair… it looks bad. The last system log I can access shows a series of voltage warnings starting yesterday. We should have caught it.”
Alistair’s head snapped toward him. “We should have caught it?”
“The system sends automated alerts,” Kenji said, his voice small. “To your terminal.”
The silence that followed was heavy and absolute. Vivi watched Alistair’s jaw clench, a muscle twitching violently in his cheek.
He finally turned his gaze from the wall, and it landed on her.
The look in his eyes was no longer just fury. It was something colder, more analytical.
It was the look he’d given her the day she arrived, the look of a scientist observing a contaminating variable.
“Genevieve,” he said, his voice flat. “My office. Now.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, simply turned and walked out. Vivi’s stomach twisted into a knot of pure dread.
She gave Kenji a helpless look, but he was already lost again in the digital wreckage, his face illuminated by the stark blue of the monitor.
She followed Alistair down the short, sterile corridor, the sound of her boots on the linoleum floor seeming obscenely loud in the tense quiet.
His office was a disaster of organized chaos, papers and data logs stacked in the meticulous system she had helped him create.
He walked past it all and stood behind his desk, creating a physical barrier between them.
He didn’t sit. He looked at her as if she were a line of code he was trying to debug.
“The system sent out three warning flags over the last thirty-six hours,” he began, his tone clinical, as if delivering a lecture.
“Minor power fluctuations in the server room’s primary circuit. Standard protocol is to run a diagnostic and, if necessary, switch to the backup power supply. I missed them.”
Vivi said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“I have not missed a level-three system alert in seven years,” he continued, his voice gaining a hard, brittle edge.
“My entire workflow is built around meticulous observation. Data doesn’t lie. Metrics don’t have feelings. You monitor the variables, you check the controls, and you act on the information provided. It’s a simple, effective process.”
He paused, his eyes scanning her face, searching for… something. A reaction? A confession?
“And yet, I missed them,” he said, the words falling like chips of ice.
“And I have been asking myself, for the last three hours, what was the uncontrolled variable? What new element was introduced into the system that could have caused such a catastrophic lapse in protocol?”
The implication was as clear as the glacial ice outside. Vivi felt the blood drain from her face. “Alistair, you can’t possibly think—”
“I’m a scientist, Genevieve. I deal in cause and effect. Correlation and causation,” he snapped, his voice finally breaking from its cold casing to reveal the raw panic beneath.
“And the only significant deviation from my baseline routine in the last two weeks has been you.”
The accusation hung in the air, monstrous and suffocating. It was everything he’d first thought of her, everything she’d feared she was—a distraction, a frivolous disruption to his serious, important work.
The passion in the greenhouse, the confessions under the late-night moon, the desperate, grounding kiss under the aurora—he was reframing it all as a data-corrupting error.
“That’s not fair,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “That’s not… we were working. We were a team.”
“Were we?” He gave a short, bitter laugh that held no humor.
“Or was I distracted? Was I spending late nights poring over romantic notions instead of system logs? Was I thinking about stolen moments in the greenhouse instead of voltage warnings? The data speaks for itself. My focus was compromised. My work is gone. The station—everything my mentor built, everything I have dedicated my life to—is likely gone. And for what?”
His words were surgical, precise, and they cut her to the bone. Every vulnerability she had shared with him was now being weaponized against her.
Her heart, which had felt so full, so shockingly alive just yesterday, now felt like a hollow, aching cavity in her chest.
She felt the sting of tears but refused to let them fall. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. “So that’s it? You’re blaming me for a server crash?”
“I’m blaming myself,” he corrected her, his voice dropping back to that terrifyingly cold, logical tone.
“I allowed an emotional variable to interfere with a critical project. I deviated from the methodology. Our… interaction,” he said the word as if it were a foreign, distasteful specimen, “was a lapse. An error in judgment brought on by isolation and pressure.”
He finally looked away from her, staring out the small window at the endless, unforgiving expanse of white. “It was a mistake.”
There it was. The final, fatal blow. A mistake. The one word that invalidated everything.
The intimacy, the trust, the terrifying, exhilarating hope that she had found something real in this frozen wasteland. It was all just an error in his calculations.
Her own failure crashed down on her with the weight of an iceberg. The treatment hadn’t worked. Her nose was still a void.
And in her desperate search for a cure, she had become a disease, infecting his life’s work and sabotaging the one person who had started to see her as more than a failed perfumer.
He was right. She was a destructive force.
She had destroyed her own life, and now she had destroyed his.
“I see,” she said, her voice impossibly calm, a thin sheet of ice over a raging sea of hurt.
She straightened her spine, pulling the remnants of her dignity around her like a shroud. “Thank you for clarifying the data.”
She turned and walked out of his office, not looking back. She didn’t see him flinch at her words, didn’t see the flicker of conflict in his eyes before he stamped it out, forcing his expression back into a mask of cold resolve.
Back in her room, the silence was absolute. She sank onto the edge of her narrow cot, the utilitarian wool blanket rough beneath her fingers.
The tundra outside was a blank canvas, a perfect reflection of her future. Empty. Scentless. Devoid of possibility.
He had pushed her away, retreating into the fortress of his logic, and in doing so, he had confirmed her deepest fear: she ruined things.
She had touched something beautiful and important, and it had crumbled in her hands.
Her mind was surprisingly clear. The emotional storm had passed, leaving behind a cold, hard certainty.
There was only one thing she could do, only one way to remove the contaminating variable from his experiment.
She moved to the small desk where her laptop sat. With steady, deliberate fingers, she opened her email client.
The funding committee’s logistics coordinator had sent their final travel itinerary yesterday. Vivi found the contact information and began to type.
Subject: Request for Transport – G. Dubois
Dear Ms. Albright,
Due to unforeseen circumstances, my research here has concluded ahead of schedule. I would be deeply grateful if arrangements could be made for me to depart with you and the committee in two days’ time. Please let me know if a seat is available on your return flight.
Sincerely,
Genevieve Dubois
She hit ‘send’ before she could second-guess herself. The click of the trackpad was a sound of finality. A quiet, digital severance.
It was done. She would remove herself from the equation.
It was the only logical thing to do.