The day after the sensor incident passed in a blur of strained civility.
Alistair offered Vivi a curt nod over breakfast, a silent armistice that felt as fragile as a pane of frost. It was an improvement, but the air between them remained thin and cold.
It was Kenji who finally broke the spell, his smile a small sun in the station’s perpetual fluorescent twilight.
“If you’re done cataloging your… atmospheric whatnots,” he began, gesturing vaguely toward her sealed lab space, “I can give you the grand tour. The real tour.”
Vivi, who had been staring at a row of neatly labeled, inert air canisters with the enthusiasm of a prisoner studying her cell walls, readily agreed.
Anything was better than contemplating the scentless void she was supposed to be curing.
Kenji led her down a humming corridor to a heavy, insulated door marked with a biohazard symbol and a stark temperature warning: -35°C.
“Welcome,” he announced, pulling it open with a theatrical grunt, “to the heart of the station. The library of time.”
The cold hit her first, a dry, invasive chill that stole the breath from her lungs. It wasn’t the damp, biting cold of the outside, but a sterile, ancient cold that felt like it emanated from the dawn of the world.
The room was a long, narrow cavern lined with floor-to-ceiling racks. And on those racks, nestled in protective sleeves, were hundreds of cylinders of ice.
They weren’t white. Vivi had expected them to be cloudy, opaque.
Instead, they were a spectrum of ethereal blues, from pale sky to deep, abyssal sapphire. Tiny bubbles, like captured constellations, spiraled through their depths.
Dark, hairline fractures mapped millennia of pressure, and faint, almost imperceptible bands of gray and white marked the passage of seasons long dead.
“Wow,” Vivi breathed, her voice a plume of white vapor.
“Right?” Kenji beamed, his enthusiasm fogging the air around him.
“Each one is a story. A core drilled from the glacier, sometimes over three kilometers deep. See these little bubbles?”
He pointed to a section of ice that was milky with them.
“Trapped atmosphere. We can analyze the CO2, methane… basically, we can breathe the air of the Roman Empire, or smell the volcanic ash from Krakatoa.”
He used the word ‘smell’ so casually, so thoughtlessly, that it struck Vivi not with a pang of loss, but with a spark of recognition.
He wasn’t talking about a sensory experience. He was talking about data, about composition. He was talking about reading a formula.
Her mind, trained for two decades to deconstruct the world into its olfactive components, instinctively began to translate.
The vast, silent library of ice wasn’t so different from her own workshop in Grasse.
There, she had shelves of absolutes, essences, and tinctures—each a captured memory, a story distilled into a bottle.
Tuberose from a specific harvest in India held the memory of its sun and soil.
Vetiver from Haiti carried the ghost of its smoky earth.
She was a curator of ephemeral histories. This was just a different medium.
“It’s like a perfume,” she said, her voice quiet with dawning comprehension. “A composition built over eons.”
Kenji tilted his head. “I… guess? Never thought of it that way.”
“Think about it,” she elaborated, walking slowly along an aisle, her gloved hand hovering near a core labeled with a dizzying string of coordinates.
“You have your base notes—the deepest, oldest ice, the foundation of the story. Compressed, dense, mysterious.”
“Then you have the heart notes in the middle, the layers that define the core’s character—a major volcanic event, a long period of warmth.”
“And then… the top notes.” She gestured to the most recent sections.
“The fresh snowfall, the recent atmospheric data. Fleeting, but telling you everything about the present moment.”
She stopped, her gaze fixed on a distinct, dark band in one of the cores.
“How do you account for compression over time? Does it mute the data?”
“When I over-distill a floral absolute, I can lose the most delicate top notes, boiling away all the nuance.” She added.
“Does the weight of millennia do the same thing to the story you’re trying to read?”
“That’s… a really good question.” Kenji scratched his head. “The algorithms account for firn densification, but the idea of ‘muting’… that’s for the boss.”
A low voice cut through the frigid air from the far end of the lab. “It doesn’t mute it. It concentrates it.”
Alistair.
He was leaning over a light table, a focused scowl on his face as he examined a thin slice of ice with a magnifier.
He hadn’t looked up, but his attention was clearly fixed on their conversation.
The lazy tour had just become a dissertation defense.
He straightened, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, and walked towards them.
The raw energy coming off him was different now.
It wasn’t just irritation; it was the focused intensity of a master craftsman cornered in his own workshop.
“Pressure doesn’t erase the data,” he said, his voice sharp and precise.
He tapped the very core Vivi had been looking at. “It forces it into a new context. That dark band you’re looking at?” He asked.
“Volcanic ash from an eruption in 1342. The gas signature in the bubbles around it is sharp, almost violent.” He explained.
“Nothing is muted. It’s clarified. The noise is squeezed out.”
Vivi felt a thrill of intellectual connection, a spark she hadn’t felt in months. This was a language she understood. “So it’s not a dilution, it’s a distillation.”
His eyes, a startlingly clear gray, met hers.
For a split second, the animosity was gone, replaced by the flicker of shared understanding between two specialists. “Exactly.”
She pressed on, emboldened. “Kenji mentioned the top notes—the recent data.”
“In my work, you can have a composition that is perfectly balanced for centuries, and then one new ingredient, one synthetic molecule, can throw the entire thing out of balance. It becomes dissonant.” She paused.
“Are you seeing that here? A point where the notes become… wrong?”
The word hung in the air. Wrong.
Alistair’s expression tightened. He looked from her to Kenji, a silent dismissal.
Kenji took the hint, giving Vivi an encouraging nod before retreating to the other side of the lab, pretending to be busy.
When Alistair spoke again, his voice was lower, a low burn of contained energy. “That’s what they don’t want to hear. That’s my ‘controversial theory’.”
He gestured for her to follow him to a large monitor displaying a dizzying graph of interconnected lines.
Most were trending upwards in a gentle, predictable curve.
But one, a jagged red line, was shooting up almost vertically.
“This is the standard model,” he said, tracing the calmer lines with his finger.
“It predicts a gradual, linear increase in glacial melt. It’s alarming, but it’s manageable.” He continued.
“It gives governments time to build seawalls and pretend they’re doing something.”
He then tapped the screen, zooming in on the aggressive red line.
It was his data.
Sourced from the sensors she had helped him fix.
“What I’m seeing isn’t linear.”
“It’s a feedback loop. Think of it as a resonant frequency.”
He spoke faster now, the passion he kept so tightly locked away bleeding through.
“Warmer oceans melt the ice shelves from below. The meltwater lubricates the base of the glacier, causing it to slide faster into the sea.”
“Faster slide means more surface area exposed to warm air and water, which means more melting. One process feeds the other, exponentially.” He explained.
“It’s not a gentle crescendo. It’s a sudden, deafening chord.”
He wasn’t just a grumpy scientist. He was a prophet, a Cassandra screaming a warning that no one wanted to hear.
The pressure he was under—for funding, for recognition, for validation—wasn’t just professional. It was existential.
“The dissonance you asked about?” he said, his gaze locked on the terrifying red line. “It’s already here. The top notes are poisoning the entire composition.”
“We’re past the point of a slight imbalance.”
“We’re at the point where the entire formula is about to collapse into something new and unrecognizable.” He ended.
He fell silent, the hum of the freezers filling the sudden vacuum.
He had revealed more of himself in those two minutes than in all the days since she’d arrived. He had shown her the core of his being, the theory that was either his life’s great work or his professional ruin.
The air around him vibrated with the force of his conviction. He looked exposed, like he regretted the sudden torrent of words.
Vivi didn’t know what to say. The science was beyond her, but the passion was not.
She knew what it was like to be consumed by a singular focus, to see the world through a lens no one else shared. She knew the exhilarating terror of creating something new—a scent, a theory—and sending it out into the world to be judged.
“So,” she said softly, “you’re not just reading the story. You’re trying to warn everyone how it ends.”
Alistair looked at her, his expression unreadable.
The brief, intense connection shimmered and then vanished as he rebuilt his walls. He gave a curt, jerky nod.
“Something like that,” he mumbled, turning abruptly back toward his light table, his shoulders hunched as if to physically contain the passion he’d just let escape.
Vivi stood before the monitor, the red line burning itself into her memory.
She had come to Alaska to find a ghost, to reclaim a piece of her past. But here, in the frozen heart of the station, surrounded by the silent history of the world, she had found something else entirely.
She had found the story of the future. And she was beginning to understand the immense, terrible weight on the man who was desperately trying to rewrite the ending.