The routine had become a form of exquisite torture.
Every other day, Vivi would sit in the small, sterile infirmary, a clear mask over her nose and mouth, and inhale.
She would close her eyes and wait for a miracle that refused to arrive.
The atmospheric concentrator beside her would hum its low, monotonous song, feeding her purified, potent doses of the Arctic air—air that was supposed to trigger the regeneration of her olfactory receptors.
Air that, to her, was just a cold, empty void filling her lungs.
Alistair was always there, a silent sentinel in the corner, ostensibly for safety protocols.
He’d sit with a tablet, his brow furrowed, analyzing data streams that had nothing to do with her.
His presence was a constant, low-grade irritant, a physical manifestation of her failure.
Each session ended the same way. He would make a note on his tablet, his stylus tapping the screen with clinical finality.
“Anything?” he would ask, his voice devoid of expectation.
And she would pull the mask away, the scent of sterilized plastic the only phantom sensation she could muster. “Nothing,” she’d reply, the word tasting like ash.
Six weeks. Forty-two days. Twenty-one sessions. Twenty-one meticulous inhalations of nothing.
The hope she had guarded so fiercely on the flight to Alaska had withered.
Now, a brittle despair had taken its place, cracking through the carefully constructed façade of her resilience.
The tundra outside, once a symbol of stark potential, now felt like a perfect mirror of her internal landscape: vast, white, and profoundly empty. Scentless.
Her days stretched into a meaningless expanse of time between treatments.
She was a ghost haunting the station, a decorative object with no function.
She’d watch Marta move through the kitchen with a cook’s brutal efficiency, her hands never still, creating hearty meals that sustained the bodies and spirits of the others.
She’d see Kenji, his face lit with boyish excitement, analyzing ice cores that held the planet’s secrets, his whoops of discovery echoing from the lab.
And then there was Alistair. He was the station’s gravitational center, a whirlwind of focused energy.
He was either hunched over his computer, wrestling with complex climate models, or striding through the corridors with a purpose that made Vivi feel even more inert.
His entire existence was a testament to data, to progress, to the relentless pursuit of answers.
She was just a question mark that refused to resolve. An experiment with a null hypothesis.
One afternoon, sitting in the common area, she stared out the triple-paned window at the sheer, blinding whiteness of the world.
The sun was a weak, indifferent disc in a pale sky.
She was fiddling with the sleeve of her cashmere sweater, the soft fibers a useless comfort.
She felt the weight of her uselessness pressing down, threatening to suffocate her.
She wasn’t a perfumer anymore. She wasn’t a scientist. She wasn’t even a particularly good patient.
She was just… here. A frivolous waste of precious resources, just as he’d said.
The sound of footsteps on the grated metal floor made her flinch.
It was Alistair.
He stopped a few feet away, and for a long moment, the only sound was the omnipresent hum of the station’s life support.
She didn’t turn, bracing herself for a clipped question about the infirmary schedule or a complaint about her leaving a mug on the counter.
“Dubois,” he said. His voice was unusually hesitant.
She finally turned to look at him.
His expression was unreadable, a familiar mask of stoicism, but his eyes held a flicker of something she couldn’t name.
He wasn’t looking at her with his usual impatience. He was just… looking.
“Come with me,” he said. It wasn’t a command, not quite.
Wary, she rose and followed him.
He led her not to the infirmary, but to his personal research lab—the inner sanctum she had never been invited into.
The room was a stark contrast to the rest of the station’s spartan utility.
It was an organized chaos of monitors displaying complex graphs, shelves overflowing with journals, and delicate-looking scientific instruments she couldn’t begin to identify.
It smelled, she imagined, of ozone from the electronics, old paper, and the faint, clean scent of melting ice.
He gestured toward a powerful-looking microscope on a steel workbench. “Sit.”
She obeyed, perching cautiously on the high stool.
He moved with a quiet efficiency, taking a glass slide from a refrigerated container and placing it under the lens.
He adjusted a few knobs, his long, capable fingers moving with practiced precision.
The same fingers that had worked alongside hers on that sensor, she remembered.
“Look,” he said, stepping back to give her space.
She leaned forward, pressing her eye to the cool rubber of the eyepiece. At first, all she saw was a blurry, watery world.
“Turn the fine focus knob. The smaller one. Slowly.”
She did as he instructed. The world swam into view, and she gasped.
Floating in the droplet of meltwater was a universe.
Tiny, exquisitely detailed organisms drifted through the illuminated circle like constellations in a liquid galaxy.
They were diatoms, she realized from some long-forgotten biology class, their silica shells forming shapes of impossible intricacy: perfect stars, delicate ovals, intricate, lace-like fans.
They were geometric jewels, shimmering with a faint, internal light.
“They’re beautiful,” she whispered, her voice filled with genuine awe.
“They’re Bacillariophyceae,” Alistair corrected, his tone factual, yet lacking its usual edge.
“Single-celled algae. Their cell walls are made of hydrated silicon dioxide. Glass.”
He leaned over her shoulder, his proximity making the hairs on her neck prickle.
She could feel the warmth radiating from his body, a stark contrast to the cold that seemed to have settled deep in her bones.
He pointed to a shape on one of the screens connected to the microscope.
“Each species has a unique frustule—the shell. See the patterns? The striae, the raphe.”
“They’re specific. Their composition tells us about the water’s salinity and temperature when they were alive.” He said.
“We find them in the ice cores. Some of them are hundreds of thousands of years old.”
Vivi was barely listening to the scientific explanation.
She was captivated by the sheer, unexpected artistry of it all.
Here, in a single drop of water from a place she considered barren, was more complexity and design than in a thousand modern sculptures.
It was a composition of staggering elegance, life on a scale she had never considered.
“They look like they were designed,” she said, still lost in the view. “Like tiny, living jewels.”
“They’re a data set,” he countered, but the words were softer now. He wasn’t dismissing her observation; he was just translating it into his own language.
“Their presence and morphology are data points. They help us reconstruct past climates with incredible precision.” He continued.
“Most people just see water. They don’t see the library of information hidden inside it.”
He straightened up, and she felt the loss of his warmth.
She pulled back from the microscope, blinking, her mind still full of the microscopic pageant.
She looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw not just the stern, demanding scientist, but the man who saw entire worlds in a drop of water.
“Why did you show me this?” she asked quietly.
Alistair seemed momentarily flustered, a rare crack in his formidable composure.
He broke eye contact, his gaze falling to the clutter on his workbench.
He picked up a caliper, turning it over in his hands as if it were a talisman.
“The work we do here… it’s not always visible,” he said, his voice low and gruff.
“It’s incremental. You can spend a month analyzing a meter of ice and find nothing but noise. It requires… patience.” He ended.
It was the closest he would ever get to an apology or an offering of comfort.
He wasn’t telling her to be patient with her treatment; he was showing her.
He was showing her that value wasn’t always loud or obvious.
That sometimes, the most profound things were invisible to the naked eye, hidden in plain sight, waiting for the right lens to be brought into focus.
It was a gesture of kindness, filtered through the only medium he was comfortable with: data.
He couldn’t offer her empty platitudes or emotional support.
But he could offer her a glimpse into his world. He could offer her a truth he had built his life on.
A fragile, tentative silence settled between them, different from the charged, hostile silences they had shared before.
This one was something else entirely.
It wasn’t comfortable, not yet, but it was breathable.
“Thank you, Alistair,” Vivi said, and the name felt strange and significant on her tongue.
He gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod, his attention already returning to the screens.
The moment was over.
He had extended a hand across the chasm that separated them, and now he was retreating to the safety of his own side.
But it was enough.
As Vivi walked back to her quarters, the station’s sterile corridors felt a little less empty.
The despair hadn’t vanished, but it no longer felt absolute. He had seen her.
Not as a nuisance or a failed experiment, but as a person adrift, and in his own awkward, scientific way, he had thrown her a lifeline.
He had shown her the scent of nothing, and then, in a single drop of water, revealed a world of everything.
A fragile emotional bridge had been forged, as delicate and intricate as the glass shells of the diatoms themselves, spanning the vast, frozen tundra between them.