The liquid refused to choose a down.
Inside the transparent cylinder mounted in front of Élise, a drop of silicone had left the syringe with the slowness of something that distrusted the world. It had rounded itself, hesitated before touching the wall, then been caught by the capillary film. On Earth, the experiment would have been almost trivial: a slope, gravity, an imposed direction. Here, in the European laboratory, direction had to be made out of surfaces, angles, pump speeds, and a great deal of patience.
Élise Varenne had spent enough time in orbit to stop finding poetry in a pen drifting away while you talked. She caught it with her wrist, hooked her shoe beneath the restraint bar, and read the last three lines on the monitor.
“Still eleven milliseconds,” she said.
Malik Osei, at the other end of the rack, did not look up.
“Nine.”
“Eleven between the camera and the flow meter.”
“Nine after correcting for the buffer.”
“The buffer is exactly what I want out of the equation.”
He breathed out through his nose. With Malik, that could mean laughter or giving up on persuading someone; Élise had learned to wait a second before deciding.
“We have a usable sequence,” he said. “Ground wants it before six. Grace wants the rack for maintenance at six fifteen. And you, I assume, want a perfect sequence in a universe where even the socks go off and live their own lives.”
Élise looked at the gray sock drying in a mesh bag above him.
“It’s secured with two carabiners.”
“See? You won’t even let me have a metaphor.”
She smiled despite herself. On the screen, the pressure curve had the satisfying neatness of a road seen from above. An oscillation at startup, a plateau, then the return. Nothing that demanded another run. Nothing except those eleven milliseconds that might only be nine and yet remained in her attention like a splinter.
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.