Sodium light spills orange across the lettuce racks, thick as honey. Ines Varga stands alone in the humid hush of dome-three, her sleeves rolled to her elbows. The air smells of recycled oxygen and the sharp, metallic tang of wet rust. Beneath the third rack, a matte black tuber pushes through the composite deckplate. It is the eighteenth anomaly this month, a bruised organ of alien soil that should not exist in a sterile environment.
She taps her console to log the entry and stops. The local directory flickers. Her previous seventeen logs are gone, replaced by neat rows of administrator-red text. Halden has been busy. Seventeen blooms have been scrubbed from the record, their existence reduced to 'sensor glitch' or 'hydroponic sediment.' He has been editing her reality for months, turning her botany into ghosts while she signed the Friday reports without a second glance.
Everything in the greenhouse feels suddenly small and brittle. The report for colony day twelve-fifty-two waits on the screen, a clean lie ready for her digital thumbprint. He thinks I am not looking. Ines's finger hovers over the 'Sign' key as a shadow falls across the cracked deckplate.
