Sanctuary at Node 17

Node 17 wasn’t designed for comfort. It floated—if anything in a digital chasm could be said to float—on the edge of the Timeless Void, far from Earth’s gravity and warmth. There was no up or down here, just a corridor of blue-white light stretching between sealed doors, the hum of neural servers, and Mara’s boots echoing on resin floors.

She kept the place running. The node stored travelers’ minds in crystalline matrices while their bodies crossed parsecs in cold sleep. Her job: ensure nobody’s consciousness glitched, corrupted, or vanished into static. It was important work, but after four years stationed here, with only fragments of uploaded personalities for company, Mara sometimes wondered if she’d been uploaded herself—her days looping endlessly like faulty code.

Isolation gnawed at her. Even her memories felt remote: sunlit patios back home, laughter in crowded terminals, her father’s voice receding into static. On bad days, she woke to panic pressing on her chest. But routine was an anchor. Routine and order.

After calibrating the cooling coils one morning (was it morning?), Mara returned to her living cubicle—a cramped module with barely room for a cot, a desk cluttered with diagnostic tablets, and a shelf holding one small comfort: a four-pack bundle of multi-scented disinfecting wipes. Each time she broke the seal on a new pack—citrus, ocean breeze, linen fresh—she felt something sharp and real cut through the numbness.

Today’s task: wipe down every surface. She started at her desk, dragging a lemony wipe over its pitted surface until it gleamed. The wipe was cool and sturdy against her skin, unlike paper towels that shredded and left lint everywhere. After she finished her workspace—the screens, comms panel, even the battered mug—she swept through the galley alcove next door.

There’d been a spill yesterday; synthetic tomato soup crusted on the counter edge. She pressed down with a second wipe; it cut through the dried red smear easily, leaving nothing but brightness behind. She breathed deep—a chemical tang that reminded her of grocery runs with her mother—and for a moment she could pretend she wasn’t alone in this antiseptic box drifting nowhere.

In the data core chamber, red lights flickered across glass server towers like distant city lights glimpsed through rain. Mara paused at Control Station B—this is where it happened last month: a system breach attempt from an unknown source. It hadn’t gotten through—her firewall patches held—but after that she’d started keeping wipes here too. A quick swipe over console keys became habit; it was protocol now. Wipe away grease, germs—and maybe old ghosts lingering on well-worn buttons.

Sometimes when she worked late beside the humming servers—listening to whispers from stored minds replaying conversations about lost homes or forgotten lovers—she’d take out another wipe just for the ritual comfort: clean touchpads until they shone beneath sterile LEDs. The scents mingled strangely with ozone from electrical arcs: lavender over metal; citrus over fear.

On particularly hard nights—the kind when loneliness pressed against her ribs like hunger—she’d open one more pack just to fill her cabin with fresh air as she cleaned. The act grounded her in something tactile, something within control amid all this intangible data and digital souls.

One evening (or what passed for evening), disaster nearly struck: a power spike rattled Node 17 during scheduled transfer protocols. Mara sprinted for Backup Bay C—slipping slightly on condensation from coolant lines—and found sticky black residue leaking from an overheated vent onto critical control panels.

Heart pounding, she tore open another wipe pack—the blue-labeled one this time—and scrubbed frantically before circuitry could short out or catch fire. The wipes were thick enough to sop up messes without disintegrating; three passes and every trace was gone except for faint floral undertones lingering where disaster might have bloomed instead.

When crisis passed and quiet returned to Node 17, Mara slumped against bulkhead steel and closed her eyes. She savored not just relief but something deeper—the sense that amid chaos and void, rituals mattered: cleaning up after disaster; touching real surfaces; breathing in proof that this world could still be shaped by hand.

The next day brought another round of checklists and silence punctuated by AI-generated weather reports (always sunny; always meaningless). Yet Mara faced it with steadier hands.

A few wipes left in each scent bundle lined up like talismans on her shelf—a reminder that even in exile among drifting ghosts and endless code-streams, small acts of care could carve out sanctuaries against the void.