Hex Code Pink

The console screen flickered. Edna hit it with the flat of her palm. It was a standard percussive maintenance technique. Usually, it stopped the screen from tearing. Today, it didn't.

Instead, the screen cleared its usual diagnostic green and flashed pink.

Not a subtle, washed-out pink. A violent, synthetic pink. Hex code #FFB6C1. Light pink.

Edna wiped a smear of grease from her forehead. It left a dark streak across her pale skin. She stared at the screen. Her eyes felt like they were full of sand. She had been awake for twenty hours straight. She had spent the last ten chasing a coolant leak through the lower decks of Station 74.

"Hank," she said. Her voice was raspy.

Hank was under the secondary generator. Only his boots were visible. They were scuffed leather. They were held together with silver duct tape.

"I'm busy," Hank said. His voice was muffled by the metal casing. "If I drop this torque wrench, the core is going to vent plasma into the hallway."

"The system just pushed a mandatory work order," Edna said. She leaned closer to the monitor. The screen cast a harsh pink glow on her face.

"Is it a hull breach?" Hank asked.

"No."

"Is the life support failing?"

"No."

"Then delete it," Hank said. The sound of metal grinding against metal echoed from under the generator. "We are technically off the clock in four minutes. I am going to sleep for three days."

"I can't delete it," Edna said. She tapped the console. The system pinged. A harsh, high-pitched error tone. "It has a platinum priority override. It's locked by the central AI."

Hank slid out from under the generator. He lay on the metal deck for a second. He stared at the ceiling. He was twenty-three, but he had the posture of an old man. His gray coveralls were stained with dark blue coolant. He sighed. He sat up.

"What does it say?" he asked. He rubbed his eyes.

"It says we are assigned to logistics and setup for the Station 74 Annual Spring Arts Festival," Edna read. She narrowed her eyes. "Location: Sector 4 Greenhouse. Deadline: Tomorrow at 1800 hours."

Hank stood up. He walked over to the console. He stood next to Edna. He smelled like ozone and stale sweat.

"Spring Arts Festival," Hank repeated. The words sounded foreign in his mouth. "We don't have seasons on an orbital station. We have shifts. And we are mechanics. We fix the air scrubbers. We don't do art."

"The AI disagrees," Edna said. She scrolled through the text. "It says all maintenance personnel are subject to cross-departmental duties to foster community engagement."

"Community engagement," Hank said. He spat the words out. "I engage with the community by keeping them from suffocating in a vacuum."

"Look at the manifest," Edna said. She tapped the screen again. A long list of files appeared.

They stood shoulder to shoulder. They looked at the list. It was a disaster.

"Item one," Edna read. "A sonic interpretation of a black hole. Submitted by Mae from Deck 2."

"What does that even mean?" Hank asked.

"It means she's going to set up speakers and play static really loud," Edna said. "Item two. A two-ton scrap-metal sculpture of a space whale. Submitted by Jay from Deck 1."

Hank leaned forward. He tapped the screen. The glass was cracked in the corner. "A two-ton sculpture. In the Sector 4 Greenhouse."

"Yes."

"The floor load limit in Sector 4 is five hundred pounds per square meter," Hank said. His jaw clicked. "If Jay puts a two-ton metal whale in there, it will crash straight through the deck and out the airlock."

"I know," Edna said.

"And the greenhouse is the size of a closet," Hank said. "It holds maybe ten people. If they stand very still."

"I know," Edna repeated.

"This is a joke," Hank said. He turned away. He picked up his torque wrench. "I'm going to sleep."

"You can't," Edna said. She didn't look away from the screen. "If we fail a platinum work order, the AI docks our ration credits. I don't know about you, but I only have enough credits left for three meals this week. If I get docked, I'm eating protein paste until Tuesday."

Hank stopped. He gripped the wrench. His knuckles turned white. He looked at the heavy steel door of the maintenance bay. He looked back at Edna.

"Fine," Hank said. "Let's go look at the greenhouse."

They packed their tool belts. They walked down the long, curved corridor of Deck 3. The lights overhead flickered. The station was old. It was built fifty years ago. It was supposed to be a temporary mining outpost. Now it held ten thousand people.

Nobody had the budget to fix the lights.

They reached Sector 4. The door to the hydroponics bay was heavy. It was covered in rust. Edna punched in her override code. The door hissed open.

The smell hit them first. Wet dirt. Stagnant water. Rotting vegetation.

The greenhouse was a long, narrow tube. The walls were lined with tiered metal planters. Most of the plants were dead. The station didn't budget for fertilizer anymore. A few sad, pale green vines clung to the overhead trellises. The air was thick and humid. It made Edna's lungs feel heavy.

"Beautiful," Hank said. He coughed. "Really captures the spirit of spring."

Edna walked down the center aisle. The floor grated under her boots. "We have to fit twenty art installations in here. And a crowd."

"It's mathematically impossible," Hank said. He pulled a cracked datapad from his pocket. He brought up the room dimensions. "We have four hundred square feet of walkable space. Jay's whale takes up three hundred."

"So we deny the whale," Edna said.

"We can't," Hank said. He pointed to the datapad. "The AI approved all submissions. If we alter the approved list, we get docked."

Edna stopped walking. She turned around. She looked at Hank. He looked exhausted. Dark circles hung under his eyes. His hair was a mess. She felt a sudden, sharp ache in her chest. It wasn't romantic. It was pity. They were both too young to be this tired.

"So what do we do?" Edna asked.

"We start by hanging the physical canvases," Hank said. He shoved the datapad back into his pocket. "There are five canvas paintings. We hang them from the overhead trellises. That frees up wall space."

"Who paints on physical canvas anymore?" Edna asked.

"Try-hards," Hank said. "Rich kids from the upper decks who buy synthetic cotton and think they are making a statement."

They walked to the supply locker at the back of the greenhouse. They pulled out a heavy coil of steel wire and two ladders. They dragged the canvases in from the hallway. The paintings were terrible. One was just a red square. Another was a blurry portrait of the station commander.

Edna set up her ladder. Hank set up his. They climbed.

The ceiling of the greenhouse was a mess of pipes and cables. Edna reached up to tie the steel wire around a load-bearing pipe. Her arms ached.

"Hand me the wire cutters," she said.

"Catch," Hank said.

He tossed the heavy metal cutters across the gap. Edna caught them. The metal was cold against her palm.

"The gravity plates in this sector sound bad," Edna said. She snipped the wire. She tied a knot.

"They always sound bad," Hank said. He was struggling with a massive canvas. It was the red square. It was heavy.

"No," Edna said. "Listen."

They stopped. They listened.

The floor hummed. It wasn't a steady hum. It was a dying, cyclical whine. It sounded like a failing engine.

"That's the magnetic coil," Hank said. His voice was tight. "It's misaligned."

"We should put a ticket in," Edna said.

"We are the ticket," Hank said.

The hum stopped.

The silence was sudden. It was heavy.

Then, the gravity cut out.

It wasn't a slow fade. It was a hard, brutal snap to zero point zero G.

Edna's boots left the ladder. She didn't fall. She drifted upward. The wire cutters slipped from her hand. They floated away, spinning slowly in the humid air.

"Hank!" Edna yelled.

Hank lost his grip on the massive red canvas. The painting drifted up. It blocked the overhead lights. The greenhouse went dim.

Hank pushed off his ladder. He aimed for the central pipe. He missed.

He flew across the gap. He was moving too fast. He crashed into Edna.

It wasn't a soft collision. It was bone against bone. Hank's shoulder slammed into Edna's ribs. The air rushed out of her lungs. Her elbow cracked against his jaw.

They tumbled in the air. A mess of limbs and gray coveralls.

Edna gasped for air. She couldn't breathe. She grabbed handfuls of Hank's jacket. She tried to stop their spin.

They slammed into the overhead trellis. The metal vines dug into Edna's back. She winced. Hank was pinned against her.

The spin stopped.

They were trapped between the ceiling and the heavy red canvas. The space was tiny. It was dark.

Edna opened her eyes. Hank's face was inches from hers.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. She could feel the vibration of it in her throat. She looked at Hank. He had a faint white scar over his left eyebrow. His eyes were dark brown. They were wide.

He smelled like copper wire, old sweat, and stale coffee.

His chest rose and fell against hers.

"You okay?" Hank asked. His voice was barely a whisper.

Edna swallowed hard. Her throat was dry. "Yeah. You hit my ribs."

"Sorry," Hank said. He didn't move. He couldn't move. The canvas pressed against his back.

Edna's stomach turned over. It wasn't the zero gravity. It was the proximity. She had worked with Hank for two years. They had fixed toilets together. They had scrubbed radiation baffles. She had never noticed the exact shade of his eyes. She had never felt the heat radiating off his skin.

Her hands were still gripping his jacket. She let go. She flattened her palms against his chest. She meant to push him away. Instead, she just felt his heartbeat. It was fast. As fast as hers.

"Hank," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Your heart is beating really fast."

"I just flew across a room and hit a wall," Hank said. "It's a biological response."

"Right," Edna said. "Biological."

Hank looked down at her lips. He looked back up at her eyes. The tension in the small, dark space was heavy. It was thicker than the humid air.

"We need to reset the breaker," Edna said. Her voice shook a little.

"Yeah," Hank said. He didn't move.

"The breaker box is on the floor," Edna said.

"I know," Hank said.

He slowly pushed his hands against the pipe behind Edna's head. He shifted his weight. He pushed off the pipe. He drifted backward, moving the heavy canvas out of the way.

The dim light returned to the greenhouse.

Edna took a deep breath. She felt cold where Hank's body had been.

Hank navigated the zero-G environment. He grabbed a wall strut. He pulled himself down to the floor. He opened the gray metal breaker panel. He pulled the heavy red lever down. He pushed it back up.

The floor hummed. Gravity returned.

Edna dropped three feet. She landed hard on the metal grating. Her knees buckled. She caught herself on a planter.

Hank landed next to her. The heavy red canvas crashed to the floor behind them. The frame cracked.

They stood in silence. They listened to the hum of the floor.

"Okay," Hank said. He cleared his throat. He rubbed his jaw where Edna's elbow had hit him. "Gravity is stable."

"Right," Edna said. She looked at the broken canvas. "We can't hang these. It's not safe. If the plates fail during the festival, someone is going to get crushed by a flying painting."

"And we still have the whale problem," Hank said. He kicked the broken frame. "We can't put two tons of metal on this floor."

Edna looked around the cramped, humid tube. She looked at the dead plants. She looked at the cracked datapad in Hank's hand.

An idea sparked in her brain. It was a stupid idea. But it was the only idea.

"Holograms," Edna said.

Hank stared at her. "What?"

"We don't use the physical art," Edna said. Her brain started moving fast. The exhaustion faded, replaced by adrenaline. "We digitize the submissions. We hack the environmental projection arrays. We project the art as holograms."

"The environmental projectors are only used for emergency lighting," Hank said. "They don't have the resolution for art."

"They do if we bypass the hardware limiters," Edna said. "We strip the physical limiters. We feed the raw data straight into the optic network. We can project the whale. We can project the paintings. They take up zero mass. They take up zero physical space. We can fit a hundred people in here if the art isn't taking up the floor."

Hank looked at the ceiling. He looked at the projector nodes hidden behind the pipes.

"The AI will flag the bypass," Hank said.

"Not if we run it on a closed loop," Edna said. "We disconnect Sector 4 from the mainframe. We run the projectors off a localized server. We use your datapad."

"My datapad is cracked," Hank said.

"It still has a processor," Edna said. "We have ten hours before the festival starts. We need coffee."

They walked back to the maintenance bay. They raided the supply closet. They found three cans of synth-caf. It was the cheap stuff. It tasted like battery acid and burnt aluminum.

They sat on the floor of the bay. They opened their laptops.

The night shift began.

0300 hours.

Edna typed. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. She was writing the bypass script. Her eyes burned. The screen was too bright.

Hank sat next to her. He was splicing cables. He was building a manual relay to connect the projector nodes to his datapad. He stripped the rubber casing off a copper wire with his teeth.

"Don't do that," Edna said. She didn't look away from her screen. "The rubber is toxic."

"Everything on this station is toxic," Hank said. He spat a piece of black rubber onto the floor. He twisted the copper wires together.

They worked in silence for an hour. The only sound was the clacking of keys and the hum of the station generators.

"Why are we doing this?" Hank asked.

Edna stopped typing. She rubbed her eyes. "To keep our ration credits."

"No," Hank said. He set the cables down. He looked at her. "We could have just failed the order. Eaten protein paste for a week. It wouldn't kill us. Why are we staying up all night to build a fake art gallery for a bunch of kids who don't even know our names?"

Edna looked at the screen. Lines of green code scrolled past.

"Because I'm tired of fixing things that stay broken," Edna said. Her voice was quiet. It lacked its usual sarcastic edge. "We patch leaks. The pipes break again. We fix the air scrubbers. They clog the next day. Everything we do is just... delaying the inevitable. The station is dying."

She looked at Hank.

"This is different," she said. "We aren't fixing a leak. We are building something. Even if it's just for one night. Even if it's fake."

Hank watched her. The harsh light of the maintenance bay cast deep shadows on his face. He nodded slowly.

"Okay," he said. He picked up the cables. "Pass the soldering iron."

Edna passed it. Their fingers brushed. A static shock snapped between them. It was real static, from the dry air of the bay. But Edna felt it in her chest.

She pulled her hand back. Hank didn't look away.

"We need a theme," Hank said. He cleared his throat. He focused on the wires. "The AI order said 'Spring Arts Festival'. We should project an environment. Not just the art."

"Like what?" Edna asked.

"I don't know," Hank said. "What happens in spring on Earth?"

Edna opened a new tab. She accessed the historical archive. She searched for 'Spring Earth'.

Images flooded the screen. Green grass. Blue skies. Yellow sun.

She clicked on a video file from 2018. It was labeled 'Kyoto'.

The video played. Trees with dark brown bark. The branches were covered in millions of tiny, pale pink flowers. The wind blew. The flowers detached. They drifted through the air like snow.

"Cherry blossoms," Edna read the caption.

"They look like the error screen," Hank said. He pointed at the pink flowers.

"Hex code pink," Edna said. She smiled. A real smile. It felt strange on her face. "Can you code the projectors to drop them?"

"Yeah," Hank said. He watched the video. He looked mesmerized. "Yeah, I can do that."

0800 hours.

They finished the relay. They carried the equipment back to the greenhouse.

They spent the next six hours climbing ladders, bypassing the hardware limiters, and plugging the nodes into Hank's datapad.

Edna's muscles screamed. She was running on purely synthetic caffeine and adrenaline.

1700 hours. One hour before opening.

"Boot it up," Edna said. She stood in the center of the room.

Hank hit the switch on his datapad.

The greenhouse went dark.

Then, the projectors engaged.

Light flooded the room. It wasn't the harsh fluorescent light of the station. It was soft. It was warm.

In the center of the room, a massive, two-ton space whale floated in mid-air. It was made of rusted scrap metal, but it was purely light. It slowly turned, swimming through the humid air.

Along the walls, the terrible canvas paintings hung suspended in glowing frames. The red square. The blurry commander.

And from the ceiling, the cherry blossoms fell.

Pink light drifted down. The holographic petals passed through the metal walkways. They passed through the dead vines. They faded before they hit the floor.

Edna stood still. A pink petal drifted right through her outstretched hand. It cast a soft glow on her palm.

"It works," Hank said. His voice came from the dark corner by the door.

Edna looked at him. The pink light washed over his tired face. The scar over his eye caught the light. He looked beautiful. The thought surprised her so much she almost took a step back.

"Yeah," Edna said. "It works."

1800 hours. The doors opened.

The crowd arrived.

They were kids from the upper decks. They wore neon reflective jackets. They had glowing tattoos tracing their jawlines. They wore clothing made of recycled plastics that crinkled when they walked.

They were loud.

The small greenhouse filled up instantly. The air scrubbers whined, struggling to process the sudden influx of carbon dioxide and body heat. The room smelled of cheap synthetic perfumes masking unwashed bodies.

Edna stood by the emergency airlock door. She kept her hand near the manual override. If the crowd got too dense, she would vent the hallway pressure to force them back.

Jay pushed through the crowd. He was nineteen. He had silver hair. He looked at the holographic whale.

"Hey!" Jay yelled over the noise. He pointed at Edna. "Where is my physical piece? This is a projection!"

"Your physical piece violates floor load limits," Edna yelled back. "If I let you bring it in, we all die in the vacuum of space. Enjoy the hologram."

Jay frowned, but then a girl in a glowing jacket pulled his arm. They started taking pictures with the whale. They didn't care.

The noise was deafening. The heat was oppressive.

Edna leaned her head back against the cold metal door. She closed her eyes. The headache was starting. The caffeine crash was imminent.

She felt someone step next to her.

She opened her eyes. It was Hank.

He had fought his way through the crowd. He stood close to her. To avoid the people pushing past, he put his hand on the wall right next to her head. His body shielded her from the crush of the room.

"How are the servers holding up?" Edna asked. She had to lean in to be heard over the heavy bass of the sonic black hole installation playing in the corner.

"The datapad is melting," Hank said. His face was inches from hers again. Just like when the gravity failed. But this time, his feet were on the floor. "It will hold for another hour. Then it fries completely."

"Good enough," Edna said.

A holographic cherry blossom drifted down between them. It passed through Hank's shoulder.

Hank watched it fall. He looked back at Edna.

"I hate this crowd," Hank said.

"Me too," Edna said.

"I hate the music."

"Me too."

"But I like the pink," Hank said.

Edna looked at his eyes. The dark brown was warm in the fake light. "Yeah. The pink is okay."

Hank didn't move away. The crowd pushed against him, but he held his ground. He looked at Edna's mouth.

Edna's chest tightened. She didn't push him away. She didn't want to. She wanted to bridge the gap. She wanted to know if he still tasted like stale coffee.

She reached up. She grabbed the collar of his stained coveralls. She pulled him in.

Hank didn't resist. He closed the distance.

They kissed.

It wasn't a movie kiss. It was clumsy. Their teeth clicked together. Hank's lips were dry and chapped. Edna's nose bumped against his cheek.

But it was real.

It was the most real thing that had happened on the station in years.

Hank slid his hand from the wall. He touched her face. His thumb brushed over the smudge of grease on her cheek. His fingers were rough. They felt perfect.

Edna kissed him back. She tasted the battery-acid coffee. She tasted the salt of his sweat. She felt the heavy, tired weight of him leaning against her. It felt like an anchor.

The crowd yelled. The bass thumped. The air was thick and hot.

They stood in the corner, ignoring all of it.

Hank pulled back slowly. He kept his hand on her cheek. He was breathing heavily.

Edna looked at him. She didn't smile. Neither did he. They were too tired for big expressions. But the look in his eyes was steady. It was a promise.

"We should shut down the datapad," Hank said. His voice was rough. "Before it catches fire."

"Let it burn," Edna said. "The AI ordered a festival. We are giving them a festival."

Hank laughed. It was a quiet, exhausted sound. He leaned his forehead against hers.

They stood there for a long time. The crowd danced around them. The holographic space whale swam through the humid air.

The fake petals kept falling, covering the cracked floor in a layer of digital spring.