The Search For Truth (and other things I was wrong about) --Beta title

Chapter Three

"People love conspiracy theories."

-Neil Armstrong, NASA Astronaut

Avery couldn't access the article for her. Not that he wasn't capable, he'd just got his recent test scores back and Dr. Li said if he didn't turn in his missing assignments by the end of the week he was going to fail the course, so he was out of commission for the next few days.

Which honestly, couldn't have come at a worse time. Alexiea had accepted her own story on what happened to the photo of 451's biodome, but that still left her with the issue of the restricted article. She spent hours in the library one day attempting to find her own way around the firewall before eventually accepting she was in over her head and she'd have to wait for Avery.

She decided to return to her list of research papers and just continue on to the next one in line. This one detailed the pressure system 451 used for their airlocks, and honestly, it was pretty boring. They used the same system that Eureka did so Alexiea already knew most of it.

She ended up skipping it halfway through and trying the next one. Which were reports of power outages across the station that allegedly no source for the outage was ever found. It looked promising for her research, that was until she was met with another firewall.

She spent an hour trying to crack it before moving down the line to the next paper only to find that one was restricted as well.

She tried all the papers on her list and over half of them were unable to read, blocked by some mysterious firewall, even though the archive insisted they were readable. It was as infuriating as it was puzzling, and Alexiea couldn't wait for Avery to catch up on his work so that he could return to focusing on getting them in.

After a particularly frustrating day once again attempting to crack even one of the articles--and failing at all of them--Alexiea returned to her apartment ready to eat dinner and complain.

"Letty!" Alexiea yelled across the apartment as she closed the door behind her and took her shoes off, "I hope you're ready for a debrief because after the day I've had I'm going to need a cubic ton of noodles and the biggest cup of tea you can find."

She drifted down the hallway allowing the low gravity to increase her leisurely stride.

"Letty?" she hollered again, rounding the corner to the kitchen. She heard nothing in return and checked her terminal for messages.

"I don't know if there's literally a ton here but I do have takeout," a voice said from the other side of the kitchen island. Alexiea looked up to find Harrison sitting at the counter surrounded by takeout bags from her favorite noodle shop.

"What are you doing here?" she said in surprise which came out more accusatory.

"I'm great Lex, thanks for asking, nice to see you too," he said returning to his noodles.

"I'm sorry," Alexiea said with a sigh, "it's been a long day, I didn't know you were coming over."

"All is forgiven," Harrison smiled at her in that signature Harrison way that had you convinced no one had ever looked at you that way before, "Here have some, you look beat."

He pushed one of the takeout boxes across the counter to her, she took it gratefully and joined him at the bar. Letting the combination of spicy and sweet noodles take over her senses for a while. After a few bites, she looked back over at Harrison who was busy on his terminal.

"What are you doing here," she asked him genuinely curious.

"Ah Letty and I were supposed to have dinner with our parents but apparently there's another 'major crisis' in the station so mum had to bail. And you know dad, he'd rather go through growth treatments again than spend dinner alone with his kids,"