Without warning, everything ground to a halt. The Senior Lab Director looked sharply toward the upper ring. Realizing he had just received an override from Zargo and frozen the impending reconstruction phase, I made a break for my cleanroom, continuously scanning the perimeter. Morana was nowhere on the horizon. Instead, a trio of Dakara brushed past me. They threw highly peculiar glances at my silhouette and stepped off the main walkway to clear my path, leaving me utterly bewildered. Before I could even reach my biometric door, a high-priority text from Zargo pinged my comlink. “Have you made up your mind? The whole day has flown by.” A truly fascinating individual. To be perfectly frank, throughout the grueling pace of this shift, I hadn't possessed a single second of spare cognitive bandwidth to allocate to my private life. “I’ll tell you everything once we’re home.” Well, the upcoming commuter shuttle flight spanned exactly thirty minutes—a perfect window to formulate five airtight reasons why this union was a terrible idea. The baseline argument for the affirmative was already there: I was head over heels for the guy. “At our place?” Zargo’s text targeted my phrasing instantly. “Yes,” I shot back, completely bypassing my mental filter. The comlink fell silent. Letting out a massive sigh of relief, I realized the workday had officially concluded. It felt like I hadn't executed much actual lab work, yet time had evaporated at maximum velocity. Retreating to the cleanroom for a final check of the systems, I powered down the terminal, only to spot Zargo leaning against the doorway framing. “Let’s head home,” he announced rather loudly. I practically jumped out of my seat, throwing a highly indignant stare at his face. “We established a clear camouflage protocol!” I hissed. “For the morning shift.” Zargo remained entirely unfazed, while I initiated a frantic, hyper-alert scan of the adjacent corridors. Unsurprisingly, multiple eyes were actively tracking us. The crew was intensely curious to see what the Senior Tan was up to. Would he go for a structural floor inspection, or could they sneak an early exit to the launchpad? Furthermore, forgetting the hyper-acute hearing of certain alien species on the payroll was a severe operational risk. Zarina proved to be the most invested spectator on the floor. She flashed me a massive, knowing wink before hurrying toward the docked commuter shuttle. The woman had clearly intercepted our exact dialogue, which explained her rapid exit. It didn't take a data analyst to run that calculation. “Zarina is my third cousin,” Zargo remarked casually, catching my wrist. “Why on earth did she omit that little detail from our introductions?!” I gasped. We adjusted our course toward the shuttle docks, executing a sharp turn into an adjacent corridor that led right to the private executive launchpad. To my surprise, a substantial contingent of the Sibian staff occupied the deck. “To what purpose?” Zargo chuckled. “Virtually every single Sibian deployed to this station shares a branch of my family tree. This project marks Zarina’s first rotation.” His lips curved into a warm smile, while I fought a losing battle against a total and absolute facepalm. I had already noted the anomaly that the civilian shuttle was running at minimum capacity. If an entire clan of relatives operates a facility as a unit, they undoubtedly share localized residential sectors planetside. Which meant they had clocked my brief walks along the shoreline, calibrated my exact trajectory, and processed precisely which house I was calling home... “Are you telling me the entire facility staff knew about our cohabitation from day one?” “I find your complete lack of professional cynicism deeply endearing,” he murmured. I ground my teeth, but wisely chose against launching a domestic boundary dispute in front of an audience of his entire extended family tree. I could barely contain my impatience waiting for the transport hatch to seal. Suddenly, the cold shoulder I’d received from the crew clicked into place. Sibian entities rarely engage in superficial small talk, even among their own kind. And since the data confirmed I shared a roof with Zargo, they had simply categorized me as a permanent fixture of their unit. The ledger was clear. I could officially collapse into my own thoughts, run my biological calculations, and execute my beloved research without a single office politics distraction. I locked down any impulse to interrogate him during our transit. The last thing our operational security required was disclosing our private internal investigation to the pilot. However, that restriction fell away the absolute millisecond our residential door sealed behind us. Turning on my heel to confront him, I found Zargo putting on a blatant, arrogant facade of total incomprehension. I managed to catch him by the arm. “Hold it right there. What is the status on Morana?” “Toron routed her complete forensic trail to the cosmic police,” Zargo stated, his tone shifting to something steady and dark. “She made a catastrophic mistake in the server room. I highly doubt her intent targeted that level of structural hazard. She simply confused the module matrices. She meant to blind the monitoring terminals, but simultaneously severed the command loop for the automated piloting array. That comprises a major cosmic felony.” I nodded, fully aligning with Zargo’s assessment. Furthermore, I highly doubted Morana herself failed to compute the legal severity of that exploit. That explained her complete meltdown when the security unit cleared the lift ring. Zargo cleared the floor to access his shower, leaving me marooned in a domestic dilemma. I could theoretically retreat to my own room upstairs, but my entire inventory of skincare gels remained locked in his master suite. Awaiting his exit, I extracted a substantial cut of meat from the freezer locker and threw it onto the thawing interface. Navigating my own quick shower and shifting into loungewear, I prepared to clear the room and initiate dinner prep—only to discover our residential perimeter had been breached by a guest. Cracking the bedroom door open a fraction, my optics locked onto Morana. She was perched precariously on the absolute edge of the living room sofa, completely silent. “You signaled a desire to submit a formal confession,” Zargo stated, standing exactly a meter from her frame with his arms locked tightly across his chest, his brow set in a severe frown. “I am listening. Proceed.” I maintained my camouflage behind the door panel, opting against breaking her psychological momentum. Better to let her dump her raw data file before I entered the grid. “Is it an absolute fact that you do not occupy this estate alone?” she whispered. “Why does that specific question continue to hijack your focus?” “Are you genuinely blind to reality?” “Yes,” Zargo cut her off, his voice icy. “I just received a high-priority notification terminating my contract.” Zargo arched a silver eyebrow, his processing loops failing to compute her grievance. I let out a soft sigh. Previously, I had operated under the assumption that romantic infatuation exclusively drove human profiles to total cognitive instability. “Explain the operational rationale behind your breach of the server deck.” “I was attempting to neutralize her,” Morana spat, pure venom warping her tone. “She infiltrated our department, she infiltrated our life.” From my angle, Zargo’s facial expressions were masked, but Morana was radiating pure, unhinged rage. I could partially decode her tactical logic. She genuinely believed the man she was infatuated with possessed the emotional capacity to forgive her and grant her an absolution patch. “I am capable of calibrating my entire existence to match your specifications,” Morana asserted passionately. “I have never once registered your profile within a relationship framework,” Zargo stated flatly. “I have already secured a partner who mirrors every single core metric I was searching for.” “A human?!” Morana hissed, her posture fracturing. “That is a temporary biological anomaly; their species is defined by systemic structural flaws.” “I harbor zero intentions of debating my private life parameters with you,” Zargo commanded. “Do you officially concede to the fact that you disabled the server arrays, exploiting the absence of the systems engineer tasked with configuring the remote centrifuge command loops?” “My target was exclusively the terminal screens, I never intended—” “The secondary variables are completely irrelevant now. Come in.” Waving his hand near his temple, Zargo pulled up the automated home network panel and unsealed the primary entrance. The absolute second the first cosmic police officer cleared the threshold, a soft, involuntary squeak escaped my throat, and I executed a rapid step back into the shadow. Thank God I hadn't left my comlink marooned on the living room counter this time; clutching the tech, I rapidly fired a text to the Sibian. “The galactic security officer who just breached our house is Roma—my older brother.” I was completely unequipped to navigate a simultaneous confession of my new relationship status to my brother and a professional briefing to my boss. First Zargo, then the cop. That was the sequence. Hopefully. Zargo solved the logistical bottleneck instantly. Turning toward Roma, he offered a perfectly calm hospitality protocol: “Clear your schedule and join us for dinner. It’s a perfect window to get acquainted.” A cosmic joke! A total and absolute fiasco! I had zero fallback options; I had to completely capitulate, step onto the floor, and pretend this entire chaotic mess was a perfectly executed, pre-planned strategy. “Where are the jars of pickled veggies, officer?” I demanded, stepping out of the bedroom with my arms crossed, leveling a strict glare at my brother. Roma’s optics locked onto my silhouette, panned slowly over to Zargo’s posture, and a sudden flash of pure comprehension lit up his face. “Getting acquainted it is, then,” Roma agreed, his lips twitching. “Right after I process the transit of the detainee to the holding brig. I will re-enter your atmospheric sector in exactly three days.” Throwing Zargo a highly meaningful, loaded glare, I scurried after my brother as he cleared the foyer. He paused midway down the launchpad suspension walkway, turning back to face me. “Are you sure about this decision?” I delivered a firm nod, then caught myself. “Just... exercise extreme caution; do not damage him! He’s a sensitive research asset!” “Honestly, my algorithms predicted this exact outcome for you,” Roma laughed. “What outcome?” I asked, my suspicion spiking. “That the absolute second you cleared your academy degrees, you’d sprint headfirst into a marriage contract with some hyper-focused academic just so the two of you could wither away inside a sterile laboratory matrix together. I can already visualize this high-fashion dandy attempting to navigate a garden patch back on Verona with Mom and Dad.” Roma burst into a hearty laugh and boarded his security vessel. A nerve in my eyelid began to twitch violently. Zargo’s catastrophic carnivorous diet and my mother’s fanatical devotion to country-house agricultural labor were tracking toward a total cataclysmic collision. Still, my brother lacked the data to compute that reality, which meant his calculations were based on some other metric. “What was the operational purpose of that invitation?” I demanded, marching back inside the kitchen zone. “Because you are a legendary coward.” Zargo smoothly migrated toward the cutting counter, reclaiming the block of meat. Sliding onto a barstool, I watched in absolute bewilderment as his hands mirrored the chef’s knife with expert efficiency. “You possess culinary skills?” I blurted out, utterly thrown. “Obviously. I’ve logged twenty cycles of solo deployment.” Mystery number one: completely resolved. As it turned out, the man wasn't nearly as domestically helpless as his clutter suggested. I tracked his patterns for another quiet minute before letting the words clear my filter: “You possess a remarkably calculated, clinical strategy for selecting a relationship asset.” “Actually, my logic failed from day one,” Zargo countered, shelving the knife. He stepped across the space, took me firmly by the hands, and guided me into a standing position. I stared up at his face, my verbal processors completely locking down. “My focus anchored onto you the exact second you breached my porch threshold. You were fiercely combative and completely ridiculous.” “And... what about the overarching directives of Tana Nimba?” “I have already updated my mother’s network database. Zero anxieties required. She will not initiate a counter-suit against my selection.” I let out a soft huff but chose against logging a formal objection, because the next microsecond, every single remaining doubt was violently wiped from my system. Bowing his head, Zargo leaned down and kissed me. The second I registered a severe deficit in my oxygen parameters, I pulled back first, a genuine smile breaking across my features as I smoothly migrated toward the prep counter. Since the Senior Tan had taken administrative ownership of the main course, I would assume responsibility for calibrating the perfect side dish. My internal anxieties cleared the grid entirely. So what if we represented completely distinct species matrices and opposite social tiers? The core telemetry was flawless: our localized alignment was perfect.