"Are you getting a reading yet?"

"No, I'll go check the cabling to the sensor."

The camera pans away from the woman getting up to leave the room, to a figure in the back. Standing still, in the same room, but detached from the group of collaborators, we see...

The man does not believe he's in mortal danger either.

From the main room, there has been a steady symphony of fans, pumps, and a harmony of electrical whirring. Gently, the equilibrium is disturbed by a tone of increasing pitch.

"Hey guys, did you change something? I hear something different!" 

It was a shout of confusion, not of alarm, from Natalia, the woman checking cable connections. The response from the control room has elements of both.

"What?! No, we touched nothing! The energy levels are increasing though. Did you touch something else than the sensor cabling?"

Uh, that's not what he was expecting. Why would the energy levels raise like that? Unless the generator was set to a higher wattage for some reason?

It takes a precious few moments before the team spots what Mark intuits.

"Hey it looks like the generator is targeting a stupidly high wattage, what the hell is going on?!"

The tone has now transitioned from a hum to an unpleasant shrilling treble. Natalia hurriedly comes back through the control room door, in a slightly military jog.

"Hey, turn it off! Now!"

The controls for the main generator should be... behind him, actually.

Mark stands up, and as he turns around he realizes that the reason the setting is wrong is that... he moved the dial with his butt while he was leaning on it. Whooops.

"Generator powering down!"

He checks the wattmeter waiting to see it go to zero as the generator winds down.

It doesn't. It seems to be stuck at 2000MW.

"It's not shutting down. SCRAM IT!"

That's not a command you hesitate to obey near experimentally modified high energy machinery. The closest team member reaches over and slams the big red button. 

Inside the main room, three great cylinders protruding from the central column make clacking noises as three large pistons fall into the core. The heavy thunks and smattering in the exotic material inside announce a change in the sound sudden enough to appear like a new movement of the symphony.

Pump noises suddenly jump in frequency, and fans max out their capacity. Auxiliary systems come alive and contribute with their own sounds. It was loud before, but nothing like now. The only steady element is the generator, after it obstinately refuses to yield to the shutdown sequence's countless commands.

The increase in noise is matched by a slowing of the now unbearably high pitch tone, and after a moment it seems like a climax has been reached. The team holds their breath.

And then the tone slowly, unrelentingly and almost mockingly starts to increase in pitch again, though much slower this time, as the generator wins against the emergency systems.

"We're too far outside parameters, the systems weren't built for this! We have to stop the generator! Mark, come on!"

"I'm trying!" Power throttles don't work, unplugging and re-plugging the control panel does not work, choking off the energy source does not work. "It's not responding to any command I give, tabarnak!"

That's when he notices the clicking and crackling.

So does a team member not currently involved in shouting theories at each other.

"Hey, it's approaching feedback loop soon!"

Natalia stops mid sentence and looks up in realization.

"We can't stop it, it's gonna spiral out of control!"

A beat as everyone takes this in. She says the next thing as she's moving to the station intercom on the wall.

"We have to get everyone out of the station - Hi command? Experiment went bad, the entire station must be evacuated. Yes, for real, the experiment core is gonna feedback loop."

She glances over at the graphs on the screen.

"Uh... Minutes at best."

She turns away from the intercom as a loud signal comes on over the announcement system, adding another layer to the cacophony. 

"IMMEDIATE EVACUATION. GET TO THE ESCAPE PODS. IMMEDIATE EVACUATION. GET TO THE ESCAPE PODS. IMMEDIATE EVACUATION..."

He notices some of younger scientist seem frozen in place, still in denial about how bad the situation is.

"FLY, YOU FOOLS!"

He moves to look at the experiment screens to get a better feeling of the situation, and see if he can do anything to delay the inevitable.

That seems to bring them back to reality, but they still don't move until one of their friends gently but firmly pushes them toward the door.

Natalia's now fully in lieutenant mode, and her voice carries remarkably well over all the noise.

"Okay we gotta GO! To the escape pods, NOW!"

The team shuffles out in a disorderly group behind Mark's back, giving him a moment alone with the screens.

It's bad. Not all the sensors were set up yet, but the ones that are functional say enough. Accumulated energy is about a magnitude beyond all the normal ranges from literature, and the collected image from the auxiliary readings shows early tendencies to superlinear growth. Generator status looks completely normal, except it's not supposed to be at 2 GW. The emergency systems are whining showing errors indicating that the core is hotter than expected. Maybe it'd have a chance if the experiment had required fewer modifications and circumventions. Perhaps if you shuffled the power couplings around you could allow... there's no time. Checking the cooling vats, there seems to be an imbalance, so maybe there's a little extra cooling potential if you just...

"Hey, maybe you can withstand blue cheese but you can't withstand a core overload. Let's GO!"

Natalia is the last one out and has turned to shout in Mark's general direction while keeping an eye on the group.

"Roquefort is the pinnacle of human food, you heathen. I'll reach you as soon as this is slow enough that the escape pods have time to actually get to a safe distance."

He starts tinkering with the coolers' balancing to see if he can squeeze any more time out of them. They're really not collaborating, but the situation being what it is means he can basically ignore all limits and possibilities of long term damage and just let all the noncritical systems overheat. It's not as if they will survive for long anyway.

Natalia turns to Mark with a look of impressed respect, and then quickly regains her composure.

"We'll save you the closest escape pod to the right. Running there will take... 20 seconds plus launch sequence. Good luck and thank you."

She turns her back and the group leaves the room.

The cooler tanks' pumps spin to life, but not without presenting Mark with a continuous stream of on-screen warnings and pop-ups which require constant dismissal. In the tanks, many cubic meters of coolant change tank, which have a noticeable though slight impact on the graphs. Another set of overrides and the coolant to several subsystems are cut. In the distance another warning signal sounds as several sets of machinery immediately overheat. It's buying time but not stopping the process by any means. Some of the subsystems accept the command but then promptly stay at the same status.

After spending a while with the graphs the outputs of various sensors imply there might also be a way to modify the composition of the reaction to gain another bit of time, through inserting more exotic matter. Maybe.

If he would have time to notice it, there would almost be a kind of calm now that all the immensely stressed scientists have left the room, despite the wall of sound. Just Mark, the screen, and the graphs.

"Crisse de câlice, do what I tell you, you dog." He tries performing some percussive maintenance on the more stubborn systems. Will it help? No. But it's good for the mood, and he needs to be at the secondary station to monitor the additional exotic particles anyway.

After a minute of cursing he sees the second derivative is clearly going down. Shit is still going to hit the fan, there is no way to stop it now, but at least the other pods should be able to escape.

His pod on the other hand... eh, 20 seconds to get there, plus at least ten to launch even if he cheats and skips the safety checks... It's going to be tight.

From the main chamber, the clicking and crackling has gone from occasional to continuous. While he was working, the telltale thuds of escape pods being launched had been smattering in the background, barely audible over the noise.

A little more balancing of the process, but then all the graphs are saying the same thing. 40 maybe 45 seconds remaining until the core is critical.

Well, fuck. Let's see if he can beat that 20 seconds estimate (he probably can, he's fast) and get out in 30 seconds from now (he probably can't, even on full manual override the launching still needs time).

He runs.

All the nearby escape pods are launched, except the closest one to the right. Running takes 13 seconds. Launching takes 11. A rapid acceleration.

In the back of the escape pod, the porthole in the door he came through is haloed by the glow from the jets. The launch sequence ends, the jets turn off, and for a few seconds, it's completely quiet.

Through the porthole he can see the station as it grows more and more distant.

It's beautiful, and he would appreciate it even more if it wasn't tinted with the sadness for all the work lost and worry about being rescued in time. It's probably going to be fine, the pods have enough oxygen for days, even more in his case because he's alone, and they managed to send the distress signal through hyperlink, so the rescue operation should already be en route.

The station is slowly rotating, suspended above a planet not unlike the Earth, if the Earth had a single anemic continent surrounded by a superocean. It has polar ice caps, but there is no landmass below them.

Sound requires air to transmit, so the only sound in his pod is his labored breath. He knows he'll soon hear the low buzzing of the life support system, keeping the air breathable and the temperature reasonable, but there is no need yet, so everything is silent. Gone are the crackling and clicking, the high pitched wines of systems about to break. Gone the people yelling, running.

He starts whistling a classic tune to calm his nerves.

It's fine. He's going to be fine. Everyone is going to be fine.

He's keeping his eyes on the labs section of the station, trying to see if he can spot the first signs of havoc, it should happen right about n-

It starts gently, like a giant tentacle slowly constricting around the hull. Uneven ruptures appear across the surface, as an immense force pulls a quarter of the station toward the lab section. For a moment the mass begins to shimmer, reminiscent of a ship about to warp, but then the force reverses.

Violently, the station explodes in a station-sized supernova, impossibly bright. Immediately, a second explosion follows as the station's main reactor is caught in the blast. For a moment it is as if time stops. A home for a hundred people, work of a cumulative lifetime, all gone in an instant. Still, complete silence.

Then the explosion is over. Where the station was, there is only an afterimage of the blast. Around it, a halo seems to appear. No, it's a field of debris, and like a shock wave it expands in all directions.

Including toward Mark.

There is barely enough time to despair before it impacts. Suddenly everything is loud again as metal fragments, glass shards, and molten material pelts the outer shell.

The pod violently tumbles, and were Mark not fastened to the seat, he would have been sent flying. Instead he bruises as he's thrown against the side of the seat, and hits his head hard against the padded headrest.

The pelting subsides over the next moments, and then it's over. Again there is silence.

"Meeeeeeeeeerd-"

He stops shouting when he hits his head, and as soon as the noise is over he starts checking the sensors and diagnostics to see if anything is on fire. Metaphorically or not.

It seems like the out shell has survived the impact without any issue, although there is a warning saying that the parachute sensor is offline. It's probably going to be ok, that area was on the other side of the pod so it should have been shielded from the first wave of debris, and there are no warnings about the deployment mechanism itself.

He takes a moment to remember the station, the corridors he's spent so much time in, the place that was becoming a home away from home. And now it's gone.

After the impact, his orbit is now going to see him land on to the planet, and the pod doesn't have enough fuel to maneuver and avoid that. T-minus 10 minutes to the beginning of the re-entry. Well, still beats being dead, he can definitely survive re-entry, and they can probably recover him from the surface without much fuss.

The ten minutes until reentry, and the first ten minutes of descent into less and less thin atmosphere, pass uneventfully.

The 3D model displaying the status and an overview of the pod display a number of other warnings. For example, the radio antenna was ripped clean off, and if he tries the radio, there's only static. The distress beacon that will allow the rescue ships to find him are working fine. Everything inside the reinforced middle layer is fine, everything outside has varying degrees of damage.

How does he spend the time until it's time for the parachute to deploy?

He turns off his pocket everything. With no base stations in range and no working radio it's completely useless right now, but it might be useful to keep some battery in it if he later needs a torch or... well, not much else to be honest, music and reading definitely don't have the priority right now.

He checks and re-checks the re-entry procedure and checklists until he can mostly recite it from memory.

He improvises some situation-appropriate lyrics for one of his favorite songs.

There's a starman falling from the sky
He'd like to reach the ground safe
But he fear he'll blow up fine
There's a starman falling from the sky
He's told the chute to work well
'Cause he knows it's essential
He told me
"Let the heat shield take it
Let the heat shield burn up
Let me get to the ground"

As the vessel gradually enters atmosphere, the air friction causes the descent to be shaky. At the same time the view out the porthole changes from cold hostile space to an inviting clear blue sky. As if the planet greets him and wants to give its condolences for the events in orbit.

Without much warning, the parachute deploys. The strong tug suggests that it's either completely undamaged, or only has a few holes.

If he leans over, he can sneak a peek of the ocean out the porthole. If he does, he'll see other escape pods bobbing happily on the surface on deployed floatation devices. Some of them have their parachutes flopped to one side, and some of them had their parachutes land directly on top, as if they were kids with ridiculously large hats.

Only some gentle waves stir the surface, and the water seems to say "come to rest here next to your friends, you are safe now".

Oh, good, that seems most of them. He hopes the other ones are also safe.

He prepares for impact, visually checking the harness one last time to see if it's still correctly locked and then relaxing his muscles.

He stops singing, and just listens for the sound of the wind whistling by.

5... 4... 3... 2... 1... and...

SPLASH!

The world tumbles dizzyingly around him as the pod impacts the water at a transverse angle. His body is again slammed against the side of the seat, and his head again hits the padded headrest. Gentler this time, since he was able to prepare for the impact angle.

As the pod falls under the waves, the sound of high pressure gas is heard as the floatation devices activate. Ten seconds pass. If he's experienced the rarer escape pod simulations, he'd know that he would see the light from the surface fill the space again in just a few seconds. Any time now. Aaany second.

Instead, a warning sounds. "Insufficient floatation pad pressure!" the screen reads when his vision finally starts to unblur.