Vienna greeted them not with postcard perfection, but with a soft, persistent drizzle and the faint, damp scent of stone and coffee. The taxi from the airport wound through streets that were both grand and intimate, a symphony in beige and ochre. Lin Xiaoyang watched the city scroll past, his sleep-deprived brain struggling to compile first impressions. It felt heavier than Oxford, more layered. A legacy system of immense complexity.
Their Altbau apartment was on the top floor of a building with a palatial, slightly crumbling staircase. The key turned in the lock with a satisfying, solid clunk. They stepped into silence, broken only by the patter of rain against the tall, double-glazed windows.
The space was exactly as pictured, yet completely different. The high ceilings felt expansive, but the rooms, emptied of their previous life, echoed with a hollow, waiting quality. Their four suitcases sat in the center of the living room like beached ships.
For a long moment, they just stood there, side by side, absorbing the new kernel of their shared existence. The Logistics Subroutine was complete. The "Operation: Vienna Synchronization" project plan had terminated successfully. Now, they were faced with the blank slate of runtime.
"Initial assessment," Shen Qinghe said, her voice cutting through the quiet. She walked to the window, looking down at the wet, gleaming cobblestones of the quiet street. "Spatial parameters match specification. Ambient noise level is acceptable. The light quality at this hour is suboptimal, but the southern exposure promises adequate illumination during core working hours."
Xiaoyang dropped his backpack with a thud. "Assessment: We're here. And I'm starving."
"A logical priority." She turned from the window, her practical side taking over. "The nearest grocery store is 320 meters away, on the corner. Its hours are 07:00 to 19:00 on weekdays. We require immediate provisions: water, simple carbohydrates, protein."
The mundane act of grocery shopping in a new country was a surreal decompression ritual. They navigated narrow aisles filled with unfamiliar brands, decoding German labels for milk and bread. Qinghe, of course, had already researched the average price of staples. Xiaoyang found himself staring at a wall of incomprehensible sausages, a wave of dislocation washing over him. This was it. This was their life for the next three months: figuring out which sausage to buy.
They returned with bags of basics. The act of putting food in their new kitchen—their shared kitchen, with no commute separating them—made the space feel incrementally more theirs. They ate a silent, tired meal of bread, cheese, and apples at the small wooden table, the rain providing a steady soundtrack.
The first true test came with the setting up of their workspaces. They had agreed to use the two smaller bedrooms as separate offices. "Proximity without overlap," Qinghe had called it. "Preserving individual deep-work states while minimizing context-switch latency."
But as they began unpacking laptops and cables, a new dynamic emerged. In Oxford, their separate spaces were assumed, enforced by distance. Here, they had to actively negotiate the boundaries.
"The power outlet placement in this room is inefficient," Qinghe noted from the doorway of what she had designated as her office. "The desk would be better positioned against the interior wall, but that would place my back to the door, which violates my security preference."
Xiaoyang, wrestling with an Austrian power strip that had more holes than he expected, called from the other room, "Just pick one. We can change it later."
"Later is an inefficient time to move heavy furniture. The decision should be optimal from the start."
He heard the familiar, precise tension in her voice. The fatigue of travel, the overwhelm of the new environment, was wearing on her optimization protocols. He put down the power strip and walked to her doorway.
She was standing in the middle of the empty room, a faint line of frustration between her brows, mentally calculating desk trajectories and cable lengths. She looked, for the first time since they'd arrived, slightly lost.
"Hey," he said softly. "Fault State Handshake. I'm at capacity for spatial optimization. My bandwidth is low. Can we… table the desk positioning until tomorrow? Just for tonight, let's set up on the big table in the living room. Like we used to in the lab. Side by side."
She looked at him, then at the empty room, and the fight seemed to drain out of her. The need for immediate, perfect order was a response to the chaos of relocation. His suggestion offered a temporary, collaborative bridge.
"A temporary, suboptimal configuration," she conceded, nodding slowly. "To allow for system recovery before executing permanent layout. Acceptable."
They dragged their laptops to the large, solid dining table. Sitting side by side, plugging in their devices, the familiar rhythm returned. The click of her keyboard, the glow of his IDE—these were constants. The Vienna apartment began to fade, and they were simply two systems, side by side, sharing processing space.
They worked in silence for an hour, dealing with the essential post-migration tasks: connecting to Wi-Fi, sending "arrived safely" messages to the network (which immediately erupted in a flurry of questions and emojis), scanning the institute's welcome packet.
As the evening deepened, the silence grew comfortable. The pressure to immediately inhabit the new space eased. They were, for now, just inhabiting each other's presence.
Later, lying in the unfamiliar darkness of their new bedroom, the city sounds a distant murmur, Qinghe spoke.
"The first-day efficiency rating was 58%," she said to the ceiling.
"That high?" Xiaoyang mumbled, already half-asleep.
"The travel and setup overhead was significant. However, the core collaborative process remained stable. The protocol held."
"That's all that matters," he said, turning to find her hand in the dark. He laced his fingers with hers. "The kernel is booting. The OS is the same. The location… is just a new terminal."
He felt her fingers tighten around his. In the dark, she didn't need to offer a data-driven response. The pressure was enough.
"Acknowledged," she whispered.
Outside, a tram bell rang faintly in the Vienna night. Inside, their distributed system had successfully ported itself to a new, foreign machine. The code was the same. The connection was the same. Everything else was a variable they would now debug, together.
The Vienna Convergence had begun. Not with a fanfare, but with the quiet, steady hum of two compatible processes, side by side in the dark, successfully initializing a new chapter.