RED: A Love Story [Featured List]

Part 1: White 3 - What's up with Sartre

"Four hours... thirty-one minutes... nine seconds... That is when... the world will end," said Sam pensively.

"What are we gonna do?" Rachel swallowed up her own desperation.

Sam did not respond straight away. He needed to think. He massaged his temples with an absent gesture, his eyes fixed on the implacable Control Room chronometer. The countdown continued: eight seconds... seven seconds... six seconds...

Rachel stared at him begging:

"We better leave before the guards show up, Sam."

"Wait a minute. I think I know how to cancel the attack."

With determination, Sam pressed a blue key on the control panel. Then suddenly hesitated. Right below it, there was a yellow key and a green key. Which one validated neutralization? Now that he had initiated the sequence of commands, he couldn't stop it, or else the alarm would go off.

He couldn't fail. The fate of mankind rested on the next key.

Lean and tall, Sam was trained in martial arts, and his body translated into pure muscular mass. But all his strength was useless in that moment. He scratched his well-trimmed beard, and his dark eyes sparked. Noticing his frustration, Rachel stared at him with a pair of eyes perfect and blue as snips of autumn sky. Since the facial reconstruction to change her identity, she felt like a Barbie doll. She missed her old face, more asymmetric, more like herself. It was the price to stay alive though.

"What if you tried the red key?" she risked.

"I don't know which command it activates. I thought of the blue and green keys because the secret code mentioned jungle and sea. Now I recall it also mentioned a great sun...

As Sam and Rachel studied the keys on the black panel, the speakers built into the ceiling hummed a Mozart sonata, muffling the guard's approach. He sneaked behind them and drew his gun...

Rachel's scream echoed through the Control Room.

Marisa woke up with a startle and paused the film streaming on the computer screen. She had dozed off with her head on the physics text book, next to a plate holding the mortal remains of a bunch of jabuticaba berries. Dizzy, Marisa scratched her eyes and checked the clock: almost half past ten. She reached out to turn the computer off, and then remembered...

The mouse cursor steered away from the Shutdown button and, with the eagerness of a sniffer dog, advanced through fields of folders, bypassed flowery shortcuts and trotted to the canopy of tabs in the browser. There, it finally burrowed into Marisa's inbox and gave her another startle upon finding a message from Marco.

___________________________________________________________

From:  Marco Aurelio Fares  <mafares@gmail.com>

To:  Marisa Constant  <mconstant@uol.com.br>

Date:  Mo, October 08, 2012 at 08:46 pm

Subject:  vocational test

Hi, Marisa,

As promised, attached is a list of professionals that I recommend.

This period of life can be difficult, I know, but you'll overcome it. Here's another quote by Sartre to inspire you: What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us...

Good luck!

Marco

___________________________________________________________