And what is love, if it is not the utmost of obsession? What are we, if we are not the devastated creatures of addiction? Could we recall, if oblivion itself did perish? Could we lie, if verity was to vary? What was desolation, if nothing was ever cherished? What were we, if our longings could desist? Of all, there was only but one truth; that within every existence and all reality, the capacity of love, was the audacity of lost.

I find this to be a great definition of love: An obsession. Every human longs for perfection and by finding someone who completes us, we become the perfection. We develop a bound unlike any to the one who we love. Everything they do becomes truly magical to us and everywhere they go becomes holly. Everything they say shall be quoted and every picture they take… that shall make our hearts feel strange! This obsession with the loved one then goes further and conquers our minds. We become a slave to the idea and we get stuck. This complex of not having the loved one then becomes so intense and grows roots in us that even when they fall for us and offer us their love, we no longer can put aside that complex and obsession. It shall be an addiction formed for the greater good, a beautiful reason to live for, a joy that is not possible to compare. Except of course, for the times when we don’t reach that special someone, or even worse: when we break up, and even worse: for when they die and we lose them, and then it becomes the different story of misery.

Adam was remembering a day in a beautiful summer, those that are not too hot and not too cold. It was a beautiful little café, full with people and lots of noise—but you see—in a good way. Sitting at the coziest corner, and talking about the beautiful flowers of the south Africa. It was a beautiful day for a beautiful couple. Adam and Pearl were quite in love. They weren’t a showoff and it really wasn’t a fairytale but then there are those of relationships that make one so dependent on one another it is then very hardly possible for anyone to get an image of the couple as two separate people. Sometimes after a while, the definition of a person gets heavily involved with the ones they love and perhaps forever. Yet, unfortunately enough, Pearl was gone. As Adam became a little bit more mindful and realized the empty presence of her, he once again tried to remember. He tried to imagine how she used to smell but then sadly she was gone for so long, he couldn’t remember. She used to be his everything. He gave up on many things for her, it was his MIT scholarship he tried a long time to get, it was the job offer at the Ocean Labs—the center piece of Clark Williamses empire—which if he accepted should have made him a multi millionaire. But he didn’t even care. All he ever wanted was the presence of Pearl, he never even thought about these. To him the only thing that ever mattered was her. And now she was gone.

It took him seven years after the death of Pearl to got over the depression. It was never clear to anyone why, but one day, he just got up and decided to change. Perhaps there was finally a reason to live again, or maybe he was just too sick of the grief. The only known thing was that it turned out to be for the best. Adam again contacted the Ocean Labs and his résumé and his story were so touching that Clark Williams himself had called him and invited Adam to join something marvelous: A five year program to become an astronaut—Yeah that big. The objective of the mission was that Williams needed a pilot for a piece of high tech machinery. A ship so top of the line that could change the dimensions of research. Williams wanted to spend a season within the space on that ship and it was for that mission that he needed a great pilot and he could wait because Adam was something that he couldn’t find anywhere.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The whole problem here is the profound lack of Pearl’s presence. There are many different reasons why one lives; so that perhaps they can be someone important, so that they can be rich or so that they can be loved. Truth is; there are billions of reasons and sometimes they become so overly rooted that one cannot change anything. Pearl was a heavenly person, and thanks to the selective memory of Adam, she now definitely looked like a saint. Flawless and perfect. How could he ever find love again when no one measured up to her?—or for what is worth, her ever remaining image.

Adam could think about Pearl all his life but then it could no longer go on since the ship had to return back to orbit. Adam was to maneuver a skillful series of moves in order to get the ship to the right path. While the technology was there, Clack always liked the excitement of seeing him manhandle the thing. Clark liked the idea of masculinity, he wanted to see men brave and stone hard, anything that was considered more manly was certainly better. His wife Claire, always looked at him like a child when he was in his masculinity-praising mode and so the sitting of the ship was the Adam in control of the flight, Clark sitting beside him and having the excitement of a five year old, Claire in the side sit looking at them with a judging smile that could tell she’s saying: “oh my adorable husband and his cute friend” in her head, Tom—Claire’s younger brother—and Sam, the co pilot of the ship in the back of the control room doing some sort of a chitchat and more of

Tom—who as I told earlier, is Claire’s sister—at the time was in the humble business of being the free world’s president. Tom and Claire were two different sides of genius. Tom the political one, Claire the business genius. Clark in the other hand was a true scientific mastermind, he was named the most influential person of the millennium since he was the one who had made the cure for the cancer. And even more heroic was the fact that he had given all the rights of the cure to the general public and for free. It made him a holy saint overnight and since he had never worked for money, the public praised the work and those who were saved or had saved or even the ones who found what Clark did incredibly valuable started donating wild numbers to Clark and then he because a very rich person within a month. He was a great man with a kind heart and now a very heavy bank account.

With the virtually unlimited resource he then had, Clark started working on whatever fascinated him. His work led him to meet Claire. Given the business mind of hers, they made a pair where one made new products and discoveries while the other turned those into financial miracles.

Their quest of conquer however, was just yet to began. They wanted change and they wanted it for good. Clark first worked on a more clean energy and with his discovery of Dimension Zero he made the concept of energy to be a joke: absolutely unlimited power and forever. Clark could remain the guy who had cured the cancer, but with this, he turned to God. This invention revolutionized the planet. Basically what he did was opening an energy portal to a parallel universe inside a burning star and harnessing its power to the Earth. While the portal still couldn’t be used for anything else, the discovery itself was bigger than the industrial revolution. The couple very soon understood the consequences of the advancement and they knew they had to be in charge, thus they needed to take control of the political climate as well. That’s were Tom came in. If you wonder what curing cancer or making energy something free gives to you, it is having the word of god. When Tom entered to the race he didn’t campaign from a year before, he got into the election just when he had to apply for the paperwork and once the word was out that Claire Richard Wood’s brother is gonna run for president, the simple first question was which party is he representing? And the answer turned out to be of even more power: “no party”. Parties laughed at him for survival but then with only one speech that was given by the Clark, Claire and Tom it was easy to see the parties are doomed. He got elected with 84% of the voters which is skyrocketing. People usually don’t care about voting, but not when the one who’s running is related to the one who has cured the cancer. This three musketeers were really the new standard of what was to be the royal family and this establishment wasn’t going to be anywhere, anytime soon.

Yet again it is that we are getting to a bad direction in our path to the story. So, yes, it was the task of returning to the orbit. While Adam was showing off how awesome he can move a ship, Sam was playing chess with Tom. “How dare you move your knight over my bishop?” said Tom. “Well Mr. President, Sir” said Sam with a joking face, “It seems after all, you’re not as good a politician as they say…”. Tom laughed and said: “I admire your bravery Sam, but I am the president for a reason” and then he calmly moved a Pawn that Sam didn’t even noticed to the end of the chess and looking at Sam’s amazed faced, he moved his head slowly down with a gesture of highlighting his move and then the Pawn was made to a Bishop and with that Bishop the game was certainly over. “Sam, you’re a good kid, but you shouldn’t ever let yourself become sure of victory. It makes you blind”. Sam could just wonder how is it possible that she didn’t even noticed the Pawn until the very end of the game? But then it didn’t matter, the ship had a big shake and then the control room went red into the light of the alarms. Sound of a beeping alarms filled the air and everyone’s attention shifted to the ship. “What’s happening?” said Sam, “Don’t know” said Adam. “Everything seems to be perfectly normal, I see nothing wrong” said Clark. “Can it be the ship’s computer?” said Tom, while wondering with a perspective of a true outsider to the ship’s tech. “It is mathematically impossible for it to be wrong” said Clark. Tom didn’t understand any but then it was no time to ask details. The whole thing then moved to another level of absurdity when every single device on the ship went off. Every light, every sensor, every computer, anything that had electricity within, suddenly seemed off. Everyone started to get really nervous. The ship was designed in ways that it ways impossible through the laws of physics that the ship could end up like this. It was so well engineered and the engineering was so well proven that no one could be any more sure any more than being sure the sun is hot. But it had happened: The very inevitable. Clack, Sam and Adam hurried into the boards, trying to open up the emergency pathways and rewiring what could perhaps save them. Let’s not forget that the ship was trying to get back the Earth and by that time they had entered into the atmosphere. It could only take so little time for them to land and therefore every second counted and yet, nothing worked. The ship got hit by something huge and as a result everyone lost their conscious.

It sometimes is the hardest thing to forgot about someone. When you have them in your mind for all the time, for every hour, for every day and you keep thinking about them for months and years. Adam was the most capable pilot alive that wasn’t anything anyone had ever doubted about, but his mind was very much addicted to the idea of the Peal. If he was ever alone or had the slightest of the time for his mind to breath, it was the thought of Pearl that dominated his mind. Something he neither could help nor wanted to help to get out of. This unconsciousness could perhaps be a great time for getting back to the Pearl. For someone who was in control of a ship, it was very strange how much Adam hated the universe. He believed that this empty vastness of pure dark was a misery house, a place for punishment. As far as Adam could remember he had made no one sad, he had never treated anyone badly and there was, left with grief. This ruins that he was prone to live with, it was the pure evil of the universe. Pearl was a great person, a non-profit lawyer fighting for the poor, a volunteer within the red cross, and she was the one who had to get the cancer. Adam didn’t see his job as a working position, but rather it was the chance to serving for Clark. To him, Clark was the ultimate hero, if the universe was less evil, maybe the work of Clark could have saved Pearl. But there was no Pearl when Clark reached the cure and Adam had nothing to do, so he dedicated all his life to serving for Clark, to saving others that could be saved and that had given him the ultimate meaning in his life, post-Pearl. Adam would have taken a bullet if it was for Clark and he had proved this when he had risked his life and went with Clark to that space mission. And now he was, with his life near dead and his body unconsciously sitting on the control room of the “Horizon’s Beauty”; the ship that would never failed. And yet, it had.

Adam were sitting on a train station. He was looking at the trains come and go that a stranger came to him and said: You are dying Adam and went away. He got shocked. A policemen came to him and said: I need to write a report on everyone within the ship that are going to die. Adam didn’t know what was going on. His father came and sit beside him.

— “You are dead” said Adam — “I know, I am. Don’t you see what is happening?” — “So far, I can only tell it’s a dream” — “Sure it is, you need to get out of it. Your friends are in danger”

Adam thought for a moment, got up and moved toward the trains. A train was coming, he didn’t stop, he passed the red safety line and jumped in front of the the thing and woke up in the dark control room of Horizon’s Beauty.