Joaquim Augusto Ferreira Barbosa de Melo - Lost in Space

-Your husband’s life requires the use of resources that we don’t have on the plane and as you know his departure is conditioned by the application of the device I ordered to be brought. What do you think we should do?

-My husband came to this state because he always refused its application. I really, really want him to live! I think, however, I have no right to oppose his will - I feel so deeply divided!

-I understand! But a decision has to be made! Urgently! Let me tell you this, maybe I can help you: I’ve always been on the side of life when I have to choose between life and death! And unless you oppose it, I’m applying the device to him as soon as I have it.

-I don’t object! Do the best for my husband’s life!

A few moments later, Felisbela arrived carrying the bracelet, accompanied by two security guards carrying an improvised gurney. The doctor applied the bracelet immediately. Then the security guards transferred the Judge by carrying him outside.

That scenario brought back to the doctor’s mind moments of strong anguish experienced a few years ago. After completing her first academic degree (medicine) and yet as an intern, she went through traumatic situations, which made her rethink her entire career. As a medical student she had a colourful and romantic idea about her future activity (helping people to alleviate sufferings and save lives). However, the day-to-day experienced in the ER during her time in the hospital showed her a very different reality. Beside that romantic dream of the activity, there also dark days, where death lurked at every moment. One day she witnessed an occurrence that greatly shocked her. The loss of a life that could well have been avoided. From then on, the romantic side of the activity disappeared, and she started to notice more about its dark side, especially whenever she watched the loss of lives due to indifference, bureaucracy and negligence. She decided to abandon her career and build a new one, far from that world of suffering. This time in Economics where she came to take doctorate, becoming a Professor. By this route she joined the Ministry of Finance and was later appointed Secretary of State of the Treasury.

Outside the plane the Judge was driven to a small reserved where he was in recovery, accompanied by his family, friends and Clara Sobral. Shortly thereafter he began to show signs of clear recovery, which did not cease to surprise those who accompanied him and in particular the doctor herself who asked herself: «how is it possible for him to come out of such a difficult situation without clinical resources? ». That recovery brought Clara a world of interrogations. The circumstances in which the Judge’s recovery occurred were in frontal clash with everything she had learned over her six years of medical school. Accompanied by a strange sensation that she knew very little or almost nothing about the life sciences after all! For the first time, as a former doctor, she felt apprenticed alongside those astonishing results! Her mind was now protruding from one question after another, without getting the slightest explanation for all of them: «how is it possible that a small apparatus placed on the wrist recovers a patient already in an advanced stage of pathology? ». Although she had been out of clinical practice for many years, she had kept abreast of what was coming out of the medical world. And she didn’t remember ever reading or listening to what she had observed there. But beyond that she could not even comprehend the basic principles that would be behind that new technology. That apparatus appeared to her eyes as a riddle, difficult to understand.

But for little Cristina, everything was a lot simpler! Just one look around and see what was right in front of her eyes: « her father recovered thanks to the intervention of her guardian angel! ». (Nothing simpler in the eyes of a child!) For her the adjectives that other people used were just a semantic way of talking, for what little mattered to her. The circumstance that occurred due to the renewal in her father’s health brought Cristina a renewed hope in life and in the joy of living, now with a greater closeness to her friend Mário - he also believed in Heaven, a kingdom of peace and joy where all coexist in total harmony. Managed by a God in the company of his children (the Angels), who cared for the beings existing on all planets, enough to ask them to help them. In this altruistic realm, the others always came first. Each angel received his share of joy and well-being in the right measure of the good that he did to each of the other beings he cared for. The very light that emanated was all the greater the more intense the love he gave to each of these beings. In Cristina, the belief in a realm of angels came through Mário’s grandmother. A Brazilian lady, travelled and very cheerful, for whom life was not a total paradise because most people had an ancestral tendency to spoil everything around them! That view of Cristina was, in the Judge’s opinion, « a colossal error of education » that he endured with great difficulty. Some bitterness between her parents originated precisely from this mystical tendency of Cristina. Marcelo accused his wife of allowing friendships like Mário’s and thus negatively influencing his daughter’s education. Margarida, on the other hand, did not see that Mário influence sufficient reason to produce the estrangement of the couple, Paula and Alberto, close neighbours and engineers, with whom it was very pleasant to live with.

Hallucinating Trip

The plane of flight 367, parked somewhere, was now a small, immovable palace of no use. Passengers felt the perplexity of those who realise that their lives are in danger, but they could do little to nothing under those circumstances. The kidnappers, strangers to planet Earth, remained in total anonymity. In addition to the information and impositions received by message, they did not express any other signs of violence, except the imperative obligation of the use of bracelets on the wrists. In the course of the time, everyone began to wonder why they did not feel any physiological necessity, particularly in the ingestion of liquids and solids. It felt as their bodies remained suspended in time since the application of those small appliances. That strange occurrence created in all a perplexity difficult to overcome and made them think (even the most experienced) that they would be facing an unprecedented fact in their lives. For most members of the governmental team, the situation was at least bizarre and full of interrogations of the most diverse natures and that was evident in some of their dialogues.

-I disagree with you, Mago Vieira, when you say we are victims of Islamic fundamentalists. In my opinion the situation goes far beyond that! - Said Óscar Pereira, Minister of Finance.

-Whatever the origin of this group, it has got us into a big mess! - Intervened Marco Dias, Minister of Economics.

-Sooner or later, the bastards will end up facing us! -Added Mago Vieira, Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Not far from there, a small group of kids, heterogeneous in their social and cultural sensibilities, gathered frequently around common goals. Cristina, Nuno, Mário, Inês and Iris formed a team willing to take on all the challenges. Freed from the seatbelts of the airplane and the supervision of their parents, they now felt that all the space available around the airplane belonged to them, making this open territory the centre of all their pranks. The devices that were applied to them in the arms were now their favourite “toys” and, by trial and error, they discovered some features available. Who was not satisfied with the situation was Esmeralda, Nuno’s mother. The restlessness of her son, increased by the influence of his companions, put her nerves on edge.

Esmeralda had been accustomed by her parents to an education of strong discipline. Conditioned by the austere models of education of the time, she conveyed to her son and students at school, an education of strong discipline, albeit more moderate than what she had received from her parents, but always centred on the will of the elders. If some of the attitudes and behaviour of her son and youth in general were a sign of the times, the irreverence was intolerable to her. For Nuno, her son and most students at school, the repressive pragmatism she used represented a permanent setback to which they would have to make front.