Noir 6

Frantically he looks inside the drawers of his desk. He turns up page after page, after having searched roughly for two hours he just gives up and goes through all the papers sheet by sheet.
Anxiously awaiting an ever so slight bulge in the papers on his desk, which is cluttered with documents, he has been sitting like this for hours. The stacks of paper on his desk have long since turned into a heap, the heap has somehow managed to spread to the floor, and because of the despair caused by his frantic search his hair looks unkempt, although even on the moon, where nothing really matters anymore, at least not to him, he tries to stick to at least a minimum of „style“.
The melody he has been humming to distract himself has experienced an ever so slight crescendo, having developed a life of its own. It resounds in the office, which is empty at this time of „day“. If he didn’t keep the time server up and running, he keeps reminding himself, life in this base would so thoroughly break down they might as well all have stayed back on Earth and died …
He shakes his head. Someone would have come up with some way to redefine a time structure that would enable the people to live a somewhat normal-ish life. What is normal if you keep seeing your home from afar, utterly destroyed by their fellow people’s carelessness and even madness?
As he is about to break down in despair, in the last corner of his eye he notices a speck of a familiar colour. Next to the colour there is a bright, radiant smile, one he has grown accustomed to, if not even developed a liking for.
Celia stands there, behind her left ear a neon-yellow pencil.
„Were you looking for this?“