Lost & Found Benjamin Adam Russell Student ELME A man sat on a hill overlooking hundreds of acres of wheat. He sat there alone with a shotgun lying down by his side. He preferred the old technology. Usually he came out at night, for stars usually make better targets than a blue mass, but he decided for a change today. The one thing that gave him meaning in life was gone. God was gone. People have lost themselves over the years. Losing who they are and who they were. The world now is a labyrinth of lost integrity and lost originality. Humanity has become a race of lost boys. God gave him meaning once. But now everything is so different. Now he had to get back at the man that had forsaken him. To get back at God. To a modern man this may seem like a crazy and illogical thing to do; to think one could fire into the sky and hit something holy. But it made perfect sense to this little man sitting alone on this hill. He picked up the shotgun, and took a few shots into the blue sky. Minutes went by and he kept pumping shells into the sky. However, he got the usual response. The sky still stood there, unwavering. He sat there for few minutes and then he gathered his things and left. What he failed to see was a body that was falling from the heavens. He looked like death. Sitting alone on the other side of the café, amidst a haze of his cigarette smoke, a caught the scent of what he was smoking. Cloves. His appearance struck me as odd, since people don’t look like that anymore, since medicines and bioengineering can fix any disorder or act of stupidity. However, my view was disrupted by a collection of curves and perfection. She could have been worshipped as a goddess in some long ago time. Now she’s a dime a dozen. At first I didn’t recognize her when she took the empty seat at my table. With a confident toss of her head, I saw a golden heart necklace around her neck. There was no doubt in my mind who it was. My secretary, Christine. “What happened to the old Christine?” “Helen le Troy,” “What?” “It’s the latest from Makeover Corp. It’s the most expensive in Beauty Engineering, but…….” A collage of old faces flashed through my mind. Derrick Hayana. Michael Scherhauf. And so many others. Old lives, heh, more like past lives. A commodity you can get at any convenient store. Organs and other body parts can be replaced like parts on a car and with constant checkups, death has become a forgotten myth. So when you get bored with yourself or need a place to escape to, science can help. My current incarnation, Jack Loas. I locate things, more specifically, people. Since, people generally don’t die anymore, they just tend disappear and it’s my job to find them when a paying client wants to find them. “Excellent. Now what do you have for me?” She gave me an irritated look. She tossed me a piece of paper. Blank, but at my touch the blankness forms into words and a picture of a woman. Fingerprint activated, simple and quiet. I quickly scanned down the page and tapped the top corner a couple of times. The next page came up and then the next. A biography of her whole existence. All of her lives, every face, every name, everything. “Who’s paying?” I asked as I panned through some more pages. “HealthFood International. A subcontractor of her own company, Genefood Corp.” “That genetic engineered food chain?” “That’s her, she’s been missing for a couple of days. I guess they’re starting to get worried.” “Seems so.” On the way back to my apartment, I studied her profile a little more in detail. Not too many people get an opportunity to view another’s whole existence. Throughout life’s many bioengineered surgeries, there is one thing that must remain constant. DNA. Biometrics such as iris and fingerprints became outdated when people began to grow them to replace the owner’s previous failing parts. The growing of eyes still hadn’t reached the level of precision yet to mimic the random chaotic formations of the patterns in the iris and retina. But what always proves to be the most interesting of any individual is where they had started from. I brought up the page and began to look. Memories flooded through my head. A red haired woman is teaching a class of children. Getting drenched in the rain. A black-lace teddy. And an Elvis clone reading our wedding vows. My first ex-wife. Her name was Faith and she was the first woman I fell in love with. So she raises non-living poultry. It’s amazing how people who were once so familiar, change so completely. Or perhaps it’s more depressing. Something sparked within me. Something that I haven’t felt for a long time. But there was also something I couldn’t remember. Something important. A face of long ago that used to be on my body. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember him. During that eternity since then, I haven’t even thought about that. A complete stranger, heh, seems as if I’ve forgotten myself. I couldn’t go back to my apartment. This assignment was growing on me too quickly, so I headed over to her place to investigate. Her house was huge. It took me hours to find what I was looking for. Photo albums. Through the earlier albums, there were many pictures of a particular farm. From one of her bios I read, I remembered her living on a farm. She must have been real fond of the place to have so many old photos of it. Then I remembered something else and pulled out her bio sheet. Flipping through it I discovered that this farm was later acquired by her current company and transformed into one of their meat factories. That was probably where she was right now. But I was looking for something else. A picture of a particular man. After, what seemed an endless amount of photo albums, I found him. There he was, almost like a ghost of some long dead relative. Tom Smith. He was an average looking man, but he looked genuinely happy. He was less than a faint memory; a stranger I barely know. But she must remember him. With all of these photographs of her entire life, she would have to remember her first husband. It intrigued me to see if I could find this man again. Sleep had nothing on me, but I was going to bring back some of the photo albums to see if there were any more pictures of me. I’ll go to the meat factory tomorrow. It seemed darker than it should have been for that time in the early morning and I was greeted to a scent of cloves. No one was around, so I got into my car. The passenger side window shattered apart as a large steel sickle was forced through it. Then, there was that face from the café. He gave me a cold emotionless gaze and that’s all I could see, his face. The rest of his body was cloaked in black, which seemed to unnaturally blend in with the darkness around him. I could just stare at his face, frozen in my seat. Then his face became more familiar, just like memories of my ex-wife had earlier today. My body was full of holes, as a crowd of people stared down at me. I was the victim of a gruesome attack at some body-engineering place pulled by some extremist group. And there in that crowd was this same man’s face. Then I saw the pointed tips of a cast iron fence going through my chest, from the time I fell off a roof. There he was again walking towards me, but then disappeared as another man came down and brought me to the hospital. And there seemed to have been many other occasions like this. Times where I almost didn’t escape death. I then realized who this man was. My car accelerated out of there and headed to the only place on my mind. My ex-wife’s farm. When I pulled in, the place seemed lifeless. The outside looked as the old rustic red farm barn, but on the inside would be one of the most sterile and deathly looking places, they’d put a hospital to shame. Usually these places are pretty much empty. Everything is automated, however a technician usually comes in every couple of days to make sure everything is up to spec. The place was silent. Not a noise at all. Surrounding me were acres upon acres wheat. Genetically altered wheat of course. With all of these genetically altered creations of nature, it seems that Mother Nature has been moving out. With nobody around, I went inside. Many long hallways with glass windows stretched the length building. The place looks much bigger than it does from outside. From each window you could see into a room with hundreds of chicken bodies; bodies without heads. So without a head, a brain, they never were really alive. Each one being pumped with various steroids and other drugs to produce bigger and tastier meat. Actually looking at this made me wonder if people actually ate this stuff, but of course they did. I heard a slight buzzing noise, as if something was being charged. A woman stood there holding a very deadly looking gun in her hands. “Mrs. Lowry?” I asked. “I was hired to find you.” “Who…who sent you?” “Some business associates of yours. Some people were real worried about your disappearance,” and she began to cry. “Umm…do you remember a man named Tom Smith?” She looked confused, but then she began to shake her head slowly and then said no. My hope flickered. I looked into her eyes and I saw nothing. Emptiness. She dropped her gun and began to hug me as she began to cry, but I just stood there. “I’ve been so scared. I’ve been receiving so many death threats and people have actually tried to…to kill me. I didn’t feel a thing for her. That spark that was started earlier was extinguished. That man I was looking for was now gone forever. “Thank you very much Mr. Loas. Your service has been surprisingly quick and invaluable to us. We have already wired the money to your account,” a group of men entered the hallway from the outside. One of them was carrying a gun. “Now, if you excuse us we have some business to attend to with Mrs. Lowry here.” I looked at them, then back at her. I removed her arms from around me and left. As I walked past them, I asked if they knew anything about a deathly looking man dressed in black and they didn’t. I heard one of the guns charging as I walked outside. She began to scream. I didn’t feel like going back home, so I decided to walk around the farm. After about a half-hour, I saw a man hunched over a body of some kind. And there he was. There was that black-dressed man, the man I seemed to have evaded for my whole. He was hunched over a body and it almost seemed that he was weeping. I approached them. He didn’t notice me at first, but when he did he got up and stood over to the side. I looked over at the body. He was completely naked. Not a scratch or a bruise was on his body. He was in perfect condition. His body however was not perfect. He was incredibly thin and delicate. Everyone today is fit and trim. However he had a natural beauty about him. Something that was natural and untouched by science. And there was a mystery about this man. Something unexplainable. Things we destroyed a very long time ago. In this complete stranger lying naked on the ground, I felt a sense of familiarity. Like someone I’ve known my whole life, but didn’t realize until now. He seemed closer to me than Tom Smith will ever be. Past lives crept through my head again as they did so many times this day. With each new face and body I came closer to perfection. Mistakes and coincidences had turned seemingly nothingness into man. But truth and science seems to have turned them back into nothingness. Meaninglessness. I cried. I then reached out to embrace the man in black. BACK