Lost

Where on Earth?

In frenzied panic.

Oh, it must be. It must be.

Yes, that's it.

Must get. Must get... it.

Prelude

The scratching of pencils.

'When integrated, e x is still e x.'

'Ln x will then be one over x'

More scratching.

Tara looked up, her eyes behind the thick lenses of her glasses, as the voice of her Mathematics teacher, Martineau, droned on.

All eyes on her. Not fixed but peeks.
Bimbos, she muttered. It's only Hamer.

More scratching of pencils. On paper.

'Ladies and gentlemen, I want your Exercises 13 and 14 in by Friday. On your way out, they are by the door. You may leave. Thank you.'

A Friday afternoon. In a hurry to break for the weekend.

Ollie 'the not-so' Bright

In this world, there are numerous kinds of pain; both tangible and intangible. Like consequence, pain is unavoidable. Tis' something that cannot easily be slayed. Oliver Bright experienced 'the intangible pain' as he knelt by the deathbed of his neglected ailing mother.

After twenty long years, he regretted every crime he had ever committed against her; the time he emptied her bank account into his, the time he took her out of the Pensioners' Fund, the time he sent faeces in the mail when she asked for money, the time he wrote her the nastiest Christmas poem a son could ever pen. It said:

"Mother Dearest,
You speak like a bird,
Squawking.
Weaving in and out
of awrily-vocabularised tongues.

Mother Dearest,
You slurp like a frog,
Croaking.
Gurgling your soup
as if it were Mint Listerine.

Mother Dearest,
You snore like a pig,
Snorting.
Awaking each day
in a sea of mucus-ridden tissues.

Mother Dearest,
I've drawn out a list
Of your 'could be' Christmas gifts:
A hearing aid,
An inhaler
And a lovely wooden box."

Consequence showed again its grotesque face. In his thousand dollar Saville Row suit, Bright wept, as he did when he entered this world. Now a couple of a million pounds richer and a whole lot brighter (debatable), Oliver Bright continued to wail so loudly that the nurses scuttled in to check if they had to 'subdue a mental patient'.

"Ollie dear, hush now and come close," the frail lady said in a meek whisper. The truth was that she was still pertrified by the thought of hugging her 'rebelliously loaded' thirty year old son. "Why bawl your eyes out when you've hated my face all these years?" she asked, intrigued.

"You know I did love you," Bright lied.

"Liars don't go to heaven, Ollie."

"Mother Dearest, you know I don't buy life insurance."

"Oh shut up, Ollie. You know and I know that you're not the hard man you pretend to be. You're soft inside; you're afraid of something, afraid of lots of things."

"And you're an Epicurus."

The frail lady gazed into her son's teal eyes for the last time. She had given them to him, brought him into the world but without recompence. At her deathbed, she had hoped to help him but her invitation was stubbornly refused. As she closed her eyes and succumbed to eternal rest, she knew he would have to face his evils alone.

Reality struck Oliver Bright like a harsh swipe across the cheek. In a last ditch attempt to save an already dead woman's life, he tried everything possible in reviving his poor old mother who had died of a broken heart, from mouth-to-mouth resucsitation to throwing his stick-like frame at her. But to no avail.

As doctors hurried into the room to check for a non-existent pulse in order to pronounce his mother dead, Oliver Bright faded away as if a shadow in the room; a lone figure as he knelt by her bedside once more and admitted quietly, "I was afraid. I was afraid that I would live and die like you did."

Misnab

Errors precede consequence. Unworthy or worthy, deemed impartial or unjust, Consequence does not hesistate to dish out its will. Jamie Glass stared at the prisoner with disbelief.

With a cold and unnerving glare, he shook his head at the warden. Infuriated, he stormed out of the Criminal Multiplex and took swift, long strides as he headed for his office. The catastrophic outcome of the operation aghasted him. Jamie Glass never failed at anything. A misnab was, in his opinion, the greatest shame ever to have befallen his faculty. It was an abdominable crime, inconcievable and unacceptable. In fact, his mind was simply unable to register the fact for its sheer incognitance.

Glass placed his chin on his left hand with a pensive frown. He picked up his Black Churchill and scratched three angry words on a white memo sheet in his cursive scrawl- Leave us, disgrace. If there was one word Jamie Glass failed to comprehend, it was 'failure'.

'Former Major' Kermit received the slip with glowing pride. "Ho ho ho, marry money. Here comes ma' fourth stripe and ma' humble wage raise." Unfortunately, he was fatally wrong.

Zee Froggie Major

Clad in their bright green cobalt suits, Zee Froggies were very much like the name suggested. Codenamed ZF, they were the B.I.I.P.O's most efficient, effective and establised strike force. Often selected from the country's most talented triatheletes, they were equally competent on land and in the water. They would run, jump, hop, crawl, swim, dive, snorkel and (of course) do the rest of the stereotypical Ninja Turtle business.

They were in for a shock.

Major Kermit III */// narrowed his eyes at the desolated landscape that lay before him in disbelief. "And how are we going to nab this unknown thing from this messy unknown place with an unknown gender and an unknown age when the odds of nabbing it are unknown!" he exclaimed in exasperation. His men had scoured the area five times over but had yet to locate their target.

Then came revelation- a tapioca chip auction. Regaining his composure, Zee Froggie Major began to order his servile underlings about; allocating them tasks, such as making a big hullaboo on purpose about the auction to catch everyone's attention, while he sat by the road sipping his tumbler of hot cocoa. He was confident of receiving his fourth stripe.

The auction sailed smoothly. The bag of tapioca chips was haggled over and fought over, as planned. Froggies in plain clothes had been planted among the bidders to spread rumours about its mystical properties in order to increase the item's value, and to stir up petty rivalries. The auction was won by a vertically-changed creature with enormous statellite dish-like ears.

Major Kermit */// waited for the crowd to disperse before walking up casually to the winner, congratulating 'it' and incapacitating 'it' with vicious blow to the torso. It was too late.

*/// represents a star and three stripes received from His Royal Greenery. Stars are awarded for courage in battle and stripes for impressive service and leadership, or for proposing tactically brilliant strategies on combat missions.

Watched

Trach watched the gaudy red pack of tapioca chips, which lay enticingly on its palm, for several minutes and contemplated its potential nutritional value. Like any other health conscious freak, it too paid careful attention to the negligible (debatable) figures printed at the back of the packet foolishly. A logical human mind would reason more sensibly that those insignificant numbers are unquestionably false; which company would risk their sales by being truthful about a couple of useless numerics whose key roles were solely to help the consumer's get over his guilty conscience at having ingurgitated so much fats. But when it came to the high caloried spicy tapioca chips, Trach was like a child begging for its crunchy chocolate Pokey stick.

Finally convinced that it was indeed safe, Trach tore the pack open cautiously and fingered the sticky snack before picking up a piece. Pure esctacy. Serving the same sensational purpose as the illicit substance, the chip got Trach so high that it started to tango with an asomatous "Mister Air". Never heard that it takes two to dance the tango?

Back at the bureau, Jamie Glass was pleased as he watched his prey in hysterics from the video screen. It was time to send in Zee Froggies.

Ahoy, ze Tapioca Chips!

Trach Cee-Chewgum adored chilli. All kinds of chillies - red chilli, green chilli, chilli padi, garlic chilli, sweet and sour chilli, just to name a few. To our odd creature, chilli was -without a doubt- heaven on earth. It even ran an illegal food syndicate, SpyCFud, which sold illicit chilli products in bulk to affluent executives with the same unorthodox craving.

No one at the syndicate knew their boss. No one knew it was on the B.I.I.P.O's most wanted list. No one knew it lived in a shelter made up of cardboard throwaways. Every employee had already been brainwashed into thinking that their head honcho was a psycho megalomaniac, with bank accounts that ran up to nine digits, who had no social life and who was permanently paralysed due to a broken vertebrex and grave cases of the Parkinson's Disease and haemophibilia. Board meetings were conversations with a computer animated wheelchair-bound figure and lasted no longer than five minutes. And still, people worked their asses off for a whatchamacallit because they were given six figure paychecks.

But Trach Cee-Chewgum had no need for money. Money is the root of all evil; and our odd creature did not want to be evil. Evil was a most vile word; take the 'e' out from the front and place it at the back to get 'vile'. Trach was proud of its bizarre theory, it thought it made plenty of sense.

Money = Evil
Evil = Vile.
Trach =/= Money
Trach =/= Evil =/= Vile

It was wholly satisfied by the dozen crates of chilli products delivered to its doorstep by an anonymous delivery boy every morning at exactly 11:59:59AM. Its entire life revolved solely around chilli and hiding. Though such a lifestyle would seem almost miserable to our society's ambitious 'eager beavers', Trach found it exceedingly gratifying.

One particularly humid afternoon, Trach was sitting contentedly with its bag of chilli-flavoured popcorn and its plate of chilli-marinated buffalo wings when an eye-catching flyer flew in from the window (a square-shaped hole our odd creature had cut out with a scissor). It said in bold black words: SPICY TAPOICA CHIPS. Now, 'the Great Unknown' was fascinated. It never would have believed that tapoica could be manufactured into deliciously crispy and spicy chips. "Tis' suits my palate very well," it thought, for the first time in days.

It rushed to its computer monitor almost immediately and requested a meeting with SpyCFud's Board of Directors. To its dismay, it was informed by their secretaries that they were all out for lunch. Enraged, it sacked them all without bonus or a month's notice and promoted ten of its best managers to take their place. Extreme matters require extreme measures, it muttered. Manipulating its virtual puppet with a computer mouse, it assigned numerous tasks to each of its newly-appointed directors. They did not mind either for their annual payroll had just been increased to a seven digit sum. Phone calls to prominent farmers and shipping companies across the globe would ensure that SpyCFud monopolised the sale of spicy tapoica chips. If there was an upcoming food trend, Trach Cee-Chewgum could be counted on to spot it. It enjoyed these mindless 'games' and could not understand why its human counterparts were hopelessly rotten at such things.

Eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds of a Sunday

You see, Jamie Glass was a workaholic. He devoured devious documents on deviants devotedly and was the chief mastermind of all of the bureau's most successful captures. While his father had been a lucrative, jet-setting, flamboyant, moneymaking billionaire-cum-Lord Viscount, Glass Jr was the reticent, dilligent boss of the country's most esoteric ministry. In fact, it was not even called a ministry but bureau; for cladestine purposes, they say.

One particularly fine evening, Glass came across a series of highly confidential documents and was highly intrigued by the odd creature featured. This creature was none other than 'the Great Unknown". Like many foolish human beings before him, Glass thought (well, he couldn't speak), "I don't believe in the unknown. The unknown is but Man's excuse for not knowing everything."

The file read something like this:
Species Name: Unknown
Also Known As: The Great Unknown
Age: Unknown
Whereabouts: Unknown
Odds of nabbing: Unknown

Glass was immensely intrigued. He pressed the lime green buzzer on his desk and summoned his wife to his side. Dahling Bel impressed him; as always. He was increasingly impressed by her uncanny ability to keep up with the latest news.

"It was last seen at L'Forte Maison Cafe with a blond transvestite. We didn't quite see it with our own eyes but when we questioned the blond, he said, 'yeh, ah dunno'," she educated her spouse. Her tone was imperturbable and cold; robotlike. To the couple, work was work. Although they did occasionally break their self-imposed regulations, they abided to them almost piously for most part. They preferred not to sit together for lunch at the staff canteen in order to not arouse suspicions that they were seeing each other, since no one knew that they were actually married as there had been no ceremony or invited guests at all. "Such rumours would put us in the most hideous of scenarios. They'd spread like wildfire," Treadwell told her husband once. She was obviously not in the know. They also preferred to forget their maritial responsibilities to each other from nine to seven, seven days a week. Yes, Sunday too. Neither observed the Sabbath. Their rationale behind this was their reasoning that 'every second could bring a villianous varmint closer to their fingertips, so why waste the precious eighty-six thousand and four hundred seconds of a Sunday?'

Glass sucked on his pencil. *He observed that it had a rather sweet flavour. With a businessman like air, he let its tip drop and drew the bold outline of a star on the top right hand corner of the page; the same sort teachers did on outstanding test scripts. Jamie Glass now had a new assignment.

*- Author's Note: Some people are just strange!

The Couple

Everyone at the Bureau of Intelligence and Investigation of Peculiar Organisms knew Jamie Glass fancied Annabel Treadwell. But no one said it aloud. It was the sort of thing which required no announcement. Not that anyone dared to either.

The couple was often spotted (and ignored almost immediately) kissing in a dark corridor and tales of their year long sabbatical in India were repeated time and time again to fresh-faced ministry colleagues. Whether there was considerable truth in these tales, no one knew. They might even have been tall tales but no one cared. Humans have long had a genetically embedded attraction to gossip. These people were only human. For them, gossip came as naturally as the change of tides. To them, Messr Glass and Mademoiselle Treadwell were an enigma; an easy lunchtime conversation topic.

Now, Jamie Glass was born lucky. Eton, Sandhurst and a stint with the Welsh Guards. He had been a dashing young captain with dark hair and the most captivating green eyes. Then pandemonium broke loose. With deep regret expressed by both parties, he was asked to leave when the General figured that his prospective regimental commander would be eternally inept at giving commands. Glass was transferred to the Ministries and to make up for the loss, given the top job at the B.I.I.P.O. In making this decision, the government had made a hypothetical supposition that a strange thing like Jamie Glass ought to deal with things more strange than himself.

Annabel Treadwell was his pretty assistant with flowing black hair and voluptous figure; albeit very similar to Demi Moore. She hardly ever spoke. And that suited Glass very well. They were married despite the fact that neither had ever proposed, taken vows or invited relatives to share their joy. Annabel didn't want to. Jamie just couldn't. To put it nicely, he was vocally impaired.

The Acquaintance

It was a glorious Monday morning. The very best our dear friend had seen in years. Less so because of the weather -droplets of rainwater dripped from the eaves of its cardboard roof- but more so because it was going to meet a trusted acquaintance at a sleazy French cafe somewhere. *It didn't know where exactly but It certainly had done Its homework on the location of this certain brasserie having marked out its location on Its map and using its x and y coordinates to calculate its bearing from Its 'place of standing'.

But when it did set foot upon the very point that it had plotted out on its well-augmentated map, it was highly puzzled. It stood rooted to the ground and squinted at the mammoth-sized signboard which stood towering five feet above its dimunitive frame. It couldn't be it, it reasoned and swore with its life that it had 6 x 6 vision.

Brassiere. Brasserie. It was just a matter of placing the 'i'. Yet, the meddlesome 'i' did not fail to confuse. Now, our odd creature groaned. It was not friends with stress. Stress resulted in tension headaches. Years of holding the post of top dog in the hallowed Slackers Fellowship had indeed dulled its brain. A fainéant. Thinking had become a redundant inneccesity. Still, Trach Cee-Chewgum pondered deeply on the prospects of its acquaintance arranging to meet at an undergarment boutique.

The acquaintance sported silky blond hair and huge sapphire eyes. He was the very sort people called pretty boys; more pretty than handsome, more a girl than a boy; everything on the outside, hollow on the inside.

"Yee ashked meh ter meet yeh heer?"

"Yeh."

"Wha fer?"

"Ah dunno."

"Whall, are wee gunna hafe food?"

"Ah dunno."

"Su... wha arh wee doin heer?"

"Ah dunno."

"Whall, say summat beshides 'ah dunno'!"

"Yeh."

"And 'yeh'."

"Wha?"

Trachel Cee-Chewgum had quite enough of this dual-syllabic conversation. Irritably, it detached itself the acquaintance's vice-like grip and made its leave for home sweet home. It was fortunate. Ten minutes later, the acquaintance was hounded by the pack of angry paparazzi.

"Did you see it?" they interrogated menancingly.

To which the acquaintance casually replied, "Yeh, ah dunnno."

*- For the convienence of readers, I have capitalised the 'it's which refer to the 'Great Unknown' in this highly confusing sentence. I apologise if you misunderstand this sentence but be assured that understanding it is not essential for understanding the novel.

Friends are for Fools

There have been some who say that friends are the family we choose for ourselves. Trach Cee-Chewgum disagreed with a vengeance. After a gazillion years of participating actively in an extensive field of research regarding relationship psychology and the simple human brain, our odd creature has met with the conclusion that friends are the most cunning, despicable and hypocritical scrouges on the face of this Earth.

Friends pretend. You can never tell the emotional overtures of a 'smiley' friend and a 'frowny' friend. A 'smiley' friend might be smiling merely for the sake of smiling. A most plastic act. Or more postively, he might be smiling because of the fact that he is truly happy that something unhappy has befallen a foe or even a 'friend' whom he unconciously dislikes. Prof T.C-C laboriously notes in its comprehensive scientific journal that this sort will be in urgent need of jaw reconstructive surgery in the near future. On the other hand, a 'frowny' friend might be frowning merely for the sake frowning. Or frowning to put up a show of sadness when a 'friend' falls over and cuts his knee. Prof T.C-C recommends wrinkle removals for those of this kind. Neither impresses our odd creature who swears staunchly never to mingle with 'these most foul trollocks'.

Friends are bloody money suckers. 'Smiley' friends are the nefarious entities which entice you to diabolical malls just to splunder hard-earned cash on worthless material goods. 'Frowny' friends don't get any better. Your star studded job, a twenty-four hour counselor without the service charge, might get you a Nobel Peace Prize for resolving worldly conflicts and ambassadoring the noble virtue of peace. But the chances of that happening have proven to be as low as the chances of Britney Spears getting married, staying married and living happily ever after.

And yet despite its august protestations against the inherent value of friendship, Trach Cee-Chewgum did have many lowlings which did consider it a friend. And for this, it was most ashamed. In fact, it received a grand total of two hundred and eighty-four delightful Christmas greeting cards from well-wishers last year. All of which were promptly mailed back to the sender as "lost and returned to the stated address". All except for one.

Too Close for Comfort

And so Trach Cee-Chewgum was going about its usual business of hiding when it was startled by a blinding flash of light. Utterly terrified at being noticed, it scuttled into its little corner and promptly suffered from a serious bout of intense seizures.

To the average human being, fame and popularity are the rights to unabashed bigotry. But to this very odd creature, they are the very plagues of destruction.

Whimpering like a wounded puppy, 'the Great Unknown' made its way towards a towering stack of cardboard boxes. Alas, an alcove; away from the filthy land of gargantuan, foul-mouthed trolls. Still trembling tremendously, it crawled warily into its cosy home; eyes wide open (and nearly bulging out of their sockets) to serve the purpose of spotting the casual unwelcome visitor, and stun gun ready in hand to disable and depot the unfortunate guest to an unknown country in exile.

Finally convinced that it was now all alone, it curled up on its fluffy, feathery bed, and settled to rest. Here, there was security. 'The Great Unknown' would never have to fear becoming 'The Great Known'. Or so it thought.

Prologue

Somewhere, some place, some time long ago, there lived someone called Trach Cee-Chewgum. And this was a strange, obnoxious character. No one really knew it. Thus, it was called 'the Great Unknown'. Such profound reference to a human being has been unprecedented in history. But then again, Missy C-Chewgum is an odd creature which lurks in the shadows in its quiet obscurity; begging never to be seen, noticed and heard. One windy afternoon, however, it became a she.

Man has been deeply fascinated by the unknown for centuries. The quantum theory. The truth about evolution. Man dislikes the unknown. Man refuses to acknowledge the fact that some things unknown must remain unknown. In a bid for satisfying his insatiable hunger for paramount understanding, Man boldly challenges his meagre intelligence and the will of the Creator himself. Has he not heard of the proverb -let sleeping dogs lie?

The Great Unknown

Commences 1 November 2004