Summary: The man whose 'phenomenal mind made this all possible' longs for something more than he can ever find in his work on Tracy Island. Follow Brains on a quest to find out who he really is.

SEARCHING

For years it's been at the back of my mind. Wondering who I really am. Where did I come from? Who was my mother? My father? My grandparents? Living as part of the Tracy family, however peripherally, only drives home to me what Idon't know. There's Ruth, her son Jeff and his five sons. And one by one, each of them are moving beyond who they've been these last seven years, making lives outside International Rescue. But somehow it just feels wrong for me to even think about having a family when I have no knowledge of my own roots.

And so I keep searching. I've tried every archive system in the world. Those I wasn't given permission to go through I've accessed on my own. But it's hard to find out who you are when you don't have a first or last name to start with. I literally am starting from scratch, as they say. I have only one piece of evidence, and that is that I was found in the rubble of a home in Holt, Michigan after a tornado swept through the area and destroyed hundreds of miles of land and buildings. Newspaper clippings indicate that 42 people died as a result of that tornado. It was April 23, 2001.

And that's why we celebrate my birthday on that day. Doctors think I was around three months old, but they don't know for certain. I could go back three months from April 23rd, but that day holds meaning for me. Because it's the day I lost whatever identity I had once had. The day I ceased to be someone and became Baby Doe. It's fitting, somehow, to celebrate my years on that day. The day I was orphaned.

But I don't even know that for certain. Was I in that small town with my parents? If not, who was I with and why? And if my parents were alive somewhere, why hadn't they looked for me? Certainly they would have known my whereabouts and come inquiring after me. Unless I had been given up for adoption before that tornado ever hit. But the one strange thing about all of this besides the fact that I have more questions than answers is that no other bodies were found in the rubble of the house I had apparently been in at the time.

That means that someone left a six-month old baby alone in a house during a terrible storm which had all the earmarks of one that could produce funnel clouds. Who would do that? Would my mother leave me all alone? Maybe I had been in bed, though I'm told the cleanup crews never found evidence of a crib in that rubble. That leads me to believe that I didn't live there. So if I was visiting, where were the people who had brought me? And where were the people we'd come to see? The home had no storm cellar, only a basement. But nobody was found down there, either.

I grapple with these questions with some part of my brain nearly every day, and have for most of my life. I'm 31 years old, and no closer to finding out how I came to be in Michigan, or what my heritage is. I watch the interaction of the Tracys and I have to admit that I sometimes envy what they share: a loving family bond created by the blood that runs through their veins and the experience of having grown up together as a solid family unit. They include me in everything, make no mistake. Jeff is forever saying "You're part of the family, Brains. Youare a Tracy." I only wish that were true. I am grateful to him for saying it, but there are some things you just can't create. Things that are innate and cannot be synthesized.

A familial bond is one of those things.

I keep trying. I e-mail anyone and everyone who might even remotely have some knowledge of me or my past. I've pretty much exhausted Michigan. At least, I think I have until early one Tuesday morning when I open my e-mail to find a response to an inquiry I made over a month ago. It's from .gov. I'm really surprised to see it there and for a moment I just stare at it in my Inbox, my eyes blinking slowly, wondering what it will say when I open it.

Originally I had e-mailed the Michigan Records Office to follow up on a new idea I had: to cross-reference the State of Michigan birth records from 2000 through 2001 with the infant death records from the same period. I thought perhaps a mismatch might signal a possible lead for me. Many of the records from that time were corrupted when a virus rampaged the Michigan records system only two years ago, so only someone with access to the actual hard copies could do it. Could this e-mail from sbeasley be confirmation of my hypothesis? Or would it once again be the standard, "I'm sorry, sir, we were unable to obtain the information you requested" response?

I sigh as I click on the subject line. And I find myself feeling nervous as I read the contents.

Dear Mr. Braman:

I must say I was surprised to receive your request. It was most unusual. However, my staff has performed the cross-check as requested and indeed came up with two mismatched names of infants born in the years 2000 and 2001.

The first infant is female, which excludes her from your search. The second infant, however, is male, but the birth certificate is inaccessible to me because it is protected by the adoption laws of this state. In other words, Mr. Braman, the male infant of which I speak was adopted and therefore his records are sealed.

Should you require further assistance, please contact me and I will do my best to help you.

Sincerely,
Susan Beasley
Records Department
State of Michigan

I lean back in my chair, my jaw hanging open slightly, my eyes reading her words over and over again. Adopted. A male infant that was adopted. For the first time my hopes begin to rise, but logic demands that I not get those hopes up toohigh. After all, the probability that the infant she mentions is me is approximately 1,253,422 to 1. And yet in all my travels and through all the searching I have done over the years, this is the first time I've really received a viable lead.

Could it be? Could Susan Beasley's staff have found the clue that has eluded me my entire life? Could I finally be on the road to discovering who I am? I try not to get excited, but is it too much to ask to know where you came from? I don't think it is. I realize as continue to stare at the e-mail that I need to see Susan Beasley in person. The adoption records of that infant boy were sealed, but she said she'd help me if she could. So she is Stop #1.

All I have to do now is convince Jeff that he can do without me for a week.

Jeff has just returned from a routine doctor's appointment in Sydney. I will give him 30 minutes to settle in before I make my request. That gives my brain 30 minutes to sift through my entire life to date. To try and make sense of who I am, who I have been and who I might become.

Natalie took care of me at the orphanage. She raised me, was my surrogate mother. She's the one who named me Christopher Braman. Christopher was her deceased husband's first name, and Braman was her own maiden name. And so that was the name I grew up with. But I quickly understood as a toddler that I was an orphan and even then would spend hours questioning why I had no parents, how I had ended up in that place.

She encouraged my learning. It was pretty clear my intelligence was above-average for a young child, and Natalie made sure I had everything she could get her hands on for me, even setting me up with a chemistry set when I was six. I didn't really intermingle too much with the other kids. You've probably heard the stereotype: brilliant but lack social skills. Well, it's true. At least for me, it is. I can interact with people who understand what I'm saying, but when it comes to normal socializing, I find that it makes me uncomfortable and therefore I stammer something awful, which embarrasses me. I usually wind up hiding out somewhere or leaving the situation entirely.

Yes, it's always been that way. You should've seen when I first started interacting with Jeff's sons. Those men are what you would call jocks, plain and simple. Competitive, athletic, smart and with egos the size of Texas. I have to laugh now as I remember how nervous they made me. They interacted with one another with such ease, and as I analyzed their behavior, I came to understand that it wasn't so much the jock part of the equation that made that possible, but the fact that they were brothers. That was the key.

Eventually they came to understand me as I came to understand them, and now there are no issues at all really. Well, sometimes I do go a bit above their heads when I get really into explaining something, but they've learned to stop me and tell me to backtrack, and I've learned some patience, which I never really had before. I said 'some.' Nobody's perfect. They treat me as an equal and I admire them so much for their acceptance. Yet as I said before, I still always feel like I'm on the outside looking in, no matter how much I'm included in their family activities and decisions.

I look at the chronometer and realize I still have ten minutes to kill. My mind wanders yet again to the orphanage, and to some of the darker times in my life. I already took care of John, the man who had been molesting boys there for years, myself included. And it took me a while to work through what he did to me, and what I wound up doing to him. (Author's Note: See my story "Child's Play" for this history.)

Then my thoughts turn to yet another dark chapter: the Hood. I very nearly fell into his evil hands when I was lecturing as a teen. He mesmerized me somehow, and it was only by pure luck that I escaped. (Author's Note: See my story "Doppelgangers" for this history.) My life could have been so much different if I hadn't. I would probably have been forced to use my intelligence for destructive purposes, and to me that is not only unacceptable, it is totally unthinkable. At least he's gone now, thanks to Jeff. (Author's Note: See my story "Tidings of Comfort and Joy" for this history.)

When I met Jeff Tracy and heard his proposal, I jumped at the chance not only to use my mind for the good of humankind, but also be in a position to perform experiments and research as much as I desired. Not to mention the fact that here I am safe from those who would use me...or rather, my brains...for their own criminal purposes. With the Tracys, I never have to worry about that, and I am protected. For that, I will be eternally grateful to Jeff.

It's almost too good to be true. At least, that's what I thought back when he first approached me. To be given everything I'd ever dreamed of and be helping save lives in the process? That was Utopia for me: something ideal I longed for but knew didn't exist. And yet it did exist, and the name of my Utopia is Tracy Island. I'm not the only one Jeff has played benefactor to. Kyrano and Tin-Tin have also benefitted from his protection and generosity. In a way, that gives the three of us something in common, since we live and work with the Tracys but are not blood relatives.

I work with Kyrano sometimes, whenever he and I have occasion to sit and talk. Accessing the higher levels of consciousness fascinates me from a scientific point of view, and so he has taught me his mystical ways of doing so while I, on the other hand, try to understand these layers of consciousness using science. That is a hobby, working through that, and something I don't devote a lot of time to given all the other things on my plate.

For not only do I assist Jeff's sons in maintaining the Thunderbirds and all the rescue equipment, I am also constantly testing new ideas and theories to help make them more effective on rescues. My oxyhydnite gas, for example, which allows them to quickly cut through up to 8.2 inches of steel to get to victims. My LSI, the Life Sign Indicator, which is a handheld device they can use to provide the exact location of people who are trapped. And our newest rescue vehicle, the Leech.

I had to laugh when Gordon named it that. It's a very simple machine that I designed right after that last mudslide rescue they went on. It was a terrible experience for them. Over two thousand people died, and though they arrived on the scene very quickly, there was nothing they could do to get to people who might still be alive somewhere under all that mud. No matter what they used to try and dig through it, it simply moved in and filled up whatever holes they started digging. It makes perfect logical sense, but logic tends to fail a man when he's chin-deep in mud and is unable to save even one life.

The Mole isn't always useful, especially in these situations. Most times the earth, even underground, is so rain-soaked on a mudslide rescue that the tunnel the Mole creates collapses before she's even gotten through it herself. Tunneling up from beneath does no good if it causes land subsidence beneath the building, or causes mud from above to come crashing down on the Tracys and the victims.

And so the Leech was born. So named by Gordon because it literally sucks the mud into itself the way a leech sucks blood. I had been leaning more towards a name that had something to do with vacuuming, but his brothers liked it so much that Gordon's choice stuck. Amidst much guffawing, I might add. The Leech sucks the mud into its holding tank, which is the entire rear of the vehicle behind where the driver sits. It then transforms the mud into dry earth by evaporating all the water from it. How? That's International Rescue's secret!

As the water evaporates, the dry earth is processed through a second chamber behind the holding tank, and tumbles down a long tube that has been strategically placed to let the dirt exit away from the area being worked on. They haven't had a rescue to use it on as yet, but they did take it to the Philippines for a test since that country is, unfortunately, known for its rain-soaked ground, and the tests were highly successful.

I look at the chronometer and realize that once again I've gotten so lost in my own thoughts that I've let 45 minutes pass instead of 30. My mind tends to stray like that. And so I head up the stairs to Jeff's study, which is adjacent to his bedroom suite. Knocking on the door, I hear him tell me to come in. I open the door and enter. As I sit in one of the two chairs across from him, I find myself nervous. So, there goes my stammering again.

"Good afternoon, Brains! What can I do for you?"

"W-Well, ah, Jeff, I...I was wondering i-if it would be a-any trouble for me to take, ah, to take one week's leave."

There. I'd said it. Well, I'd stammered it, anyway. Damn my nerves! He looks surprised and I wonder if he'll start talking about how busy I am and how much they need me right now. Or maybe he'll let me go. It's hard to tell with Jeff Tracy.

"What's this all about, Brains? A special conference somewhere that I'm not aware of? You're not usually one to request a vacation."

"Ah, no, sir, you're right about that. Actually, sir, i-it's business of a more, ah, personal nature."

"Personal?" He frowned and leaned forward on his elbows, staring at me intently with those blue-gray eyes that have been known to make grown men want to cry. "Brains, is everything okay?"

"Y-Yes, sir, Jeff, everything is, ah, okay. I-I just...I have a viable lead on...on my identity, and...ah, well, I..." My nerves are shot. It's hard for me to talk about myself to this man, no matter how well I know him.

"You mean about who you are?" His voice is soft and calming, and I find myself relaxing as he leans back in his chair. "About your real identity?"

I nod enthusiastically. Now I'm getting excited. "Yes! I received a communication from someone at the main Michigan Records office who ran a comparison I requested and found something that...well, it may be nothing, it may not even be me, but...Jeff, I just have to know!"

It's amazing how my stuttering disappears when I forget about being nervous. I've also been told that it's because my mind goes faster than my mouth can keep up with. I have yet to prove that theory...

See? I'm wandering again.

Suddenly Jeff nods at me. "Okay, Brains. One week. Keep in touch."

"Really?" I find myself asking.

He grins at me. "Yes, really. Listen, Brains, I don't want to do without you for a second here. But I have no right to keep you from investigating this." He rose to his feet and stuck out his hand. I took it, and he shook firmly. "Besides, I think we're all just as curious about your past as you are."

"Thank you, Jeff," I say. I don't think I could respect this man anymore than I do right at this moment. "Thank you."

But no sooner had the moment of potential mush, as Tin-Tin puts it, started than Jeff puts an end to it. "You can take Tracy Three," he says. "Where are you headed?"

"Michigan," I reply, letting go of his hand. "I'll need to land in Lansing, that's where the Department of Records is."

He nods as I turn and head out of his study. His voice stops me, and I turn back as he speaks. "Brains?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I hope you find what you're looking for."

I find myself smiling. Somehow, I think I just might this time. "Me, too. Thanks."

And with that, I'm on my way.