 I'm a forensic investigator. If you've ever watched any of those CSI shows, you have a very bad idea of what I do, but it's close enough to the truth for my purposes here today. If you haven't seen any of those shows, basically, I spend a lot of time with dead bodies. Some are recently dead, some are long decayed, but they're all the same in one way. They used to be people, and now they're objects. It's the dirty secret of forensics, probably of a lot of other similar professions too. I'd expect cops and doctors, and what have you. You stop seeing people as people. You start to view them as puzzles, problems to be solved. It starts with the corpses, but it starts spreading out into everyday life. Conversations become little logic problems. What did that word choice mean? What's indicated by that body posture? It's the same as reconstructing a final fight from stab wounds or ascertaining motive from blood spatter. Except the problem is, it makes you less human. It's not okay to interact with people like that, and when you do, it changes you. And other people notice. Your friends stop inviting you over as often as they once did, first dates end with a next day text thanking you, but explaining that the chemistry just wasn't there, you find yourself alone at parties holding a drink and watching the flow of people around you. Thinking, what does it mean that this person travels from group to group? Look at the way those two are standing. Is that attraction? You don't even notice that you're not included in anything that's happening. And the thing is, it's comforting. It feels good to be detached from everything, to look at the world through a clinical eye. Or at least it doesn't feel bad. And that's close enough to the same thing. It's an easy slope to slide down. And a lot of us end up isolated alone. I didn't want to go that route. So when I noticed that people were starting to drift away from me, or that I was starting to drift away from them, I made an effort to fix it. I organized outings with friends. I made a point of remembering people's birthdays. I got into group hobbies. I took up hiking with a local nature club, drinking craft brews with other young professionals. I even joined a book club for a couple months. Through all of this, though, I felt like I was swimming upstream. No matter how much I interacted with people, the non-personhood of the bodies I work with kept dragging humanity away from everyone in my eyes. It took me an embarrassingly long time to stumble on the fairly obvious solution, rehumanize the bodies. These were all people once, right? So if I wanted to care about people, what better place to start? I started learning about the people I was working on. I'd read obituaries, look up their social profiles online, go to their funerals if they were open to the public. Is that weird? That's probably pretty weird. Thing is, though, it worked. By developing a connection to the people that the bodies had been, I curtailed the sociopathic advance I'd been fearing. I learned about who they were when they were people, and it stopped me from seeing people as pre-bodies. I started to interact with people naturally again, and they relaxed around me. People were excited to see me when I walked into a room. This went well, progressing into relationships. I was a regular person again. As a weird side effect, though, I sort of wandered into a new hobby. Maybe hobby is too mild a word, but obsession is definitely way too strong. Intrigue? I don't know, pick your favorite word on that sliding scale. Whatever you'd like to call it, I ended up fascinated by John Doe's. See, these were bodies that had been people, obviously, since that's where bodies come from. But who had they been? In my line of work, we see unidentified bodies all the time, and sometimes we can match them through fingerprinting, dental records, tattoos, scars, even last known outfits or distinctive jewelry. But sometimes there's just no match. All of the databases turn up blank, no one's reporting anyone's similar missing, and basically, just no one seems to care. This got to me. It got under my skin. Here I was, going out of my way to learn about people, to stop bodies from being objects, and these John Doe's just turn up with no way to find out who they were. But no one cared about them in life, was no one looking for them. A lot of times, it seemed like this was exactly the case, and I couldn't handle that. So I made up my mission to find out about them. My crusade, you could say. I started looking into missing persons reports, compiling lists of data. I'd start with geographically relevant ones, but then I'd spread out from there. It's so easy to travel these days, after all. So just because someone went missing in Wyoming, who's to say that he wouldn't turn up dead in Florida? There are between 80,000 and 100,000 active missing person cases in the United States at any given time, close to three quarters of a million people go missing in this country every year. That's over two-tenths of a percent of the population. Now many of them turn back up in one form or another, but a lot of them just sort of vanish. There's another database called the unidentified person file. It's got fewer than 10,000 records in it, nearly all of which are John Doe's that no one could ever match up to a real person. I read through that file until I knew those names forward and backwards. I knew some of the bodies in there better than I knew my own family, the extended family anyway. I was never clear on all my cousins. This wasn't some fruitless tilting in Windmill's quest either. I actually matched up quite a few people, not always to the satisfaction of the police departments that I turned my findings over to, but always with enough evidence that I was convinced. I felt that I'd put these people to rest, honored their memory in my own peculiar way. It was no worse the use of my time than coin collecting or any of a thousand other strange things people do in their spare time, and it made me feel better about life. That is, until I came across something impossible. A few months back, I was combing through new missing persons reports and one of them caught my eye. A woman, five foot four, 47, dirty blonde hair, distinctive scar on her right calf from a dog attack when she was a child. The scar was described as a series of interlaced lions, and that was what stirred up a memory. I shuffled back through my old files, and I found her in the John Dose, female, five foot four, 40 to 50, blonde hair, right calf bearing an old scar in a series of interwoven lions. The body badly mangled, as if it had been put under intense pressure, possibly a compactor of some sort. No identification made, no family came forward to claim the body, and so she was filed and buried. In February of 1973, only, according to the record I just found, she was alive and well in December of 2017. In 1973, she would have been three years old. She probably didn't even have the scar from the dog attack yet. So how did they find her body 40 years before she went missing? Obviously, I thought it was a creepy coincidence at first. There weren't any pictures of the scar, just the description. And so I told myself that it was just a woman of similar build and similar age, who happened to have a scar that could be described in a similar fashion. What other rational explanation could there be? The rhetorical question nagged at me, though, and after a couple weeks, I started looking into it. Always before, I'd filtered out my John Doe's based on date of discovery, so as not to waste my time with false positives that couldn't possibly be the missing person I was looking for. Feeling stupid, even as I did it. I took that restriction off and began running my searches. I found them hundreds of them, descriptions that match down to the eye color, shoe size, and blood type. Displaced in time by decades, found dead in some cases years before they were born. Identical bodies perfectly matched descriptions of tattoos. The bodies were always damaged, some pulverized, as if having fallen from a great height. Some crushed under incredible pressure, some badly burned, and more than a few frozen. There's nothing linking the people that I can find. They're all ages, from all walks of life. Male, female, rich, poor, multiple races, with, family, and without. The earliest I've found went missing in 1981 and was reported as John Doe in 1949. But that's probably just because it gets harder and harder to find records as you look back. No one cared enough to digitize the paperwork for bodies discovered half a century before, so what records there are are mainly moldering papers crammed into forgotten boxes in precinct basements. Something is casting people through time. I don't know what, or even if it is a what. Maybe it's a who. I think it's been going on for a very long time, because even on some of the ones I can't match to a missing person, I can tell the telltale signs of damage. The crushing, the smashing, those are the giveaways. Burning is harder to be sure about, but the out of season freezing, those are probably its victims too. I've started digging into older and older records, convincing uninterested police chiefs to let me into those forgotten basement boxes. I found more matches, more evidence. But there's nothing I can really point to as definitive proof. I'm convinced, but I know I'd sound crazy to your average person. I wasn't planning on telling anyone about this until I found absolute proof of some sort. Maybe a photograph or something, something irrefutable at any rate. But now I think I need to let people know what I've discovered. Yesterday, I was digging through a stack of unidentified body reports from the 1910s from Wyoming. It was barely even a state then, so there were plenty of people turning up dead and unclaimed. But I came across one described as flattened like a train ran over him, which seemed like my sort of case. He was in his late thirties, had short black hair, measured 511, and had a tattoo on his right bicep of twisted knotted lines with Gaelic text. And see, I'm 511. I've got short black hair, and on my right bicep is a Celtic knotwork tattoo underscoring a Gaelic blessing, the same as the dead man's. May his soul be at God's right hand. It's basically the Irish version of rest and peace. And I'm already in my mid-thirties. I think I'm going to find out what happens to these people after all. And I'm scared to death.