(back)   (page 2 of 2)   For the next week and a half, Aida only heard from Clonnus periodically. He would call in the wee hours of the night when he'd worked himself to the point when sleep was inevitable. He'd call to talk about how things were going and promptly fall asleep with the receiver against his face before Aida could so much as tell him what she'd been doing lately.   Aida was fed up of his behaviour. The arousal she'd once had for his new self was quickly replaced with frustration and loneliness. His call came that evening just in time, as she was resolving to finally forget him and move on. Clonnus wanted her to come for dinner. She toyed with him only slightly, playing hard to get though she was ecstatic inside. In truth they were both lonely people who had no one but each other.   When Aida entered the his apartment she was flabbergasted. Not a heap of junk to be seen. He was wearing fine clothes and whisked her in elegantly.   "Clonnus, your apartment!" she marveled.   "Yes I know, it's still a little cluttered," he rubbed his chin. "But I wanted to have you over before I..."   She cut him off: "Still cluttered? There's nothing left! It's wonderful!"   "Nothing left, well, yes, no, there's the furniture and the, the wall paper and the curtains," he rambled on.   "Oh, you!" She hugged him. "I'm very impressed."   He nodded, gazed side ways and led her into the kitchen. The table was set up with candles and brilliant silverware. Aida verbalized her astonishment once more. Clonnus pulled out a chair for her and she eagerly sat down.   Clonnus disappeared momentarily and then reappeared with a video camera mounted on a tripod. Aida's smile wobbled into perplexed grin. Setting up the video camera across the table from her, Clonnus checked the viewfinder and took focus.   "What's all this about, hon?" she asked.   "Humor me, Aida, please," he smiled to her and proceeded to fetch dinner.   They ate dinner and drank wine mostly in silence as the digitized video tape shows. Following this Clonnus ushered Aida into his home office, following her with the video camera. She went willingly, a little engulfed in his mysterious behaviour yet without objection to any of the bizarre advances that he proceeded to make. This dinner was many months ago. The land lord let himself into the Clonnus' apartment only recently after not receiving rent checks for two months and finding his mail box backed up and his notices ignored.   At first the land lord thought he'd found a case of another tenant running out on his lease. The apartment was completely empty. All furniture was removed, curtains gone and wallpaper as well. It all seemed to be evidence enough that Clonnus Alias had flown the coop until the land lord followed the sound of humming into the rear home office. There, intact and running continuously, he discovered the great console of computers and monitors on which the tenant used to work. But there was nobody to be found.   Investigators sorted through dozens of cd roms full of scanned images, digitized video, small tree dimensional cad reproductions of furniture and rooms and more of the most banal and irrelevant junk that anyone could seem to want to categorize.   Yet it was among these personal items, without significance to anyone but the author of the cd library, that they found the most disturbing clues.   The video of Aida Sun and Clonnus Alias eating dinner together was burned to the same cd as a multitude of scanned images and more video. Another video displayed the two missing people in the office engaging in what looked like rather inconvenient sex before the video camera , a digital camera and over the flat bed scanner. Methodically Clonnus seemed to make a kinky game of scanning into the computer every one of Aida's body parts, from her toe nails to the squinting pupils in her bright eyes. Authorities also found program which had been written by Clonnus. The interactive "game" consisted of a text box that the user may fill with questions which they could submit to the program that would be answered by video clips of a close-up of Aida's face responding with varying degrees of precision to the questions.   One cocky young investigating officer typed: "Where are you Aida Sun?" into the text box and hit the enter key.   "I'm with you always, Clonnus, honey," she responded from the video window.   Along with the gigabytes of sorted junk and documentations of Aida Sun's body and personality, the authorities discovered a similar documentation of Clonnus Alias himself. Scanned body parts and collages of such that looked like grotesque images of a naked man pressed between two large sheets of glass along with video tapes of promenades through the apartment and various meal settings all taken from the camera users point of view. But within all that digitized documentation of the life of one man, no clues could be found as to what had happened to him or Aida.   The computer network bunched into the little home office was dismantled and the case left as unsolved. The hard drives, cd roms and the back-ups for such were confiscated and rumored to have been sold to a private interest. As in their lives before they disappeared, Clonnus and Aida remain enigmatic to the people who never knew them anyway. In the end, if this is in fact the end, they leave behind only lengthy, albeit finite, strings of binary code.