The lab was up in the mountains of CHINA, tucked away behind a thick curtain of trees and backed up to the mountain wall itself. This was where Dr. Benny lived, worked, and hid from the rest of the world.

I had a lucky connection with the MAN, but those details are useless to this story. Let’s just say a friend of a friend of a relative got me to Dr. Benny’s DOOR, and I was thrilled for the chance to meet the renowned scientist.

“I don’t get it, Jonathon,” said my grandmother when I told her where I was off to. “Why do you want a future in science, anyway?”

“Because I love science,” I answered lamely.

“You should have gone the route your brothers and sisters did. Go for entertainment. Be a musician, a music video director, an arcade manager…”

The most common jobs listed for that time, 3008, were jobs in the media field or anything else regarding entertainment. Positions in medicine or research were actually looked down upon. Nobody wanted boring jobs like those.

I was excited to meet Dr. Benny despite my grandmother’s snide remarks. Even though the man was somewhat of a recluse, he was famous in the science world--as diminished as that was now--for his peer-reviewed journal articles and the e-books he WROTE about society and ecology. The man was a genius.

Dr. Benny had a certain disdain for most people, and why I first met him he didn’t seem all that impressed. In fact, I had a hunch that he’d forgotten I was coming.

“Ah yes, you,” he said as a greeting. “Come on in.”

I entered and took a look around the place. It was bigger than it looked. From the outside the entrance seemed to lead to only a cubicle of an abode. A small square structure was all you could see on the outside, backed up against the wall of the mountainside. Inside you could tell Dr. Benny had to scoop a sizeable hollow out of the mountain. He could afford such renovations. The man was rich, the only successful scientist of our time.

“I have some things of interest that I’d like to show you,” he said, walking out of sight into an adjacent room. I followed him into a large room. His lab.

He was standing by a large plexiglass tank. A light bulb was poised over a the tank, and the light from the bulb had to travel through some strange material before it reached the inside. Inside the tank were three peculiar things. They appeared to be organic, but not as strong as trees. Each one had an extension at the top that varied for each one. The first extension looked like a trumpet, the next looked like a papery and fragile and the third resembled a snowflake. “What are they?” I asked.

Dr. Benny pointed at them. “Flowers, of the night blooming variety.” He pointed to a second tank that I hadn’t seen earlier which held three more specimens. “And these used to bloom during the day. The red one on the right is a rose.”

“I’ve never seen anything like these before.”

“I know, but flowers used to be as populous as people years ago.”

He led me into another room. This one was smaller, and not as interesting as the first. In here there were shelves on each wall containing rectangular shaped items. They looked like skinny bricks, but they were all different thicknesses and colors. “Books,” said the doctor.

“I’ve heard about these,” I said as he thumbed through one of the books with care. “I never really understood the point of them really. I mean, isn’t it easier to click a computer mouse than to turn a page?”

“There is so much you can learn from books that you cannot learn from the Internet or even school.”

“How did they make these before computers came around?” I asked.

“They had to WRITE manually, with a pen or pencil,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t hard to do. It was rewarding for some.”

“Weird,” I said.

I spent two months with Dr. Benny. He showed me all kinds of things: experiments he was working on, as well as let me get the inside scoop on his current e-book. He wrote it manually. One day, the lesson was to take a walk in the wilderness. Dr. Benny never explained the lessons out loud, he just told me to pay attention. The answers would revel themselves soon enough.

On another walk through the forest, we came upon a scraggly little nest in a bush. Three perfectly round EGGS lay in the nest. Dr. Benny looked up at the gray clouds. “They’ll never make it,” he said. “The pollution is too bad for most birds to survive--even this high in the mountains.” He took the eggs back to the lab and tried to save them, but the damage was done even before the chicks were born. It was looking like there’d be no NEW little birds this summer. It was incredibly saddening to realize this.

The two months passed quickly, and soon I was back at home, my mind still full of the lessons Dr. Benny had tried to teach me. At home, things were normal again. I stared at the TV for the longest time, just watching the weather lady do her job. I had been without a television for two months, and I was finding the experience now empty and disappointing. “The temperature for the next two days, moderately cool at 110 degrees. Pollution Gradient for Tuesday, August 1st, 3008 is at 54%, so keep those children inside!”

By FALL, I was getting the idea of all of Dr. Benny’s lessons. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a happy realization. Dr. Benny had been showing me how our world was dying, and how nobody seemed to care anymore.

A few years passed. Dr. Benny was found dead near a town. Foul play was suspected, but there was no investigation for undetermined reasons. His funeral was broadcasted on Channel 7, and I felt a surge of hate boil up inside me when I saw one of the “mourners”, a woman who claimed to be a student of Dr. Benny’s back when he was a Professor, throw the TRASH from her sandwich wrapper on the ground at the foot of his grave.

Mom and Aunt Louisa came in, toting a small end table. The positioned it in the corner of the room and smiled at their new acquisition. “Can you believe it?” Mom said to her sister. “George found the tree and cut it down himself. It’s impossible to find CEDAR anywhere.”

I stood up, now ignoring the TV broadcast. “Our neighbor cut down an endangered tree?”

Mom smiled. She apparently didn’t see what the problem was. “And it has this incredible aroma to it. You never find furniture like this anymore.”

As she spoke, the pungent but pleasant sent of cedar wood reached my nose. It was an alien scent to me.

My Mom and Aunt continued squawking about how beautiful the table was, and I just hid in my room so I didn’t have to stare at them anymore.

Dr. Benny was right. People don’t care. People don’t want to listen to the bad news.

I looked out the window, contemplating my future and the futures of the people I know and love. Well, I thought, maybe it’s time for someone to show them the truth.