The Outlier #1: Beepers

ier #1: Beepers

  by Tom Lichtenberg

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Dillon Sharif had plenty of time. As the 29 year old grandson and sole heir of billionaire global data collector, Wilkins Sharif, he had few matters more pressing than trimming his slight movie-star mustache and admiring his angular good looks in his grandmother's oracular gold mirror, yet he never knew boredom. Ever since he'd posted that viral video depicting the unlikely correlations between hat styles, virility, and lucky numbers for women, he'd been more and more deluged with requests from people all over the world entreating him to solve the most peculiar and abnormal occurrences. Evidently everyone believed that if Dillon didn't already know the answer then at least he had the information and the intuition to come up with it. He enjoyed these little games, which sometimes turned more serious, even dangerously so, than originally expected.

  Most mornings he looked forward to sorting through the requests which arrived in bulk, though lately the volume was becoming unwieldy. He would go through them in the same order every time; first the physical notes, beginning with the postcards, then the international envelopes, and then the regular domestic mail. After those he would proceed to the digital variety, beginning with instant messages sent to his phone, then the emails to his personal address, and finally those sent to the address he had specifically designated for just this purpose and prominently advertised as such. He would shake his head over his morning juice at the absurdly high percentage of requests which expressly ignored his stated delivery preference, but he glanced through them all just the same. Just the same, every day, with his glass of orange juice, his cup of half-caf skinny flat white, his toasted raisin bagel and a tiny wicker basket full of fresh picked blueberries. There was not much point to being a billionaire, he reasoned, if one could not have fresh picked blueberries every morning.

  An even more ridiculously high percentage of requests betrayed an acute awareness of his pecuniary status within the first few phrases. Dillon was constantly treading through minefields of more or less well-camouflaged gold diggers, who were often quite creative in their attempts to lure his attention. Of course they all knew, as everybody knew, that he was quite happily situated as one of the several famous lovers of that polyamorous whirlwind, the actress and provocateur Karen Clyde. She was his little rich boy, and he didn't really mind. She was more than enough woman for Dillon, who would rather splash about in muddy puddles of data than hit the night scenes or over-indulge his scrupulously well-maintained physique. And Lord only knew that no one man could ever be enough for Karen, whose collection was sorted and aligned according to her personal catalog of types. If Dillon was her North pole, than her South was Joey Mangiamo, a first rate Fiat mechanic and genuine proletariat. To the East would be Jasper Coleridge, the part-time celebrity chef and full-time hipster accountant. Finally, the West was largely occupied, and “largely” indeed, by the reigning heavyweight wrestling champion of the world, Vitaly Fleschko. Nevertheless, women and girls, men and boys from all over tried every day to ensnare Dillon Sharif and his billions.

  Dillon lived befittingly in a luxury penthouse apartment overlooking the great tech capital city of San Francisco. He lived alone, with his fat gray cat Dolores and his tropical tank of unusual crustaceans. He only used half of the apartment; the living room, kitchen, balcony and one master bedroom. The other three bedrooms and a designated family room were permanently locked, shuttered and abandoned. He rarely entertained, and never had overnight guests. His private elevator was reserved for his use alone; only he and his right-hand woman had the key, and he never shared it with anyone else. He had always valued seclusion, from his time as a child growing up on his grandfather's island, the only child of parents he had never known, raised by an eccentric pair of geniuses who had by ingenious mechanisms managed to procure the perpetual and indelible rights to all of the information ever to be produced by anyone who existed on this planet, or any other planet for that matter, although this latter fact was buried so deep in the small print that Dillon might have been the only other person who knew of it.

  Wilkins Sharif, a Turkish-Egyptian prince, and his equally mad wife, Japanese-Maori punk royalty Kintara Soh, had embarked on their respective careers as corporate attorneys, hooked up during a hostile takeover involving most of Madagascar, some of Sri Lanka and all of Mozambique, subsequently worked their way into the sacred heights of data storage and founded the powerful AllDat Corporation. From infancy, Dillon had accompanied them on their singular quest to amass every bit, every byte, every syllable, every word, every letter ever penned or etched or typed or whispered or spoken or heard or transcribed. It wasn't actually that hard, and the three of them spent many enjoyable evenings on their tropical beach-front patio examining this or that utterance, one or another phrase, certain cellular facts and amazing discoveries. They were a highly relational family, able to associate the most disparate items into utterly remarkable correlations. Wilkins delighted at his grandson's talent for selecting, querying and joining the most unexpected columns and tables, so he was the least surprised of all at Dillon's amazing discovery involving caps, sperm, and lottery winners. It was Wilkins who produced the video that took the world by storm, and Kintara who set about advertising her grandson's willingness to help any member of the public at large who had a seemingly insoluble or inexplicable issue.

  Dillon still spoke with his grandparents daily, though they stubbornly clung to the warmth of their equatorial home while he chose to reside in the midst of the common thoroughfare, a city boy despite his own intense self-imposed isolation. Kintara had the habit of glaringly disapproving of his wardrobe each morning when he called to greet her. Wilkins always wanted to know if any interesting cases had come up, and if they had, well by gum young Dillon had better bring him in on it. Wilkins would rub his hands together in excited anticipation of the possible marvels they might have to grapple with. He loved a puzzle, and Dillon liked to humor the old man, who also had a sharp eye for the adventurers who were only after his prize heir.

  “What do we have today, boy?” was how the old man began every call.

  “Nothing much, pops,” Dillon all too often had to reply. The truth was that interesting cases were few and far between, despite the dozens, even hundreds of requests that came his way every day. The sort of things that people considered extraordinary were astonishingly not, and were all too often repeated. There was the man whose morning commute led him to miss every single streetlight every day. There had to be a cosmic explanation! There was the case of the girl who was unable to hold a quarter in her hand for more than thirty seconds. Somehow it would always fall out! There was the woman who had never been able to see a New Moon, the man who couldn't keep a job, the old lady who was unable to turn a photograph into a memory. So many sad stories, but so few that Dillon could effectively help. He could only act on problems that contained multiple variables, and most people's consisted of only one, or at most a couple. Such issues were merely continuums, where all that was needed was an adjustment of ratios.

  “Surely there must be something,” Wilkins scowled into the webcam. “You received seventeen postcards, nine international envelopes, a sixty three domestic letters, ninety seven instant messages, a hundred and six personal emails and three hundred eighty nine AllDat Corporation notifications!”

  “You need a secretary!” his grandmother said. “Didn't I already tell you to get one?”

  “Yes, ma'am Yes, sir” Dillon nodded, “but for all that, there was only one item of possible interest this morning, and that only because it reminded me of another one I got two days ago.”

  “And what was that?” Wilkins grunted impatiently and tapped his fin
gers on his shiny obsidian desktop,

  “Something going beep in the night,” Dillon replied, searching for the email he was sure he'd filtered into the Possible Box. It wasn't there, so he had to search through the ProbablyNot's and the Definite's and the No's before he found it in the WTFs Box. He wondered how it had ended up in there. Had he really found it WTF-worthy?.

  “Well?” Wilkins demanded. He had not become one of the richest and most powerful people on Earth by patiently waiting for the information he desired.

  “Here it is,” Dillon stalled, glancing again at the contents. “I mean, it's probably nothing, but anyway, listen. Dear Mister Sharif. I know you get a lot of dumb stuff and this is going to sound like another one but every night for the past eleven nights I have been awokened (that's what it says, awokened) by the dim sound of something beeping inside of my house. At first I thought it was a truck in the alley backing up but quietly sort of but I looked out the window and there was no truck and anyway the beeping was not coming from that direction but from the other direction, like from the kitchen or the hallway. So I went and I looked and I mean I really really looked and I did this every night and nothing. I did not find anything making that noise, that beeping every nine or ten seconds kind of like this: beep beep beep beep beep. And it does it every night for exactly more or less twenty two minutes.”

  “Does this person not understand that the word 'exactly' does not have the same meaning as the phrase 'more or less'?” Dillon's grandfather mumbled.

  “Exactly!” Dillon said, “I knew you'd see that right away. It's the twenty two minutes that's the interesting part.”

  “It is?” Wilkins asked.

  “Are you really going to wear that shirt again?” his grandmother scolded before she wandered off to grab another glass of Kool-aid.

  “Yes,” Dillon answered them both with a word. “You see here, the other day I got a message from a forty four year old woman in Boston with exactly the same issue. Beeping, but not loud, with no discernible source, in the middle of the night, lasting twenty two minutes.”

  “Both from Boston you say?” Wilkins mused. “I knew this man from Boston once. He had an especially unsavory interest in horse meat.”

  “The other one was from Boston. Today's came from Austin, Texas,” Dillon said.

  “So what do you think?” he asked. “Do you think it's anything?”

  “No,” his grandfather declared, “but we've been in a dry spell lately. I hope it's not a trap, though. They'd probably want you to spend the night, and you know how they try to trick you that way.”

  “This boy's only twelve,” Dillon said, “and the Boston lady seemed sincerely puzzled.”

  “Well, do what you want,” Wilkins said, “only if it was me I'd wait for a third.”

  Dillon agreed, and spent the rest of the day lounging around his apartment, reading books from the Southern Hemisphere, watching movies made in 1977, and shopping online for dark glass dessert plates with concentric rings in blue and gold colors unevenly distributed. In the evening, Karen Clyde called and he didn't answer. He needed to be working on a case to get his libido going. It was a definite thing with him. The current dry spell had lasted for more than two weeks already, and his energies were at a low ebb. His only thought, while the phone was ringing, was “let her go wrestle.”

  The next morning