The Outlier #2: Migrants Read online

ier #2: Migrants

  by Tom Lichtenberg

  The past few weeks had been among the most hectic in the life of Bermuda Hills. Plucked out of nowhere for no discernible reason, the former housekeeper and nanny found herself on the opposite side of the country living the opposite kind of life than the one she'd always known. It was taking some getting used to. Where before she'd had to work several jobs and still budget carefully to make the rent and pay the bills, now she was settled in a luxury high-rise condo earning more in a week than she'd been taking in all year. She still had no idea why she'd been chosen for this job, or even how she was supposed to be doing it.

  On the surface it seemed like ordinary work; her job was to sort through the variety of letters, postcards and emails that her boss received every day, and pick out the ones she thought might be of interest to him. She was supposed to be a mind reader, she guessed. How was she to know what would appeal to him? How was she to understand the inner workings of the strangest mind she'd ever met? Bermuda Hills was now the personal secretary to Dillon Sharif. If that name is unfamiliar to you, perhaps you would know him better as the grandson and sole heir to the billionaire founders of the world's most powerful company, the AllDat Corporation, legal and earnest owners of every scrap of information past, present and future on the face of planet Earth, and all other humanoid-inhabited planets in perpetuity.

  It was pretty overwhelming. Like everyone, she had come across the name Wilkins Sharif every now and then on the news as being one of the richest men in the world, and now here she was seeing his stern, daunting face and hearing his grumbling, imperious voice daily on the wall screen in front of her desk. Dillon might trust her judgment implicitly, but Wilkins was far from doing so yet, and seemed to be taking an inordinate interest in every tidbit of correspondence addressed to his heir and grandson. He made her read aloud nearly every single one, questioning her on its contents and her opinion before eventually agreeing with her every time. Meanwhile the face of his wife, the legendary Kintara Soh, flashed intermittently across the screen as he passed on her way to and from whoever knows where she was going. She was a slight creature with wild hair sticking straight out of her head in every direction and in every color of the rainbow, or so it seemed to Bermuda. Kintara had the face of a wise old goddess and didn't say much, but what she did say was always direct and to the point.

  “'Why' is not important,” she had counseled Bermuda on the question of her selection for this position. “What matters now is 'how'”.

  Bermuda considered them both to be entirely other-worldly, aliens perhaps, which would go a long way towards explaining the personality of her boss. Dillon was tall and strong, very fit and certainly a handsome man with sharp, dark features and a pencil mustache which he seemed to find most compelling. He was a private sort, excessively so, always aiming for a kind of public invisibility, which he believed he could achieve through an appropriate selection of wardrobe for each occasion. Of course, to everyone else he always stood out. He was the only one who thought otherwise. Famous as he was, rich as he was, and good-looking to boot, he was the target of a million sellers of themselves. He lived in highly secure isolation, but was neither shy nor awkward nor socially inept. He simply existed on a different plane than the rest of humanity. At least that's how Bermuda saw it.

  Dillon mainly interacted with a scant handful of people, most of them women. Aside from Bermuda and his grandmother, there was his right-hand-person, a formidable woman named Bethany Rush, mainly known as the Commander. The Commander ran most of Dillon's life, procuring and arranging for all of his material needs, as well as providing his transportation in her dual roles of driver and pilot. She was also his bodyguard and personal S.W.A.T. team all in one. She and Bermuda possessed the only other house keys to Dillon's penthouse apartment, a fact that was none too pleasing to the other significant woman in his life, the famous actor and sensationalist, Karen Clyde.

  Bermuda was not quite clear on the nature of that relationship. Karen was Dillon's lover. This much was certain, but not a permanent partner nor a particularly trusted one (hence the key). She knew, from what Dillon had told her, that Karen was the center of a polyamorous circle. Dillon was not her only partner, though she was that to him. Bermuda pretended not to be scandalized, but she was from a time and place where such things could never happen.

  She considered herself to be fairly traditional, in the sense that she had been an unmarried teenage mother who later wed a different man, a divorcée who'd subsequently hurried off to war and had the misfortune of getting blown to pieces in a high desert in the middle of nowhere halfway around the world. The last she'd heard from him was when he'd mailed her a bag of dirt, with a note explaining that apparently this was the worthless stuff that he and his buddies were wasting their entire lives for. In the meantime, her daughter had grown up and run away, determined not to become anything like her mother, words that still stung whenever Bermuda recalled them. Bermuda did not consider herself to be a bad person, or a useless person, or a “good-for-nothing nothing”, to use Sandy's exact words. True, she had never gone to college, but she had gone back and finished high school. True, she had never been devoted to a single specialized profession and had never made even a decent living until now, but she was a competent person, capable and responsible. She was not stupid, and she was kind, and reasonable, and generous. She had done everything she could for that ungrateful child.

  She'd been alone a long time now. Maybe that was one of the reasons why her boss felt an affinity, but she had a strong intuition that she would never really understand him. Still, that wasn't her job. She only had to sort through this correspondence and try to pick out the truly interesting, truly mysterious, truly worthwhile problems from the mass of utter nonsense they mostly consisted of.

  “Trash!” Wilkins grunted, when she read out the letter from the woman who claimed that crop circles had spontaneously sprouted overnight in her suburban back yard.

  “Ridiculous,” he shouted, when she read the one from the man who claimed to be receiving graphically obscene emails from the recently deceased.

  “Really?” he uttered scornfully as she narrated from the postcard describing the case of the spider bite that moved up and down this woman's body, an inch or so every hour, beginning from the bottom of her big toe and working its way up to her armpit before beginning the downward journey once again.

  “They're mostly like that,” she reminded him.

  “Filter,” whispered Kintara as she scuttled across the screen. She had said it discretely, hoping that her husband wouldn't hear. Bermuda got the message, but Wilkins was a consummate counter. He knew precisely how many messages there were and tallied them up as she sorted through them every morning. It would not be so easy to sneak anything past him. She only hoped that eventually she would wear him out, and he would stop being so snoopy about it. But since she had to read them anyway, she figured, she might as well be reading them out loud to him as quietly to herself.

  “Too many migrants,” Wilkins muttered, stroking the goat-like white chin tuft that dominated his shriveled features. Bermuda wondered if he didn't have anything better to do, but the old folks were apparently retired as far as she could tell. There they were every morning on the screen, anxious to listen to the mail in the hopes that something appealing would turn up. At first she hadn't understood their interest, but it was beginning to dawn on her that their only genuine concern was for the well-being of their grandson, and he only seemed to be fully himself and completely alive when he was occupied with a curious case. During the dry spells in between those he was quiet, subdued and withdrawn, and his grandparents worried about him then. What Bermuda couldn't know was that far from being retire
d, the old people simply never slept. They were still working more than eighteen hours a day for the AllDat Corporation already well into their seventies. These morning sessions were merely a coffee break for them.

  As for her boss, Dillon Sharif, he was a big-data detective, perhaps the best (if not the only) one in the world. The media that fawned over him liked to say he was a “database wizard”, an “information overlord”, an “associative array” (a term they clearly did not understand). He didn't just “put two and two together”, he put “twelve and six point eight and ninety three point seven five six and eighty eight and 'geese' and 'feral blind mice' and sedimentary rocks” together in algorithms and combinations that mystified and astounded everyone and solved seemingly impossible dilemmas, not to mention proving hitherto merely speculative scientific theorems. He had originally come to public attention through a viral video in which he explained the vital correlation of particular hats, male fertility and women's