The Outlier #3: Lost Souls Read online

reading the next message.

  “I received a phone call from a strange man,” the email said, “telling me that my husband was at his house, insisting it was ours. You must know that my husband is neither ill nor old. He is also not crazy. When I went to get him, he was upset and angry, furious at me for not being there already and demanding to know what this other man was doing in our home. At first I couldn't convince him that he was in the wrong place. He claimed to recognize all the furniture and even the pictures on the wall! It wasn't until he looked at the TV set, a Toshiba, that he started to think maybe I was right. He would never buy a Toshiba TV set. He is a Samsung man all the way. He stared at that television like it was the burning bush from the Bible, and then he let me lead him out to the car. He is sitting there on the couch right now, looking at our Samsung and shaking his head. I'm afraid he's lost his mind and I don't know what to do.”

  “Another lost soul,” Kintara muttered, and then she spoke louder.

  “The next one!” she insisted, “read the next one please.”

  “Okay,” Bermuda said. “Here it is. Dear Mister Detective, my computer game is acting weird. It always did diamonds and bubbles but now it's spitting numbers out of a cannon and blowing them up.”

  Bermuda looked up at the screen, waiting for a response.

  “The next one,” Kintara requested, “quickly!”

  “This one's marked urgent. It just came in a moment ago. It says, Hello,” Bermuda read, “I don't know if you can help me but whatever. I am on a bus to Logan. At least I was supposed to be on a bus to Logan. All of us here on this bus think we are going from Pocatello to Logan except the driver who is taking us to somewhere called Palmetto. I don't even know where Palmetto is. I think it might be in a different state. We have been on this bus for a long time, longer than it would take to get to Logan. The driver insists this is the bus to Palmetto and he won't stop. Some of us have called the police but no one has showed up yet. It's getting weird on this bus.”

  “Get these to Dillon right away,” Kintara interrupted, “and hurry.”

  Bermuda did not need to be told twice. She was already on her way upstairs. Bermuda and Bethany Rush, aka. the Commander, lived on the floor below Dillon Sharif, and possessed the only other keys to his apartment. She found him on the balcony, working up a sweat on the elliptical machine. Their relationship was extremely formal. She did her job and he paid her very well.

  “Your grandmother seemed very interested in these particular messages,” she told him.

  “Really?” Dillon was surprised, and snatched the printouts from Bermuda's hand. As he said nothing else, she knew she was dismissed, and turned to leave. Usually once he selected a case from the morning mail she was free to do as she pleased the rest of the day. That morning looked like a fine day for sailing. Bermuda was taking lessons and had her eye on a particular schooner.

  “Get the Commander,” Dillon said, and then she knew the day was all hers. The Commander would take it from there.

  Dillon hopped off the bike and pulled out his tablet to call his grandmother. He wanted to know what she was thinking. He saw right away what the messages had in common - things in the wrong places – but it was very unusual for Kintara to take a particular interest in his cases. He expected it from her husband but Kintara maintained such an even keel that he couldn't even remember her looking upset, until now.

  “I'm worried,” she told him. “There might be interference on the time line.”

  “The time line?” Dillon was confused. “What time line?”

  “This one of course,” she said.

  “I have no idea what you're talking about,” Dillon confessed. His grandparents were practical people, secular to the core. He had never heard any mystical nonsense or pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo coming from either one. They had raised him on scientific principles and the one simple rule that this world should be enough for anyone.

  “You probably think I'm crazy,” she said, “or losing it like that man in the wrong house, but I need to show you something. Over here.”

  She walked over to her oil paintings and turned the camera to scan them for Dillon.

  “I've been working on these for the past week or so,” she said. “I don't know why. But you see now, don't you?”

  He did. The very first one she showed him was of a rusty old mailbox, alone in the woods with the number 429 painted on it. The next was of pink and purple bubbles in a cloud. The third one showed a rotting log cabin with faint black lettering over the door, spelling out the word 'Palmetto'.

  “Okay,” he said, “that is pretty weird, but what's it got to do with a time line?”

  “Things leak out,” Kintara said. “There's no time to explain. You have to get to Nevada right away and stop that bus before it reaches the ghost town. Call me on the way but go. Now!”

  Dillon did not like to be rushed, but he was determined to follow his grandmother's instructions to the letter. Even though his wardrobe selection was always extremely important to him, he did not dawdle over it this time, but grabbed the first combination of clothes he came up with, which later turned out, to his dismay, to be a mismatch of dark gray dress slacks, bright blue soccer socks, a Hawaiian print shirt and a Seattle Mariners baseball cap, none of which went together in any way at all.

  The Commander was already waiting for him, and while they rode down their own personal elevator to their own personal garage beneath the building, he informed her of their destination and need for speed.

  “How we're going to stop a bus I have no idea,” he added.

  “Yes, sir. Leave it to me, sir,” replied Bethany Rush, who was quite incapable of giving him “no” for an answer to anything.

  The Commander was particular about her cars, and for this occasion chose a new sporty Brazilian model powered by a fuel formed from a genetic mutation of mosquito willpower. The engine provided endless kinetic motion accompanied by only the faintest annoying whine, but it was the right tool for the job and they arrived at the airstrip in less than fifteen minutes. There they quickly boarded Dillon's private jet and soon were flying off towards the historic abandoned town of Palmetto, Nevada.

  During the flight, Dillon reviewed the four messages that had been brought to his attention. First he focused on the bus memo, and calculated the distances involved. A bus headed for Logan, Utah from Pocatello, Idaho should take approximately an hour and a half, but if it were headed instead for Palmetto, the trip could last for more than nine hours, assuming of course that a passenger revolt was unsuccessful and the police continued to fail to intervene. This gave them plenty of time, more than two hours, to make the relatively short flight and figure out what to do next. There was nothing else to do about that for the moment, so he considered the other cases.

  The mailboxes at first seemed very strange to him. There was no good reason why a Package Express driver would deliver a package intended for a post office box to anything other than a post office, especially not some random mailbox on some random street some dozen miles away! This seemed to be a genuine mystery, but he was not long in deciphering it. He considered the numbers on the mailboxes. This was more interesting to Dillon. He knew from experience that there are really no such things as random numbers. Ask anyone to think up a number at random and whatever they come up with can be analyzed for some personal meaning. He got this idea from Sigmund Freud and considered it to be one of the instances where Freud was really on to something. In this case, a solution to the puzzle was readily at hand. All of the numbers provided in the message were rarely used HTTP protocol status codes. No doubt the joker who thought them up, most likely the man who called, was some kind of networking geek. He was re-routing packages through their computer system. Dillon dispatched a note to the head of security at Package Express, and turned his attention to the next message.

  The computer game in question was called Pansy Pat and was well-known for its deceptively simple and highly addictive qualities. He downloaded the late
st version onto his tablet and played around with it for a few minutes. There were only diamonds and bubbles. You used the diamonds to pierce the bubbles, which seemed absurd, as bubbles are easily popped and hardly require a diamond to do the job. For each bubble popped, you were rewarded with a virtual Q-tip. Collect enough Q-tips and you could purchase a small rectangular square of a hideous calico cloth. There were sweatshops in South Carolina and Louisiana were people, even children, worked night and day popping bubbles and selling rewards in shady markets on online. There were no cannons firing off exploding numbers, but as he thought about it, he remembered coming across some bits of code that, put together, would do just that. Those bits of code resided in different repositories, but they were hosted by the same source, a git provider out of Yemen. He smiled as he thought of the old mantra about writing computer functions for re-use. Was this a case of malicious recombinant methods, one of inadvertent code reincarnation, or something else entirely?

  The developers of Pansy Pat were in no way related to the makers of PrimeKill or Fusilage as far as he could recall, so he put together a few queries and fired them off. The results came back negative. It would have taken a highly corrupted build environment to force an over-the-air update of Pansy Pat software through