The Outlier #4: Zappers Read online

really didn't mind. Joey liked to screw. It was no big secret.

  “Anyway,” he said, “the Commander is waiting. I have to go now.”

  “I'll be back in four days,” she said, “do you think the case might take that long?”

  “I hope not,” he said, and they both sighed. Timing was everything in their relationship.

  “Can you tell me about it?” she asked.

  “Sorry, I have to go,” he said, disconnecting the call. The Commander was indeed waiting at the door, about to knock as Dillon opened it.

  “Are we ready?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir!” she replied, as she stepped inside and gathered together his carry-on items. They used the private elevator to descend into the private garage, where the Commander maintained their fleet of alternatively-fueled cars in excellent repair. She liked to select her vehicles for the occasion much as Dillon chose his outfits, and for the rainy day drive to the air strip she had them in a yellow four-wheel drive Jeep powered by a newish fuel source made from butterfly eggs, seaweed and rainwater. The mileage was terrible but the odor was semi-tropical.

  “What do you say to someone you don't really know but have heard a lot about?” Dillon asked her a rare question during the ride. Most of the time their communications consisted merely of transactional instructions.

  “Depends on whether you've heard good things, I suppose,” she mused.

  “Say it's a friend of a friend,” Dillon said, and the Commander nearly replied with 'oh, you mean Joey Mangiamo' but she held her tongue. What she knew that he didn't know she knew she was glad that he didn't know she knew.

  “I might say something about the weather,” she said instead.

  “The weather,” Dillon pondered. “That's a good one.” He filed that information away in a region of his brain marked for sooner rather than later.

  The Commander was an excellent pilot, having flown for the Air Force in a previous career, and possibly also for the Secret Service, a post she would neither confirm nor deny. She loved the small jet she'd recommended for Dillon, a new edition to the fleet, and was happy to have the opportunity to guide it clear across the country once again. They spoke no more along the way, and Dillon used the time to consider the three major elements of the case.

  He believed they had to be related, and had arrived at enough correlations from the data set presented to confirm that notion. There were enough missing dogs, non-starting cars and cult-converted relations that were potentially connected both in time and space, although none were directly related. That is to say that none of the runaway dogs belonged to people who could not rev their engines and/or had family members who were recently 'touched by the Lord'. It troubled him that he had not seen any earlier reports, but he was certain there had been some. Bermuda must have passed over similar messages from previous days because there had not been enough scale or overlap. They must have been sparsely reported, a Zapper here and a missing dog there. It was only the conglomeration of so many on the same day that drew Bermuda's attention to them.

  The Zapper phenomenon itself was fairly recent. Dillon tracked its origin to a mere three weeks before, when the first pair of the zapped had come together to share their experiences. Both had been praying alone in their own homes when they suddenly felt a surge of electrical charge flow through their bodies, not enough voltage to do them any serious harm but more than enough to drive them to their feet and shout out loud. It had to be the Lord. There was no other possible explanation. Neither had been touching any appliances and there had been no thunder showers in the vicinity. They'd posted an ad online inquiring if anyone else had had a similar event, and soon they were joined by several dozen other victims in the vicinity.

  They soon found that the strange experience was not restricted to one area. It did seem to begin there in Long Island, but then expanded chronologically along a more or less straight line through the city and down along the interstate route I-95, heading towards the nation's capital. By the time Dillon linked it to the stray canines and defective automobiles, there were legitimate Zappers as far south as Wilmington, Delaware. There were also a lot of fake Zappers too, phonies sprouting up all over the country who claimed to have been struck by the same charge, but Dillon felt he was able to distinguish the true from the false by a variety of ancillary anecdotes. The Truly Zapped had markings on their fingernails that could not easily be duplicated by artificial means, even by people who deliberately stuck their fingers into live electrical sockets in order to communicate directly with their God. There was no shortage of those incidents, but the nail marks could not be matched. Also, the Genuinely Struck tended to use the same curious speech patterns which perhaps only Dillon was capable of discerning.

  He half-intended to trace the zap trail from its source, but had not yet decided if his physical presence would make any difference, or if that was only part of the general excuse he was using to justify his journey eastward. The New York area often figured in the pleas for help he received daily, if only because of the sheer size of the population and the general sense of desperation he often sensed in the eco-sphere whenever he was there. In any case, it was no surprise that there was a missing dog or two and some mis-firing engines in the area as well. Dillon perused the documents on his tablet, also considering the metadata associated with the messages. The texts were never enough on its own. He always considered the sender, the sender's locale, the timing, the route, the sender's background, any other messages the sender or people related to the sender may have sent, other messages and activities the sender was involved in, their online profiles, the profiles of their associates, all of their histories, caches, cookies, files in storage, photos, videos, postings, tweets, statuses both shared and allegedly private.

  There was nothing he did not readily have access to. If and when he wanted, he brought up photo and video captures of the people involved, collated by city-, state- and corporate-managed cameras. He could easily put together the daily life of practically any citizen foreign or domestic, and knew exactly who else in the world was capable of doing what he did. Unlike them, however, he also knew exactly who was actually doing it, and where and when and how. Big data was, after all, his business. For the most part, it didn't worry him. There were dictators who had the goods on their enemies, but then again, dictators had always had that. In previous times they'd used informants along with their spies. They may not have had access to the data transmitted by people's wifi-connected light bulbs, but they could even more easily find out who was at home and when they were at home and who was there with them, merely by bribing or coercing the neighbors. Dillon knew that the average citizen had more to fear from the guy next door than from big government spy agencies.

  They also had more to fear from little data than big. In most case, one single bit of data was far more determinative in a person's interaction with the law than all the big data warehoused and stored in machines put together. Examples of this single bit of data could easily be summarized. Dark skin was an obvious case in point. This one data point had caused more trouble for more people than perhaps any other in the history of America. In other countries, other single bits were more significant. Being female was often a serious fact. Even being detected as female in the womb could be, and often was, fatal. Speaking the wrong language, wearing the wrong head gear, growing or not growing a beard, all of these were cases where small data in different parts of the world could be extremely important.

  Big data certainly had its uses. It could be trolled and mined to great effect where advertising was concerned. The same algorithms that were used to recommend different musical artists a person might enjoy were also deployed to recommend shaving creams and adult entertainments, restaurants and vacation spots. They were employed to direct the news stories a person might be interested in, and in the same way prevent one from seeing the stories that same person ought to see but which wouldn't in any way benefit the provider's bottom line. All of this deliberation and data-mining cou
ld eventually lead to a state where the world was divided into two groups, be it those who ate only rice and those who never combed their hair, or some other more practical division of interest. Dillon understood the implications but still felt that the basic human behaviors would continue to underline society no matter who knew what or what they did about it.

  His own data-mining during the flight led him to one possible conclusion, one he sincerely hoped was wrong. He also hoped that Joey Mangiamo would be able to confirm the answer to one of his questions. Although he had said nothing about Mangiamo, he wasn't surprised when the Commander, after landing the plane and hustling him into a hybrid black limousine allegedly powered by rare, accumulated starlight, drove him directly to the Fiat repair shop owned and operated by Mangiamo. She did not say a word either, but pulled up in front of the shop, parked, tipped her pilot's cap over her eyes and settled down in the driver's seat for a brief power nap. This was a familiar signal which let Dillon know they had arrived at their destination. He got out of the car, slung his leather jacket over his shoulder, and noted that the later afternoon weather was warm and rather humid.

  He