The Outlier #3: Lost Souls

ier #3: Lost Souls

  by Tom Lichtenberg

  She was a half-Japanese half-Maori all-Canadian punk rocker from Vancouver and let's face it. If you were a dethroned princess raised in foster care in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and it rained all the time, you'd be pretty pissed off too. Kintara Soh never made it easy for anyone, and no one ever made it easy for her. By fifteen she was on her own, out on the streets, playing bass and yelling her lungs out nightly on stage with her band, The Sidewalk Hosers. By seventeen she was touring East Asia and winning multiple Grungy awards. By nineteen she'd added college graduate to her attainments, on her fast track to law school and ultimate global domination. Always a force, never bending, let alone breaking, she let no one and nothing stand in her way. Except for this one guy she met and fell in love with, a cranky Middle Eastern loner named Wilkins Sharif. In some ways they were mirror images of one another – both small and slight, bony and dark with narrow eyes, jet black hair and pointy chins. In other ways they could not have been more different – she loud, he quiet, she stubborn, he yielding - but over time they melded and merged to such an extent that it could be difficult to tell where one left off and the other began.

  They were as unlikely couple to end up where they did, incredibly rich, holders of a seemingly infinite number of patents, and owners of the rights to practically every drop of data on the planet. They achieved this status the old-fashioned way, through small print, technicalities, and a ruthless cleverness that never let up. Machiavelli would have adored these little people, but their philosophies were never rooted in European traditions. They came from warriors and empire builders, but from those whose time had been delayed, deterred by the white generations whose time, like everyone's before them, had come and gone. The world belonged to the South and the East in these times, and Mr. and Mrs. Sharif were the South and the East personified.

  She never knew how she'd become a remote personality, with an infallible ability to quietly distinguish all forests from all trees. Through the years of ascent to power she had mellowed, grown wise, and felt she was capable of anything, even learning the languages of birds if that was what she desired. She had seen through every human motivation, understood every action and reaction. People were a known and limited set, and she craved, as ever, new knowledge. She worked eighteen hours a day, but each one began the same way. She would stroll through her extensive gardens each morning at dawn, listening and watching, looking for patterns, in search of the key to understanding those glorious little creatures, and when it was time to come back inside, she felt refreshed and looked forward to one of her favorite times of the day, the opening of her grandson's mail.

  Dillon Sharif was fast becoming known as the world's number one “big data” detective, and the tag seemed to fit his personality perfectly. Dillon was not terribly interested in everyday people, just as there is not a lot of human interest in big data. The forces at work collecting and processing all of the world's individuals' personal information are not converting it into dramatic soap operas. Quite the contrary, they are mainly interesting in selling stuff to people, in knowing exactly how and what to offer them. They are mapping and reducing the species into a race of narrowly targeted consumers. Big data is not interested in souls, neither lost nor found. And like big data, Dillon's mind spent much of its time in a cloud, sifting through and analyzing bits and bytes of information. He especially enjoyed doing this while working out on the elliptical machine he kept out on the balcony of his luxurious Nob Hill penthouse apartment overlooking vast stretches of San Francisco and the bay area. It was one thing to have access to all the information in the world, courtesy of his grandparents' life work as founders and leaders of the AllDat Corporation, but quite another to make some sort of sense of it all. He was a living hadoop, a walking breathing searching and sorting algorithm of a good-looking young man. While not ungracious or socially defective like so many other computer-type people, he was rather a bit cold, with a short supply of charm and a definite deficiency of charisma. He had little use for such qualities.

  One thing he did have was money. Lots and lots of money, and he used it for whatever he wanted. High on that list was a personal secretary to help him sort through the hundreds of messages he received every day from people all over the world asking him to help solve the sorts of problems they considered unusual or strange. Most of these simply weren't, and he'd grown weary of looking at those in the months since he'd first come to the public's attention through a curious viral video he'd released, explaining exactly how any woman could correctly calculate lottery numbers, based on the current state of a close male's virility and the differential between his and her choice of hat. At first glance, this seems to make no sense at all, but such is the power of big data. Things don't need to make sense. They simply have to be true. Plugging in the variables, and having his right-hand-woman, who was known publicly as the Commander, do the actual work, Dillon's algorithm resulted in her winning enough lottos in a row that the state of California had to shut down the entire program. They were still working at re-jiggering the thing, submitting their code to Dillon on a regular basis, yet still unable to shake the Sexy Hat Theorem.

  His personal secretary was Bermuda Hills, a woman he plucked from obscurity, seemingly at random, who turned out to be just the right person for the job. Not only did she have a fine instinct for the truly odd request, but she also got along well with the old folks, who insisted on previewing all of the incoming mail, despite their advanced age and heavy workloads. Wilkins Sharif was especially curious about the dilemmas of mankind. Cynical to the max both by nature and experience, he chortled over every fool who was baffled by the mundane. They regularly received notifications from people who hallucinated holy figurines in their various food items. They heard from those whose lucky numbers suddenly stopped being so lucky. They were informed of dogs climbing small trees, of ducks flying in unusual patterns, of things that went beep in the night, chickens that crossed roads, cats with a sixth sense or a tenth life, children who were born knowing ancient languages in which the only words were 'goo' and 'ga'.

  Wilkins and Bermuda had many a good laugh in the mornings while they shared such items over the broadband link between San Francisco and Golden Bay on the South Island of New Zealand, where the elder Sharifs were spending the winter. It was morning for both, though Wilkins and Kintara were of course always one day ahead. Kintara was not so much amused as bored by these trivialities, so she spent much of the link time scuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, preparing tea and snacks, watering the house plants, or dabbing at her current set of oil paintings which stood on a row of easels in front of the picture window overlooking a most magnificent ocean view. She painted portraits of souls, lost souls as she called them. These could take any form whatsoever. She limited herself in no way. Some of them had found their way into world-class museums and others into the homes of wealthy collectors. These she considered to be even more lost than ever.

  “You will like this one, Miss Kintara,” Bermuda Hills said one day while Kintara was momentarily in view on her screen. Kintara stopped and gave her a gentle smile. She approved of Bermuda in a general way, as she did of anyone who was nice to her grandson.

  “Dear Mister Detective, it begins,” Bermuda read from an email. “Last night I received a very strange phone call. It was from a man I didn't know. He asked if I was me, and then told me that Package Express had delivered my package to his mailbox instead of my post office box. My phone number was on the label so he called me. I know that packages can be delivered to the wrong place sometimes, but this guy lives twelve miles away. I drove out to pick up the item. The road is a rural highway and right where he
told me I would I found a row of five mailboxes with what looked like random numbers on them. My post office box number is 507 and there was a 507 there, right next to the other boxes which were numbered 206, 308, 417 and 429. The other odd fact is that there is no side road or driveway anywhere near where these mailboxes are. They're just there on the side of the highway in front of some bushes.”

  “No road?” Wilkins was intrigued. “Did they give us the number of the person who called?”

  “Nope,” Bermuda replied, “that's about it. Their own name and number is the rest of it.”

  “I'd mark it,” he said and she agreed. Kintara shuffled along without a sound. Bermuda might have through she would like it, but she didn't. She sensed there was probably something sinister going on behind it and she had no patience for evil. She dabbed a little at a painting of a rock in a field, but after a moment returned to join her husband. Bermuda was