The Outlier #3: Lost Souls

the All-Site AppStore to make that happen. As far as he knew, it wasn't even possible. Still, it was something to ask his grandparents. They might have some idea. Then he remembered that he was supposed to call Kintara back.

  “You were going to tell me something about time lines and interference,” he reminded her when she appeared on the screen. She seemed pleased to note that he was already in the air.

  “Everything is information,” she said, “but you already know that. You also know that information is time-sensitive. What good are your lottery numbers if they were from last weeks lottery? How many times have you heard the expression 'now you tell me!'. The wrong information at the wrong time can mess up everything. Not getting the information you need when you need it can cause all sorts of problems.”

  “Of course, Gran,” Dillon prodded her to get to the point.

  “What are memories but data?” she continued, ignoring him, “time-stamped and stored away, chronological information. People forget things, they remember things, they are reminded, triggered, the memory comes flooding back. It seems quite mysterious, don't you agree?”

  “Yes,” he said, “sometimes a taste or a smell can bring back the most vivid imagery.”

  “That's exactly what I mean,” she said. “We don't really know that much about how it all works, even now when we've mapped all the emotions and can visualize all the patterns and waves. The brain remains enigmatic, and not only the human brain, but the brains of all creatures, great and small. We are always on the boundary, on the edge of discovery, but our findings are always relatively meager, never the breakthrough, never the big key.”

  “They're getting closer all the time,” Dillon said.

  “There's one factor that can't be accounted for,” she said, “and that's time. We proceed along the linear line we know, and base all our assumptions on its correctness. But there is no such thing as time. There are only all the myriad changes occurring within and without of all things living and not. These are not all organically synchronized, but operate interdependently with quantum behaviors. There is cause and effect only on some levels. But we, and I mean our scientists as well, cannot operate outside of our own perceived experience. We cannot end and experiment before we begin it. We cannot draw data from different points along its procedure. We are bound by laws which in fact do not exist.”

  “What did you mean about interference?”

  “All of those messages are telling us the same thing,” she replied. “And I'm sure there were more. You could ask Bermuda to double-check but I think you already have all the information you need. Just stop that bus. Look in the driver's eyes. Ask him one question. That's all you need to do.”

  “What question?”

  “You'll know,” she assured him. “You'll know from the look in his eyes.”

  “We're almost there,” the Commander's voice came over the intercom. “We'll be touching down in five minutes.”

  “Good luck,” Kintara wished him, and she hung up before he could get another word in.

  Dillon was not at all sure what Kintara meant. He did not believe that all the messages were related. He thought he had solved the mailbox problem and was pretty sure about Pansy Pat. That left the man who didn't know where his home was and the renegade bus driver. Both could probably be explained by some sort of dementia, but he had never known his grandmother to be wrong about anything, so he decided he would have to think again.

  The re-thinking had to wait, however, as the Commander brought the plane down for an easy landing at a private air strip in the desert. Debarking, Dillon was surprised to see a large transit bus waiting for them. One glance at the Commander was enough to tell him he needed to climb on board that thing. She followed and before he could even choose a seat she had started it up and pulled out onto the adjacent highway.

  “I suppose there's no point in asking,” he said, taking a seat right behind her.

  “If you like, sir. I tracked the cellphone of the correspondent and using global positioning was able to ascertain he current coordinates. We should come to intercept in approximately three minutes. I diverged our landing and ordered this present mode of transportation, but there is no need for concern. This vehicle runs on recycled hydrogenated vegetable oil. It may smell a bit, but is one hundred percent sustainable.”

  “But why a bus?”

  “Yes, sir? Certainly. We are going to need to block the highway in order to force the oncoming bus to halt. This vehicle has more than the width to accomplish that task. It's only a two-lane highway.”

  Dillon sighed and sat back. Sometimes he wished the Commander weren't so incredibly competent. It made his own efforts seem less than spectacular sometimes, and he did like to shine. The bus roared up the road and soon slowed, came to a stop, then methodically planted itself sideways on the highway. The Commander had chosen a long, straight stretch of road, and he noted with awe that she had even selected a bright green bus for the occasion. It stood out glaringly against the pale brown landscape. Within moments he caught side of the rogue bus heading towards them. He worried for a moment that it might not stop, but might plow straight through them, but it did not. The driver might be suffering from an episode of instantaneous dementia, but he was still able to recognize an immovable object staring him in the face. The bus slowed and came to a stop twenty feet in front of his own.

  Dillon got off his bus and walked around to the other one, where the driver opened the door for him. As he climbed up the stairs, he saw a gaggle of frantic passengers all risen from their seats and shouting at the driver and at one another. The driver was an old man, as Dillon had expected, but seemed far older than he would have thought possible. The man looked positively like a skeleton, a bald one at that, all gleaming skull and deep eye sockets and teeth, impossibly large teeth. Dillon ignored the clamoring passengers and looked closely into the driver's eyes. The driver seemed to be looking back at him, but might have been gazing off into space as far as Dillon could tell. The man was clearly not entirely in the present. And Dillon suddenly knew what to ask him.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but just how old is your grandmother now?”

  The driver blinked and cocked his head, then blinked again and opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it.

  “He won't talk,” shouted a nearby passenger, a middle-aged woman with a hefty blond coiffure, “he won't say a damn word, just keeps driving and driving.”

  “Where are we anyway?” yelled another one.

  “And who the heck are you?” somebody else said.

  “Are you the police?”

  “Get him out of here!” someone demanded.

  The driver slowly unbuckled his seat belt, stood up, and started towards the steps. He would have walked right into Dillon had not the latter backed down the stairs and retreated from the bus before him. The driver stepped outside into the hot sun, turned and looked back up at the road he'd just come down.

  “I reckon Carson City will be back that-a-way apiece,” he drawled.

  The Commander, who had come up to join her boss, nodded in agreement.

  “About a half an hour's drive,” she said.

  “Somebody better take these people,” the driver said, waving in the general direction of the bus. “I got a funeral to attend.”

  “A funeral?” Dillon asked, but there was no answer. The driver took three steps forward and keeled over, dead.

  “What did you say to him?” asked the woman with the hairstyle, who was standing on the bottom step.

  “If you'll get back in the bus, ma'am,” the Commander suggested. “My assistant will take you all to Carson City and we'll put you up for the night in a very nice motel I know there.”

  “Your assistant?” Dillon started to ask, but before he could get the words out he saw a young woman emerging from the back door of his own bus, someone he had never seen before in his life. He had no idea who she was or where she'd come from.

  “I thought it prudent,” the Commander told him
.

  The situation was well in hand. The Commander had also thought to bring refreshments for the no-doubt weary and cranky passengers. In minutes they were all settled back in their seats and headed in the opposite direction, inconvenienced for sure, but from then on were well looked after.

  “I don't know how you do it,” Dillon said to the Commander once they were back on their own bus, returning to the air strip. He searched the entire vehicle this time but found no other hidden passengers.

  “Just thinking ahead,” was the Commander's reply.

  “Thinking ahead?” Dillon repeated her words out loud, not requiring a response. If a person can think ahead, he thought, why can't they also think behind? Isn't that what memory is? Information with a time stamp, his grandmother had told him. And if a person can think ahead and think behind, why can't they think anywhere in the time line? Is that how it works? Is that what she meant by interference? Not interference in the sense of someone or something intervening in events, but interference in the sense of static, of noise, of confusion, scattering, displacement, disassociation.

  On the plane ride back, Dillon researched the man who mistook another home for his own. Had he lived at that address before? No. Would he live at that address at some time in the future? Who could tell? Nobody knows the future, even though it's right there in front of us all the time! And what about Pansy Pat? Think! Would some