Yesterday's Gone: Season One

have something to do with Luca.”
    “I don’t know,” Desmond said with a sigh. “I think the way they showed up and he walked through the door and pulled your daughter from the brink, then went all Rip Van Winkle is just so out-there weird that anything they say or do is gonna seem weird to us.”
    “Do you think Will knows something more about Luca?”
    “I think he knows a lot about Luca,” Desmond said, “and a lot more than you get from idle conversation.”  
    The room was thick with everything Desmond wasn’t saying.  
    “Tell me, Desmond,” Mary said, “please.”
    Desmond’s brow relaxed. “Something bothered me about Will the second I saw him. At first I couldn't figure it out, no matter how hard I wracked my brain. But it finally came to me last night.”
    “What is it?”  
    “Will reminds me of someone I researched about 18 months back, a scientist studying quantum entanglement. Will even said something that was nearly identical to something the scientist said.”
    “What’s quantum entanglement?”
    “Not now,” Desmond laughed. “In simple terms, let’s say everything in the universe was once one atom. You know, before the Big Bang spread us in a zillion directions all across creation. Even though we’re all separate now, we’re still connected on some level. Everything means you, me, and everyone. We’re all entangled . And somehow, those two are perceiving things that we can’t. They knew we were here and in trouble.”
    “I can see how that makes sense,” Mary said. “But it still doesn’t explain the bleakers or whatever happened to Paola.”
    “No,” Desmond said, “maybe not just yet. But it’s something that makes Will and Luca a little less frightening, right?”
    “I suppose so,” Mary said.
    Dog Vader whined again.  
    “So, does any of this help us figure out what to do next?”
    “It’s a piece of the puzzle,” Desmond said. “I just need some time alone to try and figure it all out and make sense of it. Believe me, we’re going to leave here. One way or another.”
    Mary didn’t want to consider what Desmond meant by another.

    * * * *

DESMOND ARMSTRONG

    Desmond sat in a small cubicle at the far end of the temporary offices once offered to business travelers in need of 15 minutes of Internet and quiet while staying at the Drury Inn. The monitors were black, as blank as they would be for the rest of forever, and a fair reflection of the answers in Desmond’s mind.
    He stared at the scribbles and sketches that blackened the three sheets of paper spread on the desk. He had no easy way out. Just two choices: frying pan or fire. And if he chose poorly, he’d end up marching everyone over the edge and into an unknown abyss.
    If he could pull the edges of his mind together, perhaps he could get the colors of the Rubik’s cube to click into place. Unfortunately, his mind was frayed and splitting; each time he came close to threading a feasible answer, the seams of logic would split and tear his theory in two.  
    Desmond typically solved life’s problems with a simple formula:  
    Replicate, isolate, fix.  
    A mechanic couldn’t be expected to fix a problem until he saw or heard it, which is why you couldn’t just describe the sound your engine was making; you had to reproduce the rattle to isolate the problem.  
    Whether you were dealing with a rattling engine, some bad lines of source code, or a looming economic catastrophe, effective problem solving meant you must dive deep, narrow your focus, and thin your variables. Only then could you get to the best part — fixing it.  
    Desmond loved to fix things, and had shown natural aptitude since he was a child. It’s what made him successful in life and business. But every solution started with the variables; they paved the path for the predictors that allowed him to asses the situation and arrive at the next best steps. Yet, when the laws he once knew had softened to gelatin, even seasoned estimation was little more than guessing.
    Start with what you know.
    Desmond went back to the beginning.  
    If the entire world, or at least the few hundred miles they’d traversed, had disappeared, how were a small cluster of survivors from Warson Woods, all living next to and across the street from one another, able to survive?  
    There had to be a reason, and it couldn’t be geography, not with Will and the boy crossing the country from the west coast. They were the anomaly, at least from the