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  For Fremder Gorn

  Kleinzeit House Press

  New York, NY

  Copyright © 2028 by Keith Thomas

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  First hardcover edition August 2028

  Interior design by Miranda Caliban

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  FOREWORD

  When I was nine years old, my father took me to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of the Voyager 1 probe.

  Dad was an engineer at NASA and that got me, a wide-eyed, space obsessed girl, a front-row seat to the send-off. I never forgot the experience of witnessing one of mankind’s greatest achievements. And that memory was the spark that pushed me to be better. It was what led me to speak to you now, as the President of what used to be called the United States of America.

  That was all long before the world was transformed, before the panic.

  Before we witnessed the very first Elevation of a human being . . .

  In 1977, the whole world turned towards the stars. We wanted to believe there was intelligent life somewhere out there. And we hoped that if we could reach them, maybe they’d reach back. Voyager 1, this satellite dish with bristling antenna, was a message in a bottle. Our way of letting the galaxy know we existed. That we were out here if anyone wanted to find us.

  Over the next forty years, the probe flew past Jupiter and Saturn before it drifted into the void, swallowed up by a silent universe. Or so we thought . . .

  Truth is, our message didn’t go unheard.

  The universe reached back and changed everything. Not with war or an invasion but with a whisper. Almost overnight, all that we knew transformed.

  And I saw it happen.

  In 2023, we witnessed the first Elevation of a human being.

  It began, as most dramatic things do, with a single person.

  I’m looking at a photo of Dr. Dahlia Mitchell right now. It is sitting here, framed on my desk. She is younger, mid-twenties, in the photo than when I met her. Her eyes are green, her hair long and crimped, and she’s smiling. Happy. I have no idea when it was taken, but my guess is shortly after she got her professorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  Dahlia’s history is a tragic one.

  She was an army brat. Her family moved fourteen times over the next eighteen years. Her father, Arthur, an African American chemical engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, fell for a German girl, Giselle, while he was stationed in Europe.

  Dahlia only enjoyed Fort Polk for two years, barely long enough to learn to run, before the family—Dahlia, mom, dad, and her older brother, Nico—uprooted to Augsburg, Germany. A whirlwind followed: Oklahoma, Kansas, Hawaii, Virginia, Bavaria, Seoul, and back to Augsburg.

  During the brief time we spent together, she told me she was introspective growing up, obsessed with books and history. A curious kid, she uncovered new and exciting things in every place the family encamped. And, like her mother, Dahlia learned languages easily. She spoke three by the time she was ten. She remained a bright, easily awed child well into her early teens, when her mother committed suicide.

  Dahlia took her death hard.

  After her mother’s suicide, Arthur withdrew and Nico and Dahlia had to fend for themselves. While Nico rebelled, Dahlia focused on her studies—primarily astrophysics and chemistry.

  An ambitious and clever student, Dahlia impressed her professors and received a full ride to earn a PhD in astrophysics from Cornell. After graduation, she took a professorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was, by all accounts, very productive but not very happy.

  But I’ll let you hear that from her.

  This book is a testament. Not to my presidency or my administration but to the people behind the scenes, the people who averted us from even bigger disasters or steered us out of harm’s way. When Keith Thomas first approached me about participating in this book, I told him I was hesitant to get involved. The times he wanted to document were trying for me politically and personally. Revisiting these events, even after five years, was emotionally draining and, in some cases, quite upsetting. Still, I agreed and I’m convinced he’s been able to capture some, if not all, of what made the Finality the sea change of all sea changes.

  While I know a lot of people who’ve been left broken by the Elevation, I have also met just as many who are excited by the prospects of starting over. Future generations depend on us not making the same mistakes our ancestors did. Regardless of which political philosophies you ascribe to or what religion you practice, I think we all can agree we’d like to see less bloodshed and more kindness. We have an opportunity to rejuvenate our planet. A lot of folks around here, they’ve already begun: all the food I eat, all the water I drink, it comes from down the road. From local farms, local reservoirs, and the air . . . well, it’s amazing how clean the air is.

  Of course, we’re not without lingering, serious problems. Nearly 70 percent of the western United States is still without power and more than 50 percent of the South suffers from rolling brownouts. Medical care is still an ongoing emergency, and fuel issues limit our growth.

  But we are a strong people. We’re clever; we’re resourceful. And, like those who have left us, the 122 million souls who joined the Ascendants five years ago, we are brave.

  I hope that, going forward, we can learn from the events before, during, and after the Elevation. I know the world is a much smaller place. But it was a small place before, and I am confident it will become a much bigger place again. It won’t happen in the next five or ten years but five hundred and a thousand. I sincerely hope that when we rebuild—and we will—we do it a little more carefully.

  I spent several years working on an autobiography but refused to use a ghostwriter for assistance. At the end of the day, I realized that I just didn’t have the patience or the temperament to see it through. I’ve agreed to let Mr. Thomas use excerpts from this unfinished work in this book. The portions he’s chosen are fairly wide-ranging but I think get at the heart of what I was attempting to record.

  When Voyager 1 was launched, we were optimistic that the future held only great things for humanity. While it is true that the Voyager is still drifting out into the vaster reaches of space, with no signal back, no sign of ever having existed at all, I want us to get back to that original optimistic place. While we know we are not alone in this universe, we also know that we are unique. That should be celebrated. And in the pages to follow, I think you will find quite a bit to celebrate.

  Sincerely,

  President Vanessa Ballard

  June 25, 2028

  INTRODUCTION

  This is an oral history of how the world ended.

  It took me twenty-three months to write this book.

  The world we knew ended in just two.

  On October 17, 2023, an astronomer, not particularly well-known or widely published, named Dahlia Mitchell discovered a signal emanating from a distant point in the galaxy. That signal was a pulse, sent by an unknown intelligence, and came to be known as the Pulse Code, as it contained data in incredibly advanced cryptographic cipher.

  The Pulse Code was no
t a message. It was not an attempt at communication from some distant civilization. It was a Trojan virus—a biological tool that altered the brains of roughly 30 percent of the human population. Those changed by the Pulse Code could see and hear things the rest of us couldn’t: gravitational waves, ultraviolet light, the very movement of the Earth itself. And that was only the beginning of their capabilities . . .

  This event was dubbed the Elevation.

  Many of the Elevated died—their bodies unable to keep up with the incredible transformation going on inside their heads. Some of those that survived went insane. Others isolated themselves from the rest of humanity, sequestering themselves in anticipation of an event that would see them transition from our world to another.

  That event was called the Finality.

  There have, of course, been many books written about the Elevation and the Finality—some focused on the science, others on the sociology; all of them approached the subject in suitably reverential ways. This was, after all, the biggest event in human history, changing humanity forever. Three billion people—gone.

  So why add to the pile of books about this ultimate event?

  Especially as someone known primarily as a novelist and filmmaker?

  The other books, documentaries—even the disastrous feature film that came out last year—attempt to tell the story of the Elevation as a whole; they take the 20,000-foot view. But I think this is a story that needs to be told from a personal place. At the end of the day, it’s the story of us—all of us. This oral history provides a platform for the voices of those who were there from the very beginning.

  But there is one additional thing that makes this project unique:

  This book contains portions of Dahlia Mitchell’s diaries.

  For a long time, they were presumed lost. While many people made it clear in interviews that Dahlia was a consummate diarist, no one had ever seen the books. Because they weren’t books. Dahlia, true to the digital age, recorded her diaries via posts on a private website only accessible via a password. To my knowledge, Dahlia never shared that password with anyone.

  About three years ago I got an email from a professional hacker who goes by the sobriquet S4yL4Frit3. Like a lot of hackers put out of work by the tech collapse that followed in the wake of the Elevation, S4yL4Frit3 was looking to make some side money by trawling through abandoned servers. (As an aside, it is estimated that over 3 quindecillion bytes of data—that’s a 3 followed by forty-eight zeros—remain un-accessed in world servers.) S4yL4Frit3 stumbled onto Dahlia’s diaries quite by accident; it was just one of several million private blogs archived on a “dead” social media platform (similar to the largely forgotten Twitter and Facebook) swept up in one of S4yL4Frit3’s data hauls.

  Being a fan of a certain horror thriller I’d written a couple years ago, S4yL4Frit3 sent me the diaries. Being something of a news and science junkie, S4yL4Frit3 knew this was something special. Not the sort of thing to just dump on the Net or toss to a few of the remaining news networks. The message I got from S4yL4Frit3 was simple: “Do this thing justice.”

  After I read the diaries, I knew that was exactly what I had to do. I spent the next eleven months traveling the country and compiling interviews with people who had witnessed the incredible changes that roiled our country firsthand. I was fortunate to talk to powerful voices like President Ballard, the country’s first Independent president, and unsung characters like Thomas Franklin Bess, a witness to one of the first Elevations.

  I also gained access to recorded interviews and transcripts from numerous sources. Some were transcripts from recordings made surreptitiously by both government and nongovernment actors. All of these pieces, intermixed with the one-on-one interviews I personally conducted, paint a true picture of transformation.

  On both a global and also a personal level.

  As Dahlia changed, so changed the world.

  Telling the story of the Elevation was never going to be easy.

  I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to touch on each and every angle—the wars that erupted in the Middle East, the disasters in Singapore and Austria—but I covered the history as best I could. And have provided footnotes as well.

  There will be surprises here.

  Some of what I discovered hasn’t yet been exposed.

  And some of it will be disturbing.

  While many of us were aware that there were people inside President Ballard’s administration fully against her plans, we couldn’t have known how many of these agents were entrenched in our government, like hidden cancerous cells, for many, many decades. I know I’m not the first to discuss the existence of the Twelve, but I am the first to speak to several of its former members.

  There will be controversy in these pages as well.

  Some of my contacts are people that history will not remember fondly. A lot of you might be angered to see their names again in print. I assure you that I am not airing their opinions to generate buzz but to give rationale, a way of seeing the Elevation, which very nearly ended our existence.

  As the folk anecdote goes: The worst divisions are from within.

  However, this is in many ways Dahlia Mitchell’s story. I didn’t want that to be lost in all the political or scientific turmoil. Just like all of us, Dahlia was someone caught up in the chaos of the Elevation, someone looking for safety, looking for comfort. Despite her scientific breakthroughs and the startling abilities she discovered within herself, Dahlia was a dreamer and remained one until the end.

  I dedicate this book to all the other dreamers out there.

  Keith Thomas

  February 2028

  THE PULSE

  1

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM AN FBI INTERVIEW WITH DAHLIA MITCHELL

  PALO ALTO FIELD OFFICE: RECORDING #001—FIELD AGENT J. E. MUDDOCK

  OCTOBER 23, 2023

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Please state your name, brief biographical history, education, marital status, and profession.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: My name’s Dahlia Mitchell. I was born at Fort Polk. Louisiana, but was raised all over the globe, pretty much. Army brat. I have one brother, Nico. My parents were divorced. My father died about ten years ago from an illness. My mother . . . uh, my mother committed suicide. I went to UPenn and then did my graduate studies in astronomy at Cornell. I am single and I’m . . . well, I was, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: And what was your area of expertise there? What were you researching and teaching students?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: I did my dissertation on how we can use gravitational lensing to map the distribution of dark matter in relation to galaxies. We use gravitational lensing to find galaxy clustering, and if we look at that clustering in relation to dark matter fields, we can get a sense of the position of the galaxies. If that makes sense . . .

  AGENT MUDDOCK: I’m not an expert. Please tell us what your most recent research subject was. The work you were doing before the event.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Same topic. Just . . . just studying it differently. You know the expression about not seeing the forest for the trees? Well, it was sort of the opposite of that. I was too focused on the forest, on the larger whole. While I was looking at galaxies, what I really needed to do was focus on the spaces in between to find out how dark matter ties together the universe. Even though dark matter’s still essentially theoretical, there are ways to study the effect that dark matter has on gravitational waves and other . . . well, transmissions that are beaming their way across space. I was scanning as much of the sky as I could, collecting radio bursts and hoping those would give me a better understanding of how dark matter was operating. That’s it in a nutshell.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: And how was this work received at the university?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: You know, it’s tough doing research on something that, for the most part, is only rumored to exist. I mean, that’s been changing pretty rapidly, but there’s still this bias out there against research that’s
seen as fundamentally impractical on a basic science level. Harder to get the funding and the grants when you’re looking into something people can’t see, computers can’t even measure, and that might not actually exist the way you imagine it does.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: So it’s safe to say that your work hasn’t been championed within your department? We’ve interviewed Dr. Kjelgaard and he doesn’t speak as highly of your work as he does of your colleagues’. Is it true that you were asked to suspend your dark matter work in the days leading up to discovering the Pulse signal?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Yes, that’s true.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: And so the night that you made this discovery—technically you were not supposed to be at the radio telescope observatory. You were not approved to run an experiment—

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: That isn’t exactly correct. I had been approved, just a few weeks earlier, to run the tests that I was running that night. At the last minute, my . . . my superior decided that I should just shut the program down—

  AGENT MUDDOCK: It was in fact the board that made the decision.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: On my superior’s recommendation, yes. But I had prior approval and I saw it only as a chance—like a last-ditch effort, really—to complete a project that I had spent the majority of my professional life working on. You have to understand, there are very specific criteria that go into these sorts of observations. If the weather is off or the dishes aren’t properly calibrated, then you’re looking at significant, potentially disastrous delays. I couldn’t afford to miss the moment. No matter—

  AGENT MUDDOCK: No matter the fact that your boss had told you to stop. He had specifically told you not to continue the experiment that night.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Yes. That’s true.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Seems a little convenient, doesn’t it? You’re told not to pursue this avenue of exploration, and you dismiss your superior’s judgment as flawed, you go ahead with the project as you had originally intended, and then you make the single most important discovery in recorded history . . .