Dahlia Black Page 10

  I just . . . I couldn’t focus.

  Tonight, the waves inside my head were distracting me. Another migraine was coming, the needle fingers uncurling from the nape of my neck again, ready to march across my head leaving their trail of pain.

  Like always, my brother could see something was wrong.

  I told Nico I just needed to take a little break, to lie down and rest in a quiet, dark room for a little bit.

  That is where I am right now.

  And the light waves are here again.

  They’re sliding down from the corner of the room, right at the intersection of the walls and the ceiling. Light waves that are radiating out, slowly, pulsing across the space between the corner and me.

  It is stunning. Beautiful.

  No, they’re not light.

  They’re . . . they’re gravitational waves.

  This is impossible . . .

  16

  NICO MITCHELL, DAHLIA’S BROTHER

  SAN FRANCISCO, CA

  AUGUST 22, 2025

  While Dahlia Mitchell was perhaps the most famous of the Elevated, Nico, her brother, did not lose any additional family members to the Elevation.

  He still lives in San Francisco with his wife, Valerie, and two sons, both in middle school. Nico trained as an architect but eventually found work in marketing. He and Valerie started their own advertising company roughly five years before the Elevation. It was both successful and fulfilling.

  He misses having a nine-to-five job.

  Nico and Valerie run two bed-and-breakfasts in the city. They cater to business travelers and tourists, though there haven’t been many people passing through recently. During the off-seasons, Nico helps with reconstruction projects downtown, while Valerie tutors neighborhood kids.

  Taller than I’d expected, Nico is thin, in his mid-forties, with graying hair and clear-framed glasses. He walks with a slight limp and has a bright smile. Nico gives me a tour of the house before showing the room where Dahlia stayed the night she first started to see gravitational waves . . .

  I found her in here a few minutes after she’d left the table.

  I was worried about her. The months leading up to that night were tough. My sister was struggling. She didn’t want to tell me; she was always closed up, you know? Dahlia had this drive, this self-determination thing. I suspect it was because of our mother . . . well, how it ended for our mother . . .

  Things were tough at work for her. She felt like she wasn’t being taken seriously. Her asshole boss was giving her a hard time about her research. I’ll be the first to admit that I never really understood what she was looking for out there, but she was resolute in trying to find it. That sort of single-mindedness took a toll on her. It would take a toll on anyone.

  I knew about the painkillers.

  She was a classic case. A back injury when she fell during one of her runs. Doctor prescribed opioids and kept refilling the prescription. I can’t tell you how many times Dahlia told me she was done with them. But every time I got a chance, I’d look in her medicine cabinet or even dig into her purse. I’m her brother, after all.

  She always had the pills.

  So that night, dinner at my house, when I walked into the guest room and found her . . . acting crazy, I assumed it was the drugs. That wasn’t just me being presumptuous either. Dahlia fell over when I walked in, knocked her purse to the floor. The pills scattered around the room and we ended up picking them up out of the cracks in the baseboards for weeks afterwards. Had to lock the door so the boys wouldn’t wander in and accidentally find one.

  When I walked into the room, Dahlia was talking about waves.

  She was seeing them emanating from the ceiling and rippling across the empty space between her and the wall. She described them like they were waves of light but she told me they were gravitational waves.

  I had to look that up later. Based on what I found, gravitational waves are invisible. Takes an incredibly expensive and complicated machine the size of a football field to detect them. And that didn’t happen until just a few years before the Elevation. These were concepts from theoretical physics, not the kind of thing you can suddenly start seeing. But Dahlia was seeing them the same way you and I see a sunset.

  She was stunned, fascinated.

  You can only imagine how much it meant to her. It was like she was seeing the face of God or suddenly getting the answer to the universe’s biggest question. Awe. That was the expression on Dahlia’s face. Seeing the pills scattered all over her room, I assumed it was drug induced. She was tripping and had some revelation. I will tell you that I didn’t see anything. There was some dust in the air but not a single wave or light or gravity.

  Then she passed out.

  Looking back on it now, after everything that happened, I was scared. It wasn’t just her health. I could handle her being a little bruised, maybe sick, but her mental state—the fact that she was seeing these things—really unnerved me. Valerie too. You have to understand, when you’ve got a parent who suffered from mental illness, a parent who committed suicide, every weird thought you have or gesture you make takes on added significance.

  Medical workup at the hospital was normal, at first.

  All the blood tests, all the scans—they came back with normal levels. She was high from the opioids. But we expected that. Everything else, however, was as expected. No cancer, no chronic illness. So that left the mental end of things. When Dahlia woke up the next morning, she had a meeting with several psychiatrists. That didn’t give us anything either. The docs came away talking about retinal migraines, schizoaffective disorder, the usual list of potential problems. And when they found out our family history, things got twice as complicated.

  When Dahlia was feeling better, I went in with a cup of coffee and a Danish.

  She had a fifth-floor room that overlooked the parking lot, and just beyond it, if you squinted hard enough, you could make out the ocean. When I came in, Dahlia was out of bed and sitting by the window.

  She sipped her coffee and asked me, “How bad is it?”

  I told her it was bad. “They think you’re nuts.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have said the words the second they came out of my mouth. After what happened to our mom, we were both sensitive to jokes about mental illness. Still, I couldn’t help myself.

  “Am I?” Dahlia asked.

  “No,” I lied. “Just the migraines, like you expected.”

  “You know the pills I’ve been taking?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about—”

  “They’re not working anymore. They have no effect.”

  Dahlia had been prescribed pain meds. She got hooked on them pretty quick. The way she described it, they took the edge off her. Chilled her out a bit. But her dose doubled all the time.

  I was worried.

  So when she told me they weren’t working like they used to, I told her maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

  Dahlia wanted to go home.

  I told her they’d send her home just as soon as the doctors had reviewed the last round of tests. She was antsy to go. Dahlia didn’t mention the Pulse but told me work was piling up, regardless of what her boss thought of her research. I asked her to tell me a little more about what she was working on, but she didn’t answer.

  She was staring off into the middle distance between us.

  Eyes focused on . . . nothing.

  Dahlia said, “I can see the waves again. They’re stronger now.”

  She reached out to touch one of them. At least, that’s what I assume she was doing. Dahlia carefully stretched out her fingers, gently trying to pluck something invisible from the air the same way you’d pinch a dust mote.

  I don’t know if she got it.

  But she began seizing a few seconds later.

  17

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM A PHONE CALL BETWEEN DR. XAVIER FABER AND KANISHA PRESTON

  (RECORDED BY DR. XAVIER FABER, TRANSCRIBED BY KEITH THOMAS
)

  RECORDED ON 11.4.2023

  KANISHA PRESTON: Hello?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: National Security Advisor Preston? Sorry to wake you. It’s Xavier Faber with the group. We’ve, uh, we’ve found something . . .

  KANISHA PRESTON: Okay . . .

  DR. XAVIER FABER: A Trojan horse. I think that this code is a Trojan horse program designed to hack human DNA. I don’t know what the outcome is supposed to be, but I know that this signal, the Pulse, wasn’t a message. It’s a package. This thing was just delivered to each and every one of us.

  KANISHA PRESTON: Hacking human DNA?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: It’s incredibly complicated. Dr. Roberts has some ideas, of course, but . . . We’ve never seen anything like this.

  KANISHA PRESTON: How? How would that even work?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: You’re the doctor. I imagine it’d be done the same way scientists manipulate DNA now. DNA can be edited with biotechnology. Damaged genes can be removed or repaired. We’re only a generation away from editing someone’s DNA to repair the genes associated with inherited macro-degeneration. If this code hacks human DNA, then it does roughly the same thing. Only, instead of repair genes, it alters them . . .

  KANISHA PRESTON: What would be the goal of altering human DNA? Why would an alien intelligence want to do that? Why not just . . . invade?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Best we can think, it’s an attempt at reading us. That sounds stupid when I hear myself saying it out loud, but that’s our best guess. It could be that the Pulse Code is linked back up with some sort of receiver and they basically just scanned our whole genetic code. But . . .

  KANISHA PRESTON: But?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Here’s the thing that I’m most worried about: even if we crack this code, figure out exactly how it works and what it does, we’re behind the eight ball. The Pulse already hit the Earth. If the Pulse does something bad, we’ve all already been exposed.

  THE ELEVATION

  18

  PRESIDENT VANESSA BALLARD

  DETROIT, MI

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2025

  Flying into Detroit, my plane passed low over a city that has completely surrendered itself to the vicissitudes of nature. No other American city has embraced the Finality and turned what most view as catastrophe into opportunity. I wouldn’t call the people who fly in from across the country to visit Detroit “damage porn” tourists, though for a while this was the impression people had of them: posing in front of derelict and overgrown buildings for social media selfies, touring the waste-water treatment plant lakes by kayak. The city had seen this sort of thing before, of course. Pre-Elevation, there were movies filmed in Detroit just to capture that urban decay. That was different; that was piggybacked on the pain and suffering of other people. Now the people are gone. The city is empty.

  What was, at its heyday, a sprawling metropolis of 1.8 million has dwindled to just over 15,000 people—the same size as Bend, Oregon, or the sunken city of New Orleans. One of those 15,000 is our last president.

  She resides in the Field House in Palmer Woods. It’s a well-known architectural wonder from the 1950s with a broad sloping roof. Dubbed “the butterfly house” for its unique shape, the house looks out onto an empty neighborhood. All the houses, outside of one directly across the street where the Secret Service has an office, are unoccupied. I notice several of them have trees growing from their roofs and none have windows; this is a testament to the looting that engulfed much of the country in the hours just following the Finality.

  Long hair graying, President Ballard, now in her mid-sixties, still looks every bit as presidential as she did during her first campaign. Near the living room windows looking out over her backyard, we sit in comfortable leather armchairs and drink tea. President Ballard has become quite health conscious and takes great pride in growing, drying, and brewing her own teas. She enjoys them herself and gives them to friends, family, and the occasional visitor.

  I remember when I was first told about the Pulse.

  It was Glenn. We were in the Oval Office corridor, moving from one meeting to another. When Glenn had something serious to tell me, something he knew I might have a big reaction to, he slowed down and wanted to make eye contact.

  So I slowed and he talked.

  He told me that National Security Advisor Preston had received a communication about the interception of an unusual signal. Was this, quote, unquote, “unusual signal” a problem or merely a curiosity? I asked.

  He indicated it was a problem.

  Then he told me that a radio telescope in California picked up a signal coming from outside our galaxy. That this pulse—this was the first time I heard the word in relation to this event—was sent by an intelligence alien to our planet. Even more, this pulse contained a code. A code they were working to break.

  I think my first reaction was befuddlement.

  It certainly wasn’t excitement, though that came later.

  Glenn was never shy about sharing his thoughts. He repeated how the Pulse was picked up, adding that only a few people, all inside the NSA, had seen the code and then ended with his take.

  “It’s real,” he said. “I’ve had a committee, working alongside Kanisha, sorting this whole thing out. They’re the best brains in astronomy, computer science, linguists, and physics, and they tell me that this is very much a message from outer space. What we have, Mrs. President, is potentially monumental.”

  I had never seen Glenn that . . . solemn.

  And yet hopeful.

  There was a light in his eyes when he told me about the Pulse. Of course, we shared an interest in the stars—me from my father and my upbringing, Glenn from his philosophy days. Remember, despite Glenn Owen’s fiery career on Capitol Hill, his polarizing reputation as an arch-politician, he was a philosopher first. This was a man who’d written several books on nihilism that became cult classics with edgy intellectuals. The idea that there was other life in the universe and that it had reached out to us during my administration, well . . . We both knew that this could be a defining moment. Monumental indeed.

  But I wasn’t going to cancel all my meetings that day because of it. Half the world was still in turmoil. Grinding war in the Middle East, terrorism ripping Southeast Asia to shreds, and climate change making everything worse. Back home, the divisions, as you recall, were worse than ever. We had racial strife that had exploded overnight on social media, an economy that had been stabilized but was still weak, a surge in methamphetamine addiction, and more gun violence issues than we’d seen in forty yearsI—and that’s coming from a dyed-in-the-wool Second Amendment supporter. That isn’t even touching on my own life and my husband’s health. Hard to balance all that, for sure.

  Even though my mind was spinning at the thought of an upcoming liaison with an alien race, I had important things to do first.

  So I thanked Glenn for telling me, asked him to keep me in the loop, and suggested he pull together his team and make them official. A task force, brought together to figure out what the message from space was and how we were going to handle it. And I needed them to give me some answers soon: I had a duty to tell the American public, certainly the science sector, what was going on.

  “It’s called Disclosure,” Glenn said. “Public acknowledgment that the United States government has been in contact with or has awareness of contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. It’s a big step, Mrs. President. We’ve never made it before because we’ve never had a reason to.”

  I asked him if he thought this team, this task force, could draft this Disclosure message. Would they be capable? Would they be willing?

  He said he thought so and I told him to get it done.

  The whole conversation lasted maybe three minutes. Thinking about that now, considering everything that happened after, it makes me laugh. But that’s how history works. The most important moments are sometimes wrapped in the smallest, most insignificant of packages. Three minutes and a decision was made that would chart our course,
not just for the United States, but also for the entire globe. Of course, hindsight is what it is. I would have made changes; I would have put aside some of the partisan differences that came up later.

  Glenn and I didn’t speak about the matter for a couple of days. We likely wouldn’t have talked again about the Pulse if it hadn’t been for what happened to David.

  I know that a lot of this made the papers. His Parkinson’s diagnosis was public knowledge pretty early on. The pundits, left and right, exploited it when they could. Almost always, using his health to attack me. Some suggested it made me weak, that I was struggling emotionally and therefore unfit, and others dared to link it to conspiracy theories about our marriage being a sham. The fact that we’d never had children was some sort of red flag for them. How could a woman be an effective president if she was denying her basic biology? I actually heard people say that.

  What wasn’t in the press was the fact that David’s illness was getting worse.

  Harvey Stimson, the White House physician, came to me that same week and told me that he was concerned. This was . . . well, the timing was difficult.

  I would have done anything for my husband. I told him multiple times that I would gladly give up the presidency if it meant giving him a better life, a better chance at healing.

  There’d been many scientific breakthroughs in treating Parkinson’s—the discovery of the PINK1 gene,II some novel stem cell therapies—and I was hopeful, genuinely hopeful, that we’d find a cure in David’s lifetime. Of course, I anticipated it might get worse with the stress of being in office. David and I discussed it at length before I even ran. He was my rock . . .

  President Ballard pauses here and looks out the window at the backyard. There are birds fluttering about several feeders she’s set up, and in the distance black smoke curls up over the treetops and into the pale sky.