Dahlia Black Page 11

  That’s not a house fire, though we’ve seen plenty of those.

  They’re burning refuse. Mostly leaves, branches. They’ve got a clever composting system that uses ash. It’s highly alkaline and counteracts the acidic soil in their gardens; they grow tomatoes for the whole neighborhood. Delicious and big as apples. You’ll have to try a couple of them on your way out.

  Going back, I was saying that David’s health had taken a bit of a hit right when the Pulse was found. Or at least when Glenn first told me about it. Dr. Stimson caught me that evening and told me David was exhibiting some worrying symptoms: a tremor in his right hand, speech changes, trouble sleeping. I told him I was aware of the changes. I also mentioned that David was complaining of some new pain at the base of his spine. Stimson wasn’t sure what that could be but told me he’d look into it.

  Sure enough, the night I was told of the Pulse . . . it began.

  David woke up in the middle of the night. He’d gone to bed early, around ten. I was up working in the Treaty Room until midnight and was very quiet when I came in. He was tossing, turning, and mumbling something. I was exhausted and I fell asleep despite the noise and turmoil. I woke up at two thirty and David wasn’t in the bed.

  He was standing in the corner, staring up at the ceiling.

  When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “They’re up there.”

  “Who’s up there?”

  David turned to me and his face was wet with tears, his eyes red from crying, and he said, “Don’t you hear them?” I shook my head. There was no noise I could make out. David said, “I can’t believe they’re here. Never thought I’d ever see them . . . And she . . . she looks so sweet.”

  I assumed David was dreaming. Walking in his sleep.

  But he was awake. We had the Secret Service scan the ceilings, give the room a once-over with their equipment. They didn’t find anything, of course. I called Dr. Stimson and he rushed over. The exam was normal. Eyesight, hearing, motor reflexes—all of it normal. Dr. Stimson wrote it up as a sleep disturbance. David slept fine the rest of the night but I lay awake staring at the corner of the ceiling. I never heard anything, never saw anything, but it haunted me. Seeing him like that. The things he said, it sounded like . . . like he really heard . . . I don’t know.

  Days passed. The Disclosure Task Force got to work.

  I spoke briefly with Kanisha Preston and she told me she was confident the team would have the Pulse Code cracked within forty-eight hours. She also let me know that their initial analysis suggested the code was likely a program. However, it wasn’t anything that would have run on our machines. She couldn’t rule out that it was a weapon. That was the last thing I needed, some intergalactic bomb being beamed to our planet from a trillion miles away.

  They kept working and I focused on domestic matters.

  You’ll remember this was right around the time of the train accident in Elizabeth, New Jersey.III I got the call maybe ten minutes after it happened. Two trains, filled with morning commuters, collided at full speed. Eighty-six lives lost. Worst rail disaster since 1876. After the FBI and local police ruled out terrorism, it was clear that it was driver error. What we had was radio communications and the black box from both of the trains. It was when those audiotapes, the one from the conductor of the northbound train, hit the media that people began freaking out.

  The driver was hallucinating.

  Just thinking about those tapes, the things he said, gives me chills to this day. He claimed he was seeing “the lost ones” on the tracks in front of him. He was speeding up to reach them.

  The lost ones. End of the day, everyone wrote it up as delusion. The man was in his late fifties, smoked, ate too much red meat, and likely had a stroke. An autopsy was inconclusive, considering most of his body had been reduced to ash in the ensuing fire. Here’s what the media didn’t know, what I’m going to tell you: the conductor talked about the “lost ones” but he also named them. The police kept that from the press and amazingly, for once, they were successful. I think it was done for privacy reasons, protecting family members, but . . . well, there’s a twist to that.

  What the driver said on that tape was: “There’s the lost ones . . . The lost ones come back . . . Ronald, Suzanne, and Little Curtis . . .” Took investigators several months to link those names to anything more than just rambling. The lost ones—the conductor knew them. I was dismayed when I heard it.

  Ronald, Suzanne, and Little Curtis were three of his classmates at his elementary school in Pennington, New Jersey. The three went missing in 1974 after taking a bus downtown on their way to a movie. The kids were never found and police suspected a serial killer who’d been operating in the area in the mid- to late ’70s might have abducted them. Nothing much came of that. Case still open, as they say. At the time of the crash, it was a spooky footnote in the investigation.

  A spooky footnote; I wish that was all it was.

  Three days after the accident, while the funerals were being held for the victims of the accident, David had another . . . attack. We were in the bowling alley at the White House. It’s one lane, in the basement just under the North Portico, and refurnished a few times by previous presidents. I wasn’t much for playing, but David enjoyed it. We had fun; it was great to see him laugh.

  When I brought up the Parkinson’s, David was dismissive.

  “I’m feeling fine,” he said. “Don’t stress about me. Seriously. It’s just old age making things worse. College football injuries sneaking up on me. What the hell happened to that hopeful woman who told me that we’d be creating a better world together once we reached the White House?”

  I told him she’d wised up.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Look, I’ll bowl a perfect strike just to prove it.”

  He winked at me, very cute. Then he turned, bowling ball in hand, positioned himself, focused on the pins. David pulled his arm back, ready to move, when . . . he didn’t. He stood there, frozen in that position like a statue. And then—crash—the bowling ball falls from his hand, slams down against the wood of the lane, and rolls off into the gutter. David hasn’t moved; he’s staring down at the pins.

  I got up, concerned.

  He—he was bleeding from his nose, and he kept repeating, “Why are they here? Why are they here?”

  I asked him who he was talking about.

  He said, “My mother . . . my baby brother . . .”

  I wanted to break down right there and then. My husband, the First Gentleman of the United States, was staring at a wall and telling me he was seeing his dead mother and his baby brother, Jacob, who’d died when David was only three or four years old. Then David collapsed. His legs just fell out from under him.

  I cradled him as the blood kept streaming from his nose and called for help.

  A helicopter took him to Walter Reed.

  That, for me, was the start of what we came to call the Elevation. Of course, at the time it seemed a random event, a factor of David’s illness. But when it began to happen other places, when the tragedy in Elizabeth was linked to what was going on nationwide—when there was no denying it was real—that was when everything changed. The Disclosure Task Force became much more than just a committee determined to help us navigate the waters of telling the world aliens were real: they became our lifeline to a new, radically different future.

  A future where Dahlia Mitchell was our guiding light.

  * * *

  I. And it spiked even more with anti-Elevation violence, but there were a number of violent standoffs between sovereign citizens—convinced the government was using the Elevation to claim land, weapons, and wealth—and law enforcement. Towards the last days of December 2023, just before Christmas, the murder rate in the United States reached an astonishing 25 per 100,000. It was a very dangerous time to be alive. Perhaps the most dangerous time in US history.

  II. The PINK1 gene provides the body with instructions for a protein called “PTEN induce putative kinase 1.” While th
e protein isn’t fully understood, it provides a protective function and PINK1 mutations likely play a role in Parkinson’s development.

  III. While the Elizabeth rail accident was horrifying and tragic, in the aftermath of the Finality several additional mass-casualty incidents would become associated with the Elevation. The plant explosion in Little Rock, Arkansas, the sinking of the New Waratah in Lake Michigan, and the Evergreen Building collapse in Salem, Oregon.

  19

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM A DISCLOSURE TASK FORCE MEETING

  RECORDED AT THE WHITE HOUSE ON 11.5.2023

  KANISHA PRESTON: We’re recording . . .

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: All righty. President Ballard has approved the creation of a Disclosure Task Force and a Disclosure document. This document will essentially be our message to the globe about what we know and we what believe are the next steps in this historical moment. Here’s what we know, and feel free, Dr. Faber, to interrupt me at any point to disagree or make a snarky remark—

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Don’t worry. I’m always ready.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: So. Here’s what we know: Approximately three days ago, astronomer Dr. Dahlia Mitchell of the University of California, Santa Cruz, intercepted a signal from deep space. To be specific, this was a pulse from the Bullet Cluster. She recorded part of it. We have studied the data contained in the Pulse and determined it is of extraterrestrial origin and designed by an intelligence far superior to our own. (pause) How am I doing so far?

  DR. SERGEI MIKOYAN: You’re doing excellent.

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Mediocre, but keep going.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: This pulse is the very first verifiable contact humanity has received from an outside culture. While we have the code embedded in the Pulse, we have no answers as to the culture—

  DR. XAVIER FABER: The Ascendant.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: Right: we have no answers about the Ascendant, their location, their society, their biological makeup, their—

  DR. XAVIER FABER: We get it. We don’t know shit all about them and likely won’t ever. Let’s keep focused on what we do know. Which is . . . ?

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: We know they have beamed this pulse at our planet and that it contains a program, essentially. Here is where things get a bit more complicated. The program inside the Pulse Code is designed to hack, for want of a better word, our DNA. The code functions like a chemical mutagen, but one we’ve never before encountered. Look, this is all very, very early, but as far as we can tell, it works something like this: the code alters the base pairs that make up the DNA chain.I Perhaps it’s stripping down nucleotides, incorporating changes that are imperceptible to the DNA replication apparatus. I suspect the changes include insertion of additional base pairs. Possibly many, many base pairs. For what purpose, we’re still unsure.

  DR. SERGEI MIKOYAN: I don’t care for the use of the word “hack.” That sounds malicious and we still have not determined if the code is a bad or good program. We know that the Pulse was spread across the globe and that means it likely encountered each and every person on the planet. If it is active—and that is still a big if—we need to assume it is doing something at this very moment.

  DR. XAVIER FABER: I think “hack” is an excellent word because it hints at the severity of this thing. I know Drs. Mikoyan and Roberts have ruled out the possibility.

  DR. SOLEDAD VENEGAS: To sum up, we are tasked with creating this Disclosure document. It will be presented to President Ballard. She will decide how she wants to present it, but, considering the importance of this situation, we all assume she’ll want to do it in as public a forum as possible.

  KANISHA PRESTON: The President is less worried about optics than she is about ensuring that this is accurate. Last thing anyone wants is panic. We don’t want to tell the world that we’ve been in touch with an alien intelligence that wants to help us evolve when they really want to eat us.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: That’s certainly not going to be an issue.

  DR. XAVIER FABER: I don’t know . . . I’ve heard human tastes delicious.

  KANISHA PRESTON: The other thing we’ll need to focus on is what comes next. We tell the world we’ve received this code. That means we’re not alone in the universe. But so what? Do we try and reach back? What do we say? I need you to come up with those ideas. I also need you to make some hypothetical leaps: tell me what you think we know about this intelligence, what the code tells you about their motives.

  DR. XAVIER FABER: We need to talk to Dr. Dahlia Mitchell. The reports, the interviews with her—they’re too surface-level. I need more detail. Specifically, I need to know what she thought she was seeing, what she thought she’d found.

  DR. SERGEI MIKOYAN: And the interviews didn’t answer this?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Sergei, what the Feds have asked her so far are just verbal bait and switch, attempts to catch her lying, to reveal she set the whole thing up. Dahlia’s a scientist; she needs to be questioned by her peers. If we want to know what happened when she found this thing, we need to hear it directly from her. So, can we bring her in?

  KANISHA PRESTON: I don’t see why not.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: I do have a larger concern. I’m worried we’re already too late in terms of alerting the public. If we are correct that this pulse has reached every man, woman, and child on the planet, then we can also assume that, whatever it was intended to do, it’s started. Regardless of whether we call it hacking human DNA or not, the Pulse was designed to interact with us. Outside of tuning every radio telescope on Earth to the Bullet Cluster, we need to focus on ourselves. We need to scan the news for each and every story about a potential society-wide affliction . . .

  KANISHA PRESTON: What are you suggesting, Dr. Roberts?

  DR. XAVIER FABER: He’s finally come around to my side on this. If the Pulse Code is hacking human DNA, what’s it programmed to do? We need to know what’s going on out there. My guess: the shit’s about to hit the fan.

  * * *

  I. DNA base pairs are standard nucleobase pairing with hydrogen bonds: A (adenine) with T (thymine) and C (cytosine) with G (guanine). This bonding gives DNA its distinctive double-helix structure.

  20

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Xavier was right about “the shit” but wrong on the timing.

  It had already hit the fan. However, most people hadn’t noticed.

  That’s because when the Elevation spread, the results were subtle. It began with a few scattered cases, nothing to raise alarms. And unlike a virulent disease like Ebola or a norovirus, the symptoms differed for most people.

  They were also, almost always, mental in origin.

  While the media picked up on a few wild incidents that spread across social media, the first cases of the Elevation that I could track down weren’t as dramatic. For me, the inaugural case was the elderly woman doing donuts in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  I spoke to Thomas Franklin Bess, a forty-six-year-old fireman who was one of the first to be called to the scene. He was a firefighter for twenty-one years and he still speaks of his work with reverence. No longer able to work due to a back injury, Thomas spends his time working as a handyman, driving around the largely empty neighborhoods in this sprawling suburb and fixing the few remaining residents’ toilets and sinks.

  Thomas and his crew were called out to an intersection where an accident had been reported. Only, it wasn’t an accident. When the engine arrived, they were waved down by a few people on their cells, including a young woman who claimed her mother was “going crazy.”

  Sure enough, there was a red sedan doing donuts in the middle of the intersection. Donuts. Round and round.

  Thomas motioned for the old woman behind the wheel to slow down and stop the vehicle. She didn’t listen. She just stared straight ahead, mumbling to herself. Round and round she went, with the wheel turned at a perfect angle to keep the car in its rotation but missing the curbs and everything. The firefighters couldn’t just let her block traffic until the sedan ran out of gas,
so they dragged a tire spike strip from the engine, threw it down in front of the car, and, pop, the elderly woman ran over it and the tires instantly deflated.

  When the firefighters pulled her out of the sedan, she was mumbling about how she could hear the grinding of the Earth under the street. “There’s a well under here,” she said. At the time Thomas didn’t think much of it. The woman was clearly unhinged. She was escorted to a waiting ambulance and taken off to the nearest hospital.

  A couple of days later, that very same intersection collapsed. At first Thomas assumed it was a sinkhole. That happened from time to time. But it wasn’t a sinkhole, at least not a natural one. Two cars went into a thirty-foot-deep pit, a void that engineers said was caused by an old well, one that had been abandoned but never properly sealed up. Thomas was struck by how eerie the whole thing seemed.

  “I thought the woman was prophetic,” he told me. “Well, until I heard about the others just like her.”

  The old well that swallowed up two cars made the local news; the old lady doing donuts did not. But she was the tip of a very unnerving spear. In the very hours that followed Thomas’s encounter with the elderly woman, I was able to stitch together a series of social media posts about incidents with similar unpredictable, inexplicable circumstances. It seemed that over the course of a single week, a large portion of the world’s population suddenly started to go . . . weird.

  There was the strange death of a young man, Orlando Macintyre, known to local police as a breeder of pit-fighting dogs. Orlando dropped out of school after ninth grade and was described by his mother as being “troubled and very slow to learn.” Two hours after Thomas’s encounter in Cheyenne, Orlando’s body was found in a barren field near Dayton, Ohio. The cause of Orlando’s death was never determined, but authorities suspected drugs played a role. What was unusual was the fact that Orlando was discovered gripping a scrap of paper in his left hand—a scrap of paper that contained a complicated mathematical formula that a professor at Bowling Green State University determined was a partial proof—or solution—for the Hodge conjecture.I