Dahlia Black Read online

  That same day, in Mesquite, Texas, a mother of three named Francine Sharpless drove her minivan into a crowded farmers market. Before detonating the homemade explosive in the trunk, she shouted to startled witnesses: “I’m going to free you now!”

  These are just two of dozens of similar cases. And these are the cases for a single given day in the United States. I found thousands of identical events in countries across the globe. There was the oil tanker that ran aground in Denmark, the train derailment in Singapore, and the fires that burned down most of Athens.

  These are, of course, the bigger events.

  I also found hundreds of instances in the records of many smaller, more personal accounts of transformation. I’m certain that most of these testimonies would have been lost in the barrage of second-by-second updates and new posts. Many of these posts were of drawings—pen, crayon, pencil, charcoal, paint, digital; they ran the gamut—all done in a feverish, almost art brutII fashion. If you were to create a video of these pieces, having each of them appear on-screen for a few seconds, you would immediately notice the similarities: cascading colors, overlapping circles, radiating lines. Each and every one of them was an illustration of something people aren’t supposed to see. Gravitational waves, infrared colors, and, in a few cases, even having what the comic books would call “superpowers.”

  People like Carter Loisel.

  * * *

  I. The Hodge conjecture is an unsolved problem in algebraic geometry that was first presented by mathematician Sir William Vallance Douglas Hodge in 1950. The person who proves or disproves the conjecture will be awarded $1 million by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

  II. The term “art brut” frequently refers to “outsider art” or art made by people without any artistic training. Most often, it is associated with art by the mentally ill. That certainly is the connotation here, as much of the art created by the Elevated that I’ve seen is very reminiscent of work by schizophrenic artists like Adolf Wölfli.

  21

  ADELE FRANCE, MD, EMERGENCY MEDICINE PHYSICIAN

  CHICAGO, IL

  JANUARY 3, 2026

  Adele France is in her early thirties.

  Two of her three siblings died due to Elevation-related causes.

  Like the rest of the world, she was caught off guard by the changes that suddenly spread through the population. Being on the front lines of the medical emergency—and scientific mystery—that followed, she witnessed firsthand how families were left confused and frightened in the wake of the Elevation. Her own family was one of those: looking up everything they could on the Internet, calling their doctors incessantly, hitting every ER and urgent care center that would accept their insurance (sometimes even those that wouldn’t), and emptying the shelves of their local pharmacies. Of course, none of that helped.

  The Elevation wasn’t a disease doctors knew how to treat.

  Today, Adele lives in Chicago, but when she was a medical resident, she lived in Oklahoma. She tells me she enjoyed the wide-open spaces and the sky that seemed to never stop. It was there that she saw her first Elevated human.

  I was a resident when the first case came in.

  This was in rural Oklahoma. There’s this loan repayment plan for medical students if you choose to do part or all of your residency at a rural hospital. I didn’t come from money and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to the idea of paying off student loans for the next forty years. So I jumped at the opportunity and took a job in Boise City.

  With the political turmoil over health care, the place was really struggling. I’d say something like seventy percent of my patients were on government assistance. That’s probably low. Most of the stuff we saw on a day-to-day basis was your typical flus and injuries. A lot of farm equipment injuries.

  Most days we’d be sitting around waiting for something, anything, more exciting than a baby with a sore throat or a farmer with a sprained ankle. Never in a million years would I have guessed that something would be one of the first Elevated.

  It was maybe six o’clock, late in the summer. I remember the shadows were really long and I was standing outside with a friend who was a nurse. She was on her smoke break and I was just stretching, getting a last few rays of the sun. An old woman drove up in this ancient station wagon. She was in quite a state, frantic, honking the horn and waving her arms like the world was ending.

  I ran over there and she rolled down the window.

  “It’s my grandson,” she was yelling. “He’s gotten real bad!”

  There was a boy in the car, sitting in the back seat. I remember clear as day how he looked. The boy was sitting there, legs crossed, about seven or eight years old, and he turned and looked over at me. Just as cool and collected as he could be. The look in his eyes . . . I have no way to really explain just how much it affected me. This is going to sound silly—certainly sounds that way in my head as I’m saying it—but the little boy’s gaze was too knowing.

  That’s the best way for me to describe it, though even that doesn’t get at the effect his look had on me. I had sat beside my grandfather as he passed away. I was in college then and hadn’t had any real experience with death outside of pets, really, so I was a wreck. He was sitting on a couch, wrapped up in blankets, and listening to some gentle music. I held his hand and stared into his eyes; my mom and dad were sitting right beside him on the couch.

  We’d been there twelve hours, just waiting, watching, comforting as we could. His breathing was the first to go. It went from strained, long inhalations to ragged, lateral breaths—shallower and shallower. The sun had just come up and I remember the light in the room was so soft, almost hazy. I held my grandfather’s hand tightly as his breathing slowed even more. Finally, it just kind of stopped and he turned to me and looked at me, staring me directly in the eyes, and . . . he smiled. And died. But at that last second, that very last moment, looking into his pupils, wide and dilated and dark as the depths of the ocean, I felt like I was seeing his soul—a soul rich with so much wisdom, so much experience. Those milliseconds were overflowing. In them, I felt a massive wave, a tsunami, of knowledge wash over me. Subsume me. It was like gravity had reversed and I was launched out into the vastness of space, a tiny fragment lost in the entirety of the cosmos . . . That may be putting it a bit too poetically, but the feeling was real.

  And it wasn’t frightening. It was just . . . awe.

  I had the exact same feeling, the same sensation of being overwhelmed by an almost impossible force, when I looked into that little boy’s eyes. I froze. I hadn’t done that since I was in med school. It didn’t last long; I snapped out of it and got the boy out of the car as his grandmother screamed and yelled.

  Naturally, I’d assumed something had happened to the boy. Maybe he was sick or there had been an accident. He didn’t have a mark on him. He wasn’t hot to the touch, wasn’t pale. Seemed completely fine at that moment. Anyway, I brought him into the ER and had the nurses do a workup. I talked to the grandmother to get a history and figure out what exactly was going on.

  The grandmother, sixty-five at the oldest, was clearly panicked. It took her a while to calm down, but when she did, she confirmed that the little boy hadn’t been injured. He wasn’t sick—not with a virus or an infection. What was happening, according to her, was that the boy wasn’t himself anymore. He’d changed.

  “Changed how?” I asked.

  “He’s saying things, telling me things, that he shouldn’t know.”

  I didn’t understand what that meant, but I put a note in the chart that we needed to get a psychological evaluation and have a social worker come by to chat with the grandmother as well. I asked about the things the boy was saying.

  “He says he can see inside things . . .”

  “Like . . . like what?” I asked.

  “People, mostly,” she said.

  The way this boy’s grandmother said it gave me chills. The first thing my clinical brain thought was that the boy either had a particularly detai
led imagination or possibly was suffering from schizophrenia. It’s rare to see in kids, though. Especially little kids. I don’t know the rates off the top of my head, but schizophrenia in children under twelve is almost unheard-of.

  The boy’s vitals were all normal. His blood results came back normal too. Nothing elevated, nothing of concern. Before we went ahead with scans, I had our psychologist come down and talk to the boy with me. Just to see exactly what it was that he was telling the grandmother—exactly what it was that had her so concerned. A lot of times kids clam up. That’s expected. They’re in an unfamiliar place, talking to people they don’t know and don’t necessarily trust. In all honesty, that’s a positive thing. That’s something a well-adjusted kid does. Think of it more like a hardwired survival instinct.

  This boy didn’t clam up.

  If anything, he was too relaxed. Too talkative.

  The first thing this boy said when we sat down across from him in this cramped exam room was “You have metal in your ankle. The left one.” He said that to the psychologist and she laughed, nervous, and asked him how he knew that. The little boy said he could see it, plain as he could see the glasses on my face. The psychologist said that as a kid she’d fractured her ankle, tore some ligaments and a tendon, and had several surgeries. There were metal plates put in. Small, but there.

  “How do you know that?” the psychologist asked the boy.

  She was jumping the gun. I think the comment, the first words out of the little guy’s mouth, threw her off. There’s a whole procedure to these things, how to ask questions without setting up expectations. Psychology is a dangerous game: you have to know the rules and play it right, otherwise you really can’t get at the truth of what you’re looking for. Anyway, I think we were both stunned, confused, and she wanted to jump directly to the matter at hand.

  “I didn’t know it. I see it,” the boy said.

  So I asked him what else he could see.

  The boy leaned forward and stared at me like he was scanning a page for a particular word. It was unnerving, him looking me over. Took maybe thirty seconds, and then he leaned back in his chair and said, “I see three things. First, you have a tattoo on your backside, just above your butt crack. It looks like a bird but it’s all artistic looking. Second, you have a surgery. I don’t know what it was for, but the doctors made a small cut on the right side of your belly. There’s a part missing in there. A part of your guts that most people have but that’s not inside you.”

  “The appendix?” the psychologist asked.

  The boy shrugged. “I don’t know what it’s called,” he said, “but it’s like this little squiggle that comes off the bigger part of the guts. Most people, it kind of looks like a little tail that’s tucked in. She doesn’t have one.”

  “She” being me.

  I didn’t say anything. There’s this cliché about being at a loss for words, but it’s true. It can happen. Most clichés are like that; the reason they’re overused is because they’re so . . . real, some sort of common currency among humans, shared experience. Anyway, I couldn’t reply. The psychologist said, “You mentioned three things. What is the third?”

  The boy smiled and turned away shyly.

  “Go on,” the psychologist said, “it’s okay to tell us.”

  He laughed and looked at me and said, “You’ve got a little plastic T in your . . . in your vagina.” He was talking about my birth control. My IUD looks like a little T, of course. Placed in the uterus, it knocks around and prevents unwanted pregnancy. I’d had it implanted only a few weeks earlier. Now, I suppose it’s possible the boy was somehow familiar with an IUD. Maybe someone in his family had one or he’d seen a commercial or I don’t know. But the other stuff—the tattoo and, even more, the fact that I’d had my appendix taken out . . . it was mind-blowing. And at the same time it was too much to believe. I figured the boy was being coached.

  So I wrote it down and we did the scans.

  X-ray first. Found nothing abnormal. Here’s where we faced some trouble: there was technically nothing wrong with the boy. What his grandmother was complaining about was unusual, yes, but not dangerous. Technically, there was no threat to his life. Running tests under these circumstances was both expensive and unwarranted.

  At the same time, whatever was going on with the boy was distressing the grandmother. When I told her that everything looked okay, she was upset. She insisted that she wouldn’t leave the hospital until we’d figured out what was wrong with her grandson. When I suggested that there was nothing wrong, she looked at me like I’d lost my mind. The boy’s grandmother stood up, walked over to the door to the examination room, opened it, and said, “Come. Let me show you.”

  We went into the exam room where her grandson was and she took his hand. Then she asked if we could walk through the waiting room. Like I said at the outset, this was a small town. Despite that, there were actually five people in the waiting room at the time. Three had come in while we’d been talking to the boy and we hadn’t yet had time to do a workup on any of them.

  The boy’s grandmother took the boy by the hand and led him past each of the people in the waiting room. It was weird for a few moments, the boy standing there, staring at these sick people, and the psychologist and grandmother and me watching. The first patient, an older woman, began asking us what we were doing, when the boy said, “She has black stuff in her lungs, sticky and thick. It’s making her cough and the air doesn’t get down in deep like it should.”I

  The older woman nodded and said, “Yeah . . . he knows . . . how’s he know?”

  But we’d already moved over a few chairs to a man with a moustache who was slumped over and fast asleep. He reeked of alcohol and we’d had him pass through several times before complaining of pain and looking for opioids.

  The boy stared at the sleeping man a bit longer than he had at me or the psychologist or the older woman. Then he turned to his grandmother and said, “He has lumps all over the inside of his body. They’re going to kill him, aren’t they?”

  Of course, we didn’t know then that the boy was the first.

  His name was Carter Loisel and we also didn’t know that there was another patient, a young woman with kidney stones, who’d been filming the whole thing on her cell phone. She uploaded the video to her social media sites a few minutes before she was brought back for treatment.

  By the time she was out two hours later, the Net had blown up.

  That little boy was the face of the Elevation.II

  At least, until the others showed up.

  * * *

  I. What the boy described seeing was most likely COPD, a condition commonly attributed to smoking though genetically acquired in some cases, encompassing emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

  II. Sadly, Carter Loisel passed away from an Elevation-related cerebral aneurysm five months after his ER encounter.

  22

  KIARA MCCAIN, MD, MPH, NEUROSCIENTIST AND EPIDEMIOLOGIST

  AUSTIN, TX

  JANUARY 15, 2026

  My flight to Austin was a rough one.

  The plane passed through several storms, and the turbulence had a handful of people on the flight vomiting. I picked up my rental car and made my way downtown, over the Congress Avenue Bridge, where a nightly display of emerging bats used to charm thousands of tourists, to the Perry-Castañeda Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus. It is a large, white stone building with low-slung ceilings. Inside, the architecture is clean—a lot of light, woodwork, and earthy tones.

  I meet with Dr. McCain in a vestibule on the third floor.

  As the Elevation first spread across the globe, medical professionals were still scrambling not only to explain what was going on with the people turning up in their emergency rooms but also to determine if these bizarre cases were linked. Dr. McCain emerged as an early proponent of the theory that what physicians were seeing was indeed novel—that it wasn’t a chemical exposure issue or a viral outbreak; that the changes mani
festing in the brains of the affected were “built-in”; they were due to physical changes—alterations in the very substance of the brain itself.

  Though she left her medical practice three years ago, Dr. McCain continues to occasionally consult on cases for the state of Texas. Today, her passions are her children—she has five, aged three to fourteen—and watercolor painting. Dr. McCain is African American and tall, with chunky glasses and a tight ponytail.

  We called it the Elevation.

  I believe the name came from a researcher in Nevada, someone on Lance Guttman and Raj Cheema’sI team. I think it was something of a joke at first. They saw some of the people that had been coming into the ERs, claiming ridiculous abilities, and kidded that maybe these people were the next step in human evolution. They were Elevated.

  The name, the idea, it stuck.

  A lot of us think of the little boy who had, quote, unquote, “X-ray vision,” the old woman driving in circles who could hear a well beneath the street, but they were only the more media friendly of that first wave.

  This was happening in every city and town in the United States.

  Parents were walking into emergency rooms with children who were seeing things, hearing things, feeling things they couldn’t—magnetic radiation, ultraviolet colors, the ultrasonic songs of mice.II

  There were videos popping up online by the dozens.

  I received thousands of case reports in just twenty-four hours. Somehow my office became the in-box: doctors, researchers—they saw something they couldn’t explain and sent it in here. The high school girl endlessly scribbling mathematical formulas on her classroom whiteboard; the pilot who’d tried to fly his plane through a mountain; the older gentleman, a former pastry chef, who woke up one morning and started lecturing his nursing home staff in quantum mechanics; and the middle-aged woman who carefully cut the flesh off her thigh to manipulate the tendons inside and watch the muscles dance.