Dahlia Black Page 13
They all appeared random, just instances of mental unbalance. It all happened so quickly, no one could see the bigger picture. With the medical system overwhelmed, this stuff looked at first like a case of mass hysteria.
Only, no one’s ever seen mass hysteria on this scale.
What could cause millions of people, thousands of miles apart, to suddenly wake up one day with itching inside their heads and the ability to sense things the rest of us can’t? No one could say, but the first step in solving the cause of the Elevation was admitting that it existed in the first place.
I’m not one to toot my own horn; I was raised Presbyterian. But I think I was the first to see the pattern, the thing that connected each and every one of these cases. Now, I might have had the idea but I didn’t do the work, the on-the-ground work, required to make it real. That came down to the partnering physicians and neuroscientists who really dug into the data, the statisticians who crunched the numbers at the CDC and gave us our graphs, our smoking guns.
In a majority of the most severe cases, the patients had MRI scans of their brains. The doctors were looking for brain bleeds, evidence of strokes, injuries, multiple sclerosis, dementia, infections—the list goes on and on. When we compared those scans—at least the first batch that came in, a few hundred or so—it was impossible to see any correlation: there was nothing immediately obvious.
You ever get that gut hunch? You just know something is wrong?
I had that looking over those scans.
I knew there was a connection between the cases that I wasn’t seeing—that no one was seeing. I promised myself I wouldn’t leave my office, wouldn’t sleep, until I found that connection. Eighteen hours, six caffeine-filled energy drinks, a package of chocolate coconut cookies, and seven bathroom breaks later, I saw it. It had been staring me in the face the whole time. All of us, we’d missed it.
Every brain was smaller than it should have been.
Not a lot smaller, but noticeable.
The average adult human’s brain weighs 1,300 to 1,400 grams and is roughly 15 centimeters in length. There are variations, of course, but you’d be shocked by the consistency. The brain of each of these individuals was 12 centimeters in length—every single one of them. We could estimate the weight based on the dimensions, but in the few who had passed away, we found they weighed 1,100 grams. Exactly. How’s that for a ringer?
Now, you’re going to say that this makes no sense. But I’m telling you that the Elevated—these people who suddenly had the ability to outthink, outsee, and out-hear the rest of humanity—had smaller brains then the rest of us.
That is counterintuitive, correct?
Big chunk of the medical establishment, mostly the older-school neuroscientists and neurosurgeons, nearly had a heart attack after hearing what I’d found. It flew in the face of hundreds of years of anatomy and what we know about the human brain. But it was real. The brains of the Elevated were smaller, more compact, because they were using more of their minds. Again, that’s heresy to say: the brain isn’t supposed to work like that.
The human brain has been the same weight, same dimensions, for about the past 2 million years. Then, precipitously, in a matter of days, it changes. It transforms, it becomes even more plastic—that’s the term we use—and shifts into a subtle new form, a form capable of incredible feats of sensation and logic. I mean, we saw much more after with people like Dahlia Mitchell.
My first question on seeing those scans, realizing what it likely meant, was simple: How does something like this happen? Is it a virus? Is it from environmental contamination? Is it genetic? There had to be some causal relationship between the affected people, the Elevated. It was only a matter of figuring out what.
What happened next, I had nothing to do with.
I didn’t make any recommendations, though if I had, I’m sure no one would have listened to me anyway. Who was I? Just another doctor struggling to figure out a problem affecting the whole country; another voice in the crowd. I might have gotten the ball rolling but . . . well, I never would have foreseen it.
Terrible what people do when they get scared, isn’t it?
* * *
I. Drs. Lance Guttman and Raj Cheema are neuroscientists at the University of Nevada, Reno. Both were involved in Dr. McCain’s early work on identifying Elevated patients. Neither was willing to speak with me for this project.
II. This story always fascinated me. Dr. McCain couldn’t actually recall where she’d heard it, but I was able to track down the source—a case in Wichita, Kansas. Apparently, a fifteen-year-old girl in the city’s suburbs came into the ER reporting an unusual form of tinnitus, an almost incessant squeaking in her ears; turns out, she was hearing the ultrasonic battle and mating cries of field mice. All mice, I learned, make calls—some quite complicated—but most are of such a high register that we can’t actually hear them, much like dog whistles.
23
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Elevation spread like wildfire.
That’s a cliché, but it feels quite apropos for this event.
The number of cases exploded within the first six days. From a few dozen the day after Dahlia discovered the Pulse to several thousand two days after that. This was just in the United States, according to databased medical insurance forms and hospital intake records. There were other countries where the numbers were mind-boggling. The medical system was inundated and quickly overwhelmed.
What seemed like a chaotic, scrambled display of symptoms at first soon gave way to a clear pattern. For some, the Elevation was a thing of wonder akin to a religious awakening. For others, it was a nightmare. And, like all processes that alter the human body, it didn’t always end successfully.
Many grew sickened. Many more died.
The Elevation changed the affected in stages. These stages were not strictly defined and frequently bled into each other. And like any biological process, it could be messy. The stages, as documented by the CDC in November of 2023, were as follows:
Phase 1—The Elevated experienced visions, heard voices, and saw visible manifestations of normally invisible processes—like gravitational waves—or long-dead relatives. Many of the initial symptoms of the Elevation appeared similar to schizophrenic disturbances and were accompanied by nosebleeds.
Phase 2—With heightened cognitive abilities, some Elevated became savants overnight. They could calculate new forms of mathematics, develop innovative computer algorithms, uncover unseen biological processes, and create unimaginable works of art.
Phase 3—As the Elevation took over more than neurological functions, the first deaths occurred. The process was simply too much for their bodies to handle. Those who survived could perceive another, unearthly world overlapping our own. This was not another planet but another reality inhabited, it was assumed, by the Ascendant.
Phase 4—During the final stage of the Elevation, the affected simply vanished. This happened within milliseconds (and will be discussed in more detail later). It is believed, though never proven, that the Elevated had actually shed their limiting human forms and moved into the Ascendant’s plane of existence.
As to why only some people—roughly 30 percent of the population—were affected by the Elevation, researchers can’t confirm, but there are theories: First is genetics. Scientists suspected those who were Elevated had a particular gene—perhaps one related to language acquisition, as many of those affected were bilingual. Second was psychological makeup: sociologists studying those who became Elevated determined that they demonstrated more altruistic attributes than the general population. These suggestions, however, were only hypotheses; it would, one researcher told me, take several decades until science fully understood the Elevation.
One thing was clear, however: once begun, the Elevation could not be stopped. While the human body naturally attempted to prevent or stall the Elevation’s progress, it ultimately had to accept the change; those whose bodies would not simply died.
D
uring this time, there were, at first, many different, competing theories. Perhaps it was some virus—that was a commonly accepted idea in the first few days—or even a terrorist drug that had been introduced into our environment via the water or air. These were quickly ruled out. Another suggestion emerged: that this was a genetic abnormality triggered into expressing itself now due to environmental pollution or a contaminant in the food supply. Again quickly ruled out. With each theory that was knocked down, a dozen new, more outlandish ones took its place.
What the general population didn’t—couldn’t—know was that the symptoms of the Elevation began shortly after Dahlia Mitchell had discovered the Pulse. That information wouldn’t come out until after the Disclosure Task Force released their initial report one month after the Pulse was first recorded. And by that time the world had already been irrevocably altered . . .
24
SAI LAGHARI, OWNER OF THE NEW OLD WORLD WEBSITE
RALEIGH, NC
JANUARY 19, 2026
Though Sai Laghari was born in Pakistan, his parents—both mechanical engineers—emigrated to the United States when he was in elementary school.
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, he was a run-of-the-mill student who loved stories about the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness Monster. More than that, he loved the fact that these phenomena were “unaccepted” by modern science: they were taboo. While Sai hadn’t shown any outstanding talent for programming in his youth, in college he proved a quick learner and adept coder.
After college, Sai found a job as an IT specialist at an accounting firm. But his passion was in web design. When he launched New Old World three years later, in 2021, he sensed “that this was going to be the site I’d be known for.”
Sure enough, Sai’s site would go on to change the course of history.
Originally, New Old World was something of a clearinghouse for obscure information: fringe news stories about UFO sightings and anomalous phenomena, opinion pieces on “damned data” (information unaccepted by the scientific and historical orthodoxy), and reviews of “forgotten” books that Sai had found intriguing. He wasn’t personally invested in the stories that ran on his site but saw himself as something of a curator, giving “voice to the voiceless.”
The site caught on and Sai was soon inundated with material sent in by readers. At first, he was careful in selecting what he featured on the site. In interviews, he claimed that he wanted to ensure that his readers weren’t just getting “any random person’s version of reality,” but that changed, and he started posting nearly everything he was sent. In fact, the more outrageous and perplexing the information was, the better. Denying that he did this to increase his site’s following (people who most frequented the site and habitually posted in the forums quickly became its primary source of material), Sai said that he came to the conclusion, after years of research and reading—he claims to have read twenty-five thousand books—that only the most amateur of investigations were dependable. Everything else, in his mind, had been corrupted by what he’d termed “the treason of reason.”
Sai had come to believe that all logical truths generated by the state (this encompassed everything from government and academia to big business and the military) or carried by the media (again, as broadly defined as possible) weren’t to be trusted—only folks whose ideas were generated as far from the mainstream as possible. Sai liked to call these people’s theories “naïve thinking” or “outsider theories.”
In the wake of the “fake news” tsunami of the late ’10s, New Old World quickly became a mainstay for conspiracy theorists. In time, it also became the hub for wild speculations and alternate philosophies about the Elevation.
I meet Sai in his Raleigh, North Carolina, home. He and his wife, Ginger, a former nurse, have set up quite a welcoming spread—sweet tea, sandwiches, and pastries—on his back porch. Though their kids are grown, Sai and Ginger have a pool and several neighborhood kids splash around in it as we talk. Sai is short and has his dark hair slicked back in a tight ponytail.
Yeah, so, Carter Loisel . . .
I heard about the kid the same way most of the world did: social media.
This is going to sound lazily cliché, but my aunt forwarded an email chain about it. My aunt Stella would send along just about anything that appeared in her in-box. So you can forgive me for not taking the Carter thing seriously at first. I actually almost deleted it.
First time I watched the video of Carter Loisel diagnosing patients in the waiting room of some desert town in the middle of the middle of nowhere, I got chills. Honest-to-God chills. Right up the lengths of my arms and the back of my neck.
And then more people sent it to me.
Contacts out in the world. Folks who know what I do, the sort of information that I disseminate—they started hitting me up left and right with questions about the video. Did I think it was legit? Hell yes. Did I think it had something to do with government mind control programs? Certainly might. Was this kid possibly the result of an alien/human hybrid breeding program?I I was open to that possibility.
You have to understand, we were all just stabbing in the dark at this thing. It was so early in the outbreak that there was a novelty to it. It left people stupefied ’cause they weren’t jaded yet by all the brouhaha and nonsense that followed. I say that facetiously, of course. What followed was, as we all know, the greatest “false flag” operationII to ever befall our country, if not the world as a whole.
Accompanying the video was a brief note about how each of the kid’s diagnoses were verified. Whoever put the thing together—and I later learned it sort of snowballed online with multiple people adding bits and pieces—added X-rays and test results. Those documents were what sealed the deal for me.
Slam dunk.
See, I was trained as an EMT, and while I would never say I’m as knowledgeable as a doctor about medical issues, I know enough that I could tell the results of those tests were legitimate. Even more, what Carter was saying was legitimate too. Here we had a bona fide case of a human being, and a young human being at that, seeing illness in a body like a goddamned scanning machine would.
It was incredible.
I immediately placed the video at the top of my website and surrounded it with as many exclamation points as possible. Then I made a reaction video that I posted on several streaming sites and I followed that up with a commentary video. At our peak, the New Old World site got 15,000 unique visitors an hour. This was before the video, so I knew that once I jumped on something, I could give it the push it would need to hit the TV news channels and the press.
Within two hours of me posting the video of the “Carter Incident,” as some idiot reporter down in Miami dubbed it, it became the biggest-trending news item of the decade. It felt good to be, essentially, the guy at ground zero for that moment. I took advantage of it immediately and linked the Carter Incident video to most of the other important items that I had been hoping to promote. Gave them all a serious boost too. Little did I know how interconnected they’d all be . . .
You looked at me a bit funny when I said it was the greatest false flag operation in the history of the world. I know it sounds a bit like an exaggeration when I say it that way, but neither of us can doubt the fact that our world has fundamentally changed. And not for the better, I might add.
I don’t believe the Elevation was real.
What Carter did on that video—it was genuine. The boy was seeing inside people. He was diagnosing illness, and, as we all know, that was only the start. Before he “Elevated,” as they say, he had seen a great many more things than just a handful of tumors and broken organs. Carter was the first Elevated person we, as a country, ever saw. The first one they decided to present to us.
“They” being the government, of course.
I have some moles inside one of the companies that helped roll out the whole Disclosure program to the public. He sent me several incriminating emails that clearly showed that, not only did the gover
nment know about Carter well before that doctor found him, but that they’d had evidence of other, quote, unquote, “Elevated” people long before they chose to let the proverbial cat out of the bag. Naturally, I can’t give you a name or put you in touch with this individual, because, well, we all know what would happen—even now, so long after it all went down.
There are videos, you see.III
I can’t reveal my sources, like I said. But I have it in writing from knowledgeable authorities that there are people who are kept confined in the subbasement of a New Mexican army facility who are like Carter.
Only, the thing that makes them different is on the outside.
You understand?
That boy could see inside people and his gift is invisible. These others, they’re not so lucky. They’ve been twisted and modified, reshaped by something into mutations. I heard there’s a girl with two spines . . .
Freaky, right?
Here’s what I want you to go home thinking about: The Elevation, this thing that spread across the globe in a matter of hours—could it really have been random? Nothing like that ever happened before in the history of mankind without a little help, a little prodding. My guess is that the Elevation was really just a whole smattering of different things: mental illness, some genetic abnormalities, some poisonings, and toss in a whole heap of crisis actors. You do that, mix it together, and edit it slickly with big-money Hollywood effects, and you’ve got a winning formula for an instant plague.
Why would the government want to do that?
Well, duh, it’s pretty obvious to me.
All about control, people. Always has been, always will be.