Dahlia Black Read online

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: No. No, it didn’t happen . . . What exactly are you suggesting?

  AGENT MUDDOCK: That it is possible that there is a very good reason you made this discovery. You went up there that night, in direct violation of an order not to proceed with the experiment, the readings, the manipulation of equipment, for the express purpose of, quote, unquote, “making this discovery.” Is it possible, Dr. Mitchell, that you created the data that you claim to have stumbled across?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Of course not. That’s outrageous. I would never do anything like that. I take my work as seriously as anything. I can’t believe—who would even suggest something like that? You’ve seen the data, right?

  AGENT MUDDOCK: The data you were studying—

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: The data from the Pulse. You’ve had it for weeks; you’ve been studying it the whole time. If not you, then the people on your team. I couldn’t fake the math found in that signal. I couldn’t fake that level of sophistication—

  AGENT MUDDOCK: You’re intelligent. Transcripts from undergrad and graduate school show exceptional levels of dedication. And, let’s see, one of your advisors here wrote, and I’m quoting, “More than any of my students, Dahlia has the ability to think far beyond the edges of the box. She sees things most of us, even myself, miss. Dahlia is the sort of student who will in time discover great things.” Perhaps this signal is something you, quote, unquote, “discovered” as well?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: That is absurd. You’re taking a random quote that has nothing to do with this and trying to reapply it. The information contained in that pulse, the code at the heart of it, is . . . even the most out-of-the-box thinker could never come up with something like that.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Or maybe it just seems that way. Maybe it’s just gobbledygook, like glossolalia. Are you familiar with the Voynich manuscript, Dr. Mitchell?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: No.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: It’s a manuscript, singular and strange, that has been dated back to the 1400s. Supposedly, it is some sort of alchemical textbook filled with medieval science experiments, anthropological observations, a treatise on botany and zoology, and explorations of human reproduction. I use the word “supposedly” because no one, no expert, knows for sure. The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown, likely made-up language. It has never been translated and likely never will be.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Okay . . . I don’t understand what you’re getting at . . .

  AGENT MUDDOCK: It won’t even be successfully translated because it isn’t a language at all. It has all the corresponding structure and look of a language, but it isn’t. It’s gobbledygook. Glossolalia. Speaking in tongues. And yet brilliant mathematicians, linguists, cryptographers, still try to decipher the Voynich. People have given up decades of their lives attempting to crack the uncrackable. This code you discovered, maybe it is the same thing.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: No. You’re wrong. I didn’t make it; I couldn’t have made it. I suggest you take a good look at the Pulse Code. A good, hard look. You’ll say—and your experts are going to tell you the same in a matter of days, maybe hours—that this wasn’t a hoax or from a deranged astronomer.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Then what is it, Dr. Mitchell?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: It is the one thing you’re not willing to open your mind to; the one thing that you want desperately not to believe . . .

  2

  FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #312—10.17.2023

  I think I found something tonight.

  Writing that sounds ridiculous.

  Like I’m back in undergrad, convinced I’d just made some huge breakthrough when I “discovered” an unusual fast radio burst out of Centaurus A.I How silly, right? Thankfully, Dr. ZivkovicII let me down easy. He didn’t want to quash my enthusiasm. Of course, the burst I’d found was first seen in 1934. It was rediscovered every day, a thousand times a day. Still, that thrill when I first heard it—there was nothing to match that. I wanted to feel it again. To think that maybe, just maybe, I’d discovered something no one else alive had ever come across. Unmapped territory. The great beyond . . .

  I got the same feeling tonight.

  And so far, I haven’t found a single reference to this location, this signal, before. I’ve checked the University databases, SIMBAD, SDSS, NASA’s ADS, NASA/IPAC’s NED, and come up with nothing. This location isn’t a new stretch of space. It’s old territory, pored over for centuries. Dead space, as they say. Literally the last place you’d expect to pick up something new. That’s why, despite what happened, I still have my doubts. I always have my doubts . . .

  —-

  My day didn’t start well.

  “Sucked” is a better word for it.

  During my morning lecture on dark matter—the same intro lecture I’ve given for nearly three years and could recite verbatim in my sleep—Frank walked in.III By the look on his face, he wasn’t thrilled at the thought of catching my attention. The board meeting had been two nights earlier, and I’d been waiting on pins and needles for him to tell me what was going on. Ominous silence, no matter the situation, is never a good sign. Especially with Frank.

  So I stopped by his messy office—does this guy ever straighten up?—after the lecture let out and sat in front of his desk. He fiddled with his pen for a moment, pretending to look over some papers as he got up the courage to break the news to me: “Dahlia, the board’s scaling back your dark matter project.”

  I reacted like he’d just swung a bowling ball into my stomach. It really was that dramatic. Hurt. Frank shook his head and waved his hands, trying to make it seem like none of it was his idea, but that didn’t last long. He eventually just set his teeth and gave me the bad news. “The interim analysis isn’t supporting your thesis.”

  No shit.

  That was why I’d fought the board about doing an interim analysis in the very first place. It was unnecessary and likely to result in some significantly skewed numbers. Turns out I was right, of course. I told Frank that I was dealing with 300 terabytes of data. In only three months I’d more than doubled our mapping progress. Looking for dark matter wasn’t exactly easy; it’s called dark for a reason, because, in the vastness of space, it’s pretty much invisible. But sometimes it’s the invisible that matters most. Goofy thought, but it’s true.

  Think of all the things we can’t see that touch our lives every day: air, gravity, emotions, faith . . . Dark matter is the equivalent of these things but in outer space. More than that, we think it makes up most of the known universe; it is the very fabric that holds the celestial bodies in their places, the source of gravitational waves.

  Not that Frank was listening. He never is.

  No, he just went on with his speech, expecting me to roll right over. Not only did he bring up the fact that I’ve got “a heavy course load for the year”—I bet he’d never point that same fact out to Colin or FredrickIV—and that shifting my focus might actually be advantageous. He didn’t suggest, as he had before, that dark matter wasn’t the worthwhile endeavor the rest of the astrophysics community had built it up to be. That always grated on me most. Still, I bet if I’d pressed him he would have told me I’d been wasting my life. Don’t even go there, Dahlia . . .

  So I suggested that I run one more test: the Bullet Cluster.V

  Frank scoffed and said Milgrom had ruled it out years ago.VI

  I argued Milgrom wasn’t using the right tools.

  But Frank was beyond listening. Whether the board had truly made a decision or it was just that Frank was tired of defending my work, he was passive-aggressively telling me that I was done. It took pushing but finally he just said it: “I need you to start shutting down your project tonight.”

  And that, as far as he was concerned, was that. I left the room in a huff and Frank could call the board and tell them it was done—that their little problem child astronomer was being relegated to the back of the class. Not only was tenure likely going to be delayed if not taken
off the table outright, but I was looking at a long slog to get approval for any additional project. Could the day get any worse?

  As I walked back to my office from Frank’s, I realized what I needed to do. I wouldn’t be shutting down the dark matter observation of the Bullet Cluster. I decided I would run it and damn the consequences. I was given time at the observatory, allocated the staff and the computer time, and I was going to use it.

  Dad would’ve been horrified. Sorry, Dad.

  After wrapping up some additional paperwork and grading some papers, I jogged the three-mile loop around West Cliff. My time was mediocre but I got my miles in. It felt good to move, just sweat out that stress. At home I showered, poured a glass of red, and then considered which microwave meal to eat (pasta or masala) when NicoVII called. Right on time, big brother.

  I told him what had gone down and like usual he tried to talk me out of doing anything rash—a little too late for that, though. “I’m going to fight this thing, Nico.” He suggested, always playing Devil’s advocate, that maybe, just maybe, I had made a mistake and Frank was onto something.

  “Nico,” I said, “I need you on my side.”

  He laughed and asked if I wanted him to kick Frank’s ass for me. I said that wouldn’t be necessary and that if Frank’s ass had to be kicked, I could certainly be the one to do it, thank you very much.

  Nico, being Nico, followed up with something about him and ValerieVIII and the kids coming down for a visit. I couldn’t think of anything worse. But, really, it was just another excuse for him to be worried about me. Ever since Mom . . . well, we know how that whole situation played out. Nico worked through all those emotions no problem; he got a therapist, he confided in his wife, and worked it all out. Not even a year after and he was like he was before—maybe wiser, maybe more humbled, but himself. Me, not as much.

  It was like we were riding out a storm together. He navigated it perfectly, got to the other side, in the warmth and the sun. But I’m still back there, right in the heart of the storm—beat down, frozen. Nico expects me to turn it around overnight. He expects me to pick myself up and say, “That was rough but I learned a lot about myself.” Right, like that’s how I’ve ever approached things. I pick myself up but I keep moving straight ahead. Introspection isn’t one of my charms.

  Two hours later, I left for the desert.

  I got to Big EarsIX early, just to get started on some of the experiments my grad students were running. Clark WattsX was there, working on Dr. Jacob’sXI field triangulations but likely saw the night as a way to catch up on his reading. Clark’s smart but has never been the most motivated student. I doubt he’d argue the point. I wonder if that’s how my profs saw me. Trying but not really.

  When I arrived at the control building I found Clark using fitsplodeXII to pull spectral line data for one of the other grad students. He was busy enough that he barely noticed me. I cleared my throat, said good evening. Clark looked up at me, a bit bleary-eyed. Clearly he’d been catching some z’s.

  “Didn’t think you were coming up,” he said.

  “Need to finish something.”

  Clark just nodded and went back to his work but watched me out of the corner of his eye as I pulled together some printouts of my spectrum analysis of the anomaly we’d picked up in October.XIII I showed Clark the area I’d isolated and asked him what he made of it. Like Frank, he thought the Bullet Cluster was old news and the anomaly was just that—an incongruity.

  “It doesn’t mean there’s something there,” he said.

  “I’m not suggesting there’s something there,” I replied. “I just need to understand why we’ve gotten this data. I don’t think it’s an error and I’m not jumping to conclusions either. Aren’t you in Dr. Rafael Tirso’sXIV class? I took his class, too, just eight years ago. I’m sure he hasn’t changed much.”

  He nodded.

  I reminded Clark that Rafael had one point he hammered into the brains of his students: a section of space, no matter how small, can never be fully ruled out. Dead space is never really dead. With that, I pulled rank and asked Clark to recalibrate the K4 telescope. We were going to scan the Bullet Cluster again. That’s when the truth came out. Or at least part of it . . .

  Clark confirmed that Frank had told him not to let me redirect the telescopes. He figured I might try to run this last look and wanted Clark, a grad student, to stop me, a professor, from doing it. As soon as those words left Clark’s mouth, he knew how silly and demeaning they sounded. I wasn’t to be trusted with this equipment? Why not just change all the locks in the lab? Why not blacklist me on some astronomy website for heretics? It was unbelievable.

  Clark keyed in the codes and turned the K4.

  I didn’t even want to talk to him again after that. I was too angry, too worried I’d just explode at him. That wouldn’t look good. It’s never professional to let out your rage on students. Just had to suck it up and refocus. So I did.

  And three hours later, it happened.

  Three sixteen to be exact. The machines were ticking away, I was going over some of the axion clump research that Hertzberg at TuftsXV had been doing while Clark was making his way through a never-ending pile of Frank’s undergrad essays. Ready for my second coffee of the evening, I went out into the hallway to grab a cup. Clark didn’t want one; he was happy with his Red Bull.

  The espresso machine, however, was finicky.

  It was one of those ancient vending machines with the horrible Styrofoam cups that held scalding-hot, watery coffee. My only dollar was at least ten years old and had clearly been through someone’s wash. It was soft and folded and there was no way the machine was going to accept it. Every time I put the dollar in, it slid back out silently. I’m not sure why I’ve been so fixated on that moment. It’s so meaningless, so banal, and yet, when I think back on that moment—the one minute that changed everything—I see the coffee machine and the failed dollar. I was frustrated and growing angry. I’d never kicked a vending machine before, but just as my sneaker was about to crash into the side of the machine, an alarm went off.

  It’s not unusual to hear alarms at the radio telescopes.

  Sometimes it’s a calibration issue; sometimes there’s something picked up by one of the other pieces of equipment. This, however, wasn’t an alarm I’d heard before. Not loud like a smoke detector, not wailing; it was more an insistent and irritating chirp. Sounded like a toy bird. The kind a cat plays with.

  I ran back into the control room, where Clark was freaking out.

  “We got an anomaly here!” Clark shouted.

  He pointed over to a monitor displaying a spiky, EKG-like line, and there, right at the peak of one of the waves, was a break in the line, a spot where the background data was missing because something new, different, had punched its way through. Here is little squiggly drawing of it I did. Terrible, I know.

  Clark said, “I think it’s a fast radio burst.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Or some other random signal. Get me some specs.”

  Clark started analyzing it.

  “Looks weird to me,” he said.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “I’m not but . . . Seriously.”

  He was right. This wasn’t a fast radio burst. It was pulsating.

  I made sure Clark was recording it, then ported the signal over to visualization. It didn’t look like much; it was coming in blurry. Clark and I did some on-the-fly engineering to rig a monitor that would show us what was coming in. Dad would have been proud. It took a few minutes, but when the Pulse finally showed up on the screen it . . . it was beautiful. That sounds funny, talking about data on a monitor. But it was. Even someone who couldn’t tell a fast radio burst from a pair of old socks would think so. It was elegant . . . so organic . . .

  And buried inside the Pulse, contained within its oscillations, was a code. A series of numbers, letters, and symbols like dots and triangles. Clark and I watched with our mouths open as these digits streame
d across the monitors. I wrote as many of them down as I could, but . . . the series was incredibly complex and long.

  “This is coming from deep space,” I said.

  Clark was too stunned to speak.

  “Where’s the ETI confirmation binders?” XVI I asked.

  He had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to pull myself away from watching the monitors and dig in a closet. Luckily, I found them. These were instructional binders given to the University by the SETI InstituteXVII a few years previously. They were covered in dust and I doubt anyone had looked at them since they’d arrived. I flipped through one and found the page I needed.

  “ ‘Hypothetically, in interstellar communication, a radiation pulse would appear in more than one iteration with consistently massive maximum dispersion measures,’ ” I read aloud, then looked up at Clark. “It’s data. A message . . .”

  Clark was befuddled, “You’re not actually suggesting—”

  “I’m not suggesting,” I said. “I’m saying. This pulse was broadcast by something or someone outside of our galaxy.”

  His response was perfect: “Holy shit.”

  * * *

  I. First noted in 2007, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are transient but intense radio pulses from deep space. Usually lasting only a few milliseconds, the vast majority of recorded FRBs are of unknown origin. Many originate from distances as far away as 1 gigaparsec, or 3 billion light-years.

  II. Dr. Emil Zivkovic, an astrophysicist at Cornell University. He was Elevated.

  III. Dahlia is referring to Dr. Frank Kjelgaard, an astrophysicist and dean of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  IV. Dahlia is talking about two other, younger astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Both male and both, at the time, less accomplished.

  V. The Bullet Cluster consists of two groups of galaxies slowly smashing into each other a few billion light-years from Earth. A lot of astrophysicists think the Bullet Cluster provides very compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter; it’s complicated how, exactly, but it has to do with the mass of the Bullet Cluster.