Dahlia Black Page 3

  VI. Mordehai Milgrom, a physicist, argued there are other explanations for the mass “issues” related to the Bullet Cluster. Some people agreed with him, others didn’t.

  VII. Nico Mitchell, Dahlia’s older brother.

  VIII. Valerie Mitchell, Dahlia’s sister-in-law.

  IX. “Big Ears” is a nickname for the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in Big Pine, California. It consists of several massive radio telescopes—white “dishes” arrayed in a valley. These are used to “listen” to the universe.

  X. Clark Ashton Watts was a graduate student at Santa Cruz. His research with Dr. Kjelgaard involved X-ray binaries. After the Finality, he chose to pursue a career in landscape architecture.

  XI. Dr. Andrew Jacob, a senior lecturer at Santa Cruz, was an expert on the Wild Duck Cluster, a group of over two thousand stars. Dr. Jacob was well liked by his students and peers. He died in the early stages of the Elevation.

  XII. A program that pulls spectral line (used to identify molecules present in stars, galaxies, and gas clouds) data from binary FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) tables, the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy.

  XIII. Dr. Mitchell is referring to a “signal” or “spike” that she’d identified previously. Classified as an anomaly, it was determined to be a fast radio burst unrelated to the Pulse and likely emanating from a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way.

  XIV. Dr. Rafael Tirso was an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studied neutron stars and passed away during the early stages of the Elevation.

  XV. Dr. Wallace Hertzberg was an astronomer whose research at Tufts revolved around dark matter axions. Dr. Hertzberg lost both his eyesight and hearing during the Elevation.

  XVI. “ETI confirmation” refers to extraterrestrial intelligence. Dahlia is talking about a binder of information from SETI (see below) used to determine if an “intelligently generated” signal has been sent by an extraterrestrial culture or mind.

  XVII. “SETI” stands for the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” The first modern SETI experiment was set up in 1960, while the nonprofit SETI Institute itself was established in 1995.

  3

  TRANSCRIPT FROM A GOVERNMENT INTERVIEW WITH CLARK ASHTON WATTS

  PALO ALTO FIELD OFFICE: RECORDING #002—FIELD AGENT G. RANGER

  OCTOBER 25, 2023

  AGENT RANGER: Take us through the night, as far as you remember it.

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: Okay, well, I was up at Big Ears for my shift. This was just a normal night. One of three nights a month that I’d go up there, make that long drive, and then crunch numbers, analyze some of what we’d picked up during the week, and try and get some of my other work done. Just routine work.

  AGENT RANGER: And you weren’t expecting Dr. Mitchell to be there?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: No. I, uh, I wasn’t sure who else might be up there. The professors rotate on their own schedule and sometimes swap shifts, depending on the project they’re working on. I wasn’t surprised to see Dr. Mitchell come in but I expected her to be there to look over some of the other projects that we’d been running, maybe catch up on the dark matter data scan.

  AGENT RANGER: But she wasn’t there to look over other projects or catch up on older data, correct? She wanted to run an experiment.

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: She asked me to recalibrate and move one of the radio telescopes.

  AGENT RANGER: And what did she say the purpose was?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: To look at the Bullet Cluster. It was related to her dark matter research. She knew that Frank had asked me—well, told me—not to let her move the telescopes. But I did. I moved number three and, uh, a few hours later we picked up the signal. That’s when it happened.

  AGENT RANGER: Where was Dr. Mitchell when the signal was intercepted?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: She was in the building getting coffee. We heard the alarm at the exact same time. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t know what it meant at first. I figured something was wrong with the equipment. But it was functioning normally. The alarm was us picking up the signal, getting a reading. I’d never actually been in the building for one of those. It was a rush.

  AGENT RANGER: Were you at all concerned? Frightened? Nervous?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: Me? No. No way. Cool as a cucumber. Nothing really spooks me.

  AGENT RANGER: And the two of you analyzed what you’d received?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: Yeah. Right away.

  AGENT RANGER: Though it didn’t go as planned, right?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: I wouldn’t word it that way. No one plans to get a thing like this. I mean, maybe the folks over at SETI would have been prepared—they have protocol for these sorts of things—but I assumed at first that it was something terrestrial bouncing back. We’ve seen that before; it’s common. But it was clear within minutes of analyzing the signal that it wasn’t beamed from Earth.

  AGENT RANGER: How, then, did you determine this signal wasn’t from, say, a celestial event like the explosion of a supernova or two colliding stars?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: We ran the metrics, but it wasn’t until we’d gotten the signal through some of the more advanced software, particularly using time delays on some of the correlated particles emitted from the astronomical sources near our site in the Bullet Cluster. What I’m saying is we ran all those tests and the results came back negative for celestial events. This FRB, this pulse, was clearly not a natural event. Dr. Mitchell said it seemed it was intentional. That’s the word she used.

  AGENT RANGER: Can we shift gears for a moment? You mentioned in an earlier interview with several of our colleagues that you had concerns about Dr. Mitchell.

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: That was related to what Dr. Kjelgaard had mentioned. Like I said, he didn’t want her touching the telescopes. He’d already asked her to stop her research, and he thought . . .

  AGENT RANGER: Thought what?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: That she might push it, you know? Like she wasn’t going to give up too easy on finishing her dark matter research. She’d spent months preparing for it. Dr. Mitchell’s hardheaded. I mean that in a good way. Frank knew it too. He told me to not let her go ahead with it. But having me protect the place is like using a Chihuahua as a guard dog.

  AGENT RANGER: I see. However, you raised other concerns, correct? We’re more interested in what you communicated to Dr. Kjelgaard several weeks before this event. I think we have a copy of the notes he took of your meeting here. Let me bring them up . . . Yes, here. You expressed some apprehension about Dr. Mitchell’s mental state. Is that correct?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: That was just a . . . I think maybe it was me being a little overconcerned, you know? Mental state is also . . . That suggests crazy, right? I never thought Dr. Mitchell was crazy or suffering from some . . . It was—

  AGENT RANGER: You suspected she was abusing pharmaceuticals.

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: I was worried, okay? I have some friends, people I went to school with, who got addicted to pain pills; an ex-girlfriend back in Ohio. Me, I never hit anything harder than some ibuprofen. Honestly. In my mind, we’ve become kind of soft . . . People don’t put up with pain the way they used to. Life’s hard, right? That’s—

  AGENT RANGER: Mr. Watts. Focus. Why did you think Dr. Mitchell was abusing?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . Never done this before. She kind of had some tells. Mood swings, nothing major, but when she was happy, she was real happy. Dr. Mitchell was never the fanciest dresser. She’s an astronomer. But over the last year or so she kind of let herself go. Not in a bad way, just wearing a lot of sweats and not much makeup. She also put way too much sugar in her coffee. I know that sounds like no big deal, but I’ve seen that before. Opioid addicts, they’re big on the sweets.

  AGENT RANGER: You never saw her taking any prescription medications?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: No. This was just a hunch.

  AGENT RANGER: But it was enough
of a hunch that you reported it to Dr. Mitchell’s supervisor. That’s not a minor step to take.

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: Listen . . . I want to be as forthright with you as possible, okay? I am telling you everything I know. I just need some . . . I want some guarantee that—

  AGENT RANGER: As we explained at the outset, Clark, this conversation is entirely confidential. Everything you say to us will be off the record, so to speak. Neither Dr. Kjelgaard, Dr. Mitchell, nor any of the staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will be made aware that we are even meeting. And I should remind you that you are under oath. This is a criminal investigation. Now, please go ahead.

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: I wanted to impress Dr. Kjelgaard. I wanted to be his inside man, okay? I noticed stuff going on with Dr. Mitchell and I could have kept it to myself but . . . information is currency, right? It’s not strange to want to impress your boss. All of us are looking for a way to get ahead. I’m just a grad student, but I’m looking at a crowded field out there. And to tell you all the truth, I haven’t always been the most stellar student. So, yeah, that’s why I told Dr. Kjelgaard. Honestly, it was just as much out of concern for her health, you know, as well as me getting a leg up—

  AGENT RANGER: Is it possible that Dr. Mitchell was abusing prescription medications when she located the Pulse signal?

  CLARK ASHTON WATTS: I don’t know. Maybe. I mean . . . if you’re addicted, you don’t stop, right? I don’t really see how it would matter though. We found that signal. I analyzed it right there in the room with her. I ran the programs, watched them do their thing. No matter whether she was high or not, the Pulse was real. It is real.

  4

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM AN FBI INTERVIEW WITH DAHLIA MITCHELL

  PALO ALTO FIELD OFFICE: RECORDING #001—FIELD AGENT J. E. MUDDOCK

  OCTOBER 23, 2023

  AGENT MUDDOCK: You said you didn’t know the signal was extraterrestrial at first. You assumed it was just another space signal.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Right, at first. We see these things, random noise generated by the universe all the time. Astronomers have picked them up for . . . centuries, really. Fast radio bursts, most of the time. In every instance, it’s a noise generated by some natural phenomenon. Usually something exploding.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: But not in this instance.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: That’s what we figured out. Like I said, though, at first I assumed it was just some of the same background noise we’d always seen.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Okay, and then what?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: So you’re not going to accuse me of falsifying it?

  AGENT MUDDOCK: No.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: First time I was dragged in to talk, they made it pretty clear that they thought I had something to do with the Pulse. Like I’d either faked it or somehow knew about its location and only released the data when it was professionally advantageous to me. Which is the most absurd thing imaginable.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: We’re not interested in exploring that angle further at this moment. Please tell us what happened after you’d verified the signal data.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: To be honest, I sat on it for a while. I wasn’t convinced I was really seeing what I was seeing. Analyzing these things takes a while. There are sounds radio telescopes picked up three decades ago that still haven’t been deciphered. I figured this would be another one of those, something grad students would crunch numbers on for the next few years. Turns out, I was wrong.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Yes. And how exactly did that realization come about?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: I did some initial analysis. When we find something, we take all the proper measurements and record them. We’re pretty tempered people—

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Explain.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: It’s not like the movies—not like we look through a telescope and suddenly see something and all shout “Eureka!” But after my initial analysis, even as cursory as it was, I was certain: this was unlike anything I’d ever seen. But even knowing that, even seeing it right there in front of me, I needed someone else to analyze it and tell me that it was what I thought it was.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: Can you be more specific about what you thought it was?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: It sounds silly saying it out loud. I ran through every conceivable option—from an FRB, like we discussed, to an unknown type of cosmic radiation or a celestial collision—but it just didn’t fit any of those things directly, And, frankly, it was so . . . purposeful. That’s why I thought it must be a transmission from an unknown intelligence outside of our galaxy.

  AGENT MUDDOCK: From an extraterrestrial source.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Yes. That was my first thought. But that idea itself opens an entirely different can of worms. I let my mind go there for a few minutes; certainly Clark and I talked about it, but it was just . . . it was too much. So I did what I was trained to do when confronted with anomalous and shocking data, data that simply doesn’t fit: I stepped back, got serious, and analyzed it. Tried to find what I was doing wrong. But everything checked out.

  5

  FRANK KJELGAARD, PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY

  LOS ANGELES, CA

  MAY 9, 2025

  Dr. Frank Kjelgaard is a burly, unmarried sixty-five-year-old who moved to Los Angeles from Santa Cruz about three years ago.

  An astronomer, Frank taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for fifteen years. He always considered himself a scientist first and a teacher second, an approach that guaranteed grant monies but also resulted in poor student reviews of his teaching. He told me that he once went online to see how he was ranked compared to other professors at his school. He was not happy with what he saw.

  The Elevation brought Frank a lot of unwanted attention. People, mostly online and anonymous, blamed him for not trusting or listening to Dahlia Mitchell when she told him she’d discovered the Pulse Code. There were death threats. He was even “SWATed.” An angry denizen of the dark web called the police, claimed to be holding hostages, and gave the cops Frank’s address. When the SWAT team kicked in the front door, Frank was in bed and terrified.

  When the country fell apart in the immediate aftermath of the Finality, Frank tried to maintain a semblance of his life. He awoke at 6:00 a.m., dressed in a suit and tie, and went to work at the University. Though there were no students, Frank continued his research until the power went down. After that, he went to the library on campus and caught up on reading during the daylight hours. Eventually, he was asked to leave by police who’d been ordered to lock up the campus to prevent looting.

  Bored at home in Santa Cruz and infuriated with the pace of recovery, Frank chose to move to Los Angeles, where a number of academics—including several astronomers and astrophysicists—had set up camp around the famed Griffith Observatory. Here, they reminisce, plan new projects, and plot how they’ll eventually gain access to working modern telescopes should the opportunity arise.

  I meet with Frank on the steps of the Observatory on August 7. It is a hot day and the city of Los Angeles sparkles below us. The Pacific beyond is so still, it resembles a pane of glass. Frank smokes an old-fashioned pipe as he speaks and looks out over the city below us. Ten years earlier, it would have been a sea of congestion: cars baking in the late summer heat as they inched from jammed intersection to intersection; the sidewalks crammed with people; the skies buzzing with passing planes, helicopters, and drones; the air hazy. Two months before Dahlia discovered the Pulse, there was a traffic jam on I-405 that lasted a record-breaking three days.

  Now the city is silent.

  There are only a handful of cars darting by on the streets below us. Most of the people traveling across the city are on bikes. With the population of the city only a fourth of what it once was, the place has largely been given back to nature—and nature’s taken as much as she can get. The Los Angeles River, a few years ago just a concrete trench with a few inches of water in it, is now a raging torrent. Palm trees have taken root on rooftops. There are large flocks of bird
s, thousands strong, nesting in the abandoned office buildings along South Grand Avenue.

  Dahlia came to me the morning after she’d found the Pulse.

  She looked as though she hadn’t slept, which of course she hadn’t. I was used to seeing Dahlia fired up. She was a passionate teacher. Many of her students came to me in the months that followed the discovery and told me personally of how she’d touched their lives. This was before everything happened, before all the changes. Like most of us, I was personally affected by the Elevation: I lost a wife, a daughter, and my brother-in-law.

  I realize there are others, people who lost just as much as I did or even more. For a long time, and I’m okay admitting this now, I blamed Dahlia for what happened. I know how that sounds. She’s a national hero of sorts, a global one, but until all the information came out about the other signals, I held Dahlia liable for bringing it on us. Sort of an extraterrestrial Pandora, but instead of opening a jar,I she opened the entirety of the universe.

  Despite spending a good portion of my life staring up at the sky, I never was one to hope we’d see anything, find anything, other than new stars and new astronomic events. I never believed there was another intelligence out there. In my mind, there was always only us. We were a miracle in the vastness.

  The funny thing—the thing that no one else wants to say—is that still might be the case. After the Elevation, after the Finality, we, the survivors, remain alone here . . .

  Frank pauses here, exhales a plume of smoke, and looks off at the ocean. A few seconds later he clears his throat and picks up where he left off.

  When Dahlia showed me printouts of the signal, I was confused.

  She said, “We’ve been looking at gravitational lensingII this whole time, but when I recalibrated the telescopes for radio emissions, we found it.”