Dahlia Black Read online

  Only I wasn’t seeing what she was seeing.

  “It’s a pulse,” she said, pointing at several lines of the code. She continued, “This isn’t like Gran SassoIII or Minnesota,IV Frank. This pulse didn’t come from background processes. It’s not bouncing in from a terrestrial source.”

  Then she leaned forward and told me: “This is the one.”

  The one.

  I asked her if she was familiar with Martin Keane.

  She shook her head.

  I said, “Of course you’re not. No one is. He was a third-year grad student at MIT when he stumbled across an alien broadcast. Made the papers. It took four years to figure out he’d mucked up his measurements. Today, he gives lectures on how most of the presidents since Nixon are secretly reptilian aliens.” V

  Dahlia said, “This isn’t a nutcase conspiracy theory. This is verifiable data.”

  I reminded her that she’d just told me she altered the calibration of the telescopes. That, in her words, she’d “fixed them.”

  I told her it wasn’t a challenge.

  I told her I’d given her an opportunity to move to another project and instead she came back with this garbled code that convinced her it was sent by an alien intelligence. She was exasperated, as expected, and stormed off.

  Which is what I was hoping she’d do.

  Frank pauses again. I can tell he’s going to reveal something big, so I wait, don’t pressure him, let it form inside his mind. Several reporters before me had approached Frank with questions about his dealings with Dahlia Mitchell, the finding of the Pulse, and what transpired after. Frank is clearly uneasy.

  After Dahlia left, I took the data she’d given me and made a few calls.

  I’m telling you this now because . . . well, it’s been long enough. I’ve kept this information secret for too many years.

  I took the Pulse Code that Dahlia gave me and sent it to a contact I had at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. You’ve probably never heard of them and, honestly, I’m not sure anyone is in that department any longer. But at the time, they were tasked with providing all geospatial data—analyzing Earth’s features, both man-made and natural. What they do is tangential to what we do. They focus down, we focus up, but we have a lot of tools and technologies in common. My contact, however, wasn’t involved in the geospatial work. That was his cover.

  I never knew his real name, though I’d met him in 2021.

  Never knew what agency he truly worked for. This was a guy who came out of the shadows, literally, and then vanished back into them. He said his name was Simon Grieg. He approached me at a conference at the Capodimonte observatory in Napoli.VI He’d read some of my work, notably the papers I’d published on the effects of pulsars on gravitational waves. We chatted for a while about astronomy and bitched about funding and then he suggested I call him when I was next in Washington. He gave me his card and it all looked quite official.

  When I found the card in my desk drawer twelve, thirteen months later, I grew curious. I ran a few searches on Simon and everything seemed to check out. He was a government employee, an expert in geostationary satellite imaging, and had worked for NOAA, among other agencies. According to what I found online, he was married, had two daughters, and lived in Reston, Virginia. Turned out, of course, that none of that was true.

  I was in Washington three months later for a meeting and gave Simon a call. He and I met for dinner at a vegetarian restaurant (my preference) and he told me he’d gotten involved in something that I would find intriguing. Apparently, there were deep branches of the government, offices I’d never heard of, that had been tasked with dissecting signals received from outside our galaxy.

  We’re talking fast radio bursts, largely.

  What followed was the strangest conversation I’d ever had in my life. Simon said that his colleagues had picked up signals that they believed were from outside our galaxy and intentionally designed to get our attention. Communication. I was skeptical, of course. This is exactly the kind of UFO nut stuff that I’d been dealing with since before graduate school. Roswell, Levelland, Tehran, Rendlesham Forest, the “triangle flaps”VII—I knew enough to dismiss them all. Mass hysteria, confusion, poor reporting, eyewitness error, the list of explanations was endless. And yet, Simon was clearly not one of these people. I told him I needed proof, and, well, that’s when he showed me something.

  It was a few weeks after our meeting in DC. I was in New York for yet another meeting and he called me up. I agreed to meet him in Maryland. I rented a car and drove to an office building in Silver Spring. He met me in the lobby.

  First thing I noticed when I walked in was that he had armed bodyguards. Simon handed me a bottle of water and then led me to the elevators. We rode to the tenth floor. There, we went down a hallway to a closed door. He produced a key and opened it. I stepped inside an office largely devoid of furniture. There was but a single standing desk in the center of the room. On it was a laptop computer. Simon, without saying anything, pressed the return key on the laptop and . . .

  Frank needs reassurance from me that the information he’s about to give won’t result in an investigation or potential criminal charges. I show him the letter I received from my attorneys about this project and those I interview. As he reads it over I remind him of what he already knows: the world has changed.

  At this point, there is no one interested in punishing people who may have withheld information in the lead-up to the Finality. And the court system is a tenth of what it was, 82 percent of prisons have closed, and the few remaining district attorneys certainly have better things to do. If Frank wants to talk—if he wants the truth about the Pulse, the Elevation, and the Finality to finally be told—it’s now.

  He continues:

  There was video.

  It was filmed in a research lab. There were no exterior shots. I saw workbenches with technical equipment on them, computer monitors, the usual stuff. There was a chair in front of the wall. It was simple, plastic. Two people came into frame, both wearing hazmat suits and masks. They stood on either side of the chair, arms folded in front. I couldn’t see their eyes because of their visors. Then a third person, also in a hazmat suit, walked into frame, and propped up a young woman in a chair. She appeared very ill.

  The girl was maybe fifteen, sixteen, but not much older than that.

  She had deep bags under her eyes, and long, dirty-blond hair tied back in a loose ponytail. Her skin was tanned but pockmarked and scarred. The scars resembled those you might see on someone who’d been cutting him- or herself. I had a niece who did that. She struggled with addictions for most of her life and . . . well, it’s not important.

  Then the person in the hazmat suit, I’m guessing he was a male, the one standing to the left of the chair, produced a small tablet computer. He held it up so the camera could make it out and the camera zoomed in.

  The man pressed a button on the tablet screen.

  First, there was a number. I believe it was 0304. Then a card that read: “Trial Sonora.” Then the tablet displayed a code that ran across the screen, left to right. The code was complicated. Not as complicated as what Dahlia found but similar. I can’t describe it more than to tell you that it was a series of letters, numbers, and simple shapes. It ran in three loops, each maybe twenty-two seconds long.

  The man signaled to the second person standing to the right of the chair. This person, female would be my guess, leaned over and signaled for the girl to turn around. She did, though it was clear that the movements were painful.

  The man then reached down and opened up the back of this girl’s hospital gown, revealing her skin. There were visible scars, just as there were on her arms and legs. The camera zoomed in on this girl’s spine.

  At first I couldn’t make out what the purpose of this was. The girl’s back seemed fine, outside of the scars and some discolorations of the skin.

  And then she moved.

  I can’t . . . I can’t guarantee that it w
asn’t faked.

  In this video, the girl had two spinal columns. They . . . they moved with each other, twisting with her body as she bent from side to side. When she leaned forward, her spines were even more pronounced.

  The video ended.

  I was in shock. I’m still left speechless thinking about it, honestly. This was many years ago. Years before the Pulse, before Dahlia even joined the University. Simon Grieg, of course, knew the video would upset me and leave me confused. I think he also knew that it would frighten me. Frighten me enough to listen very carefully. I’d asked Simon for more information on the video. What was wrong with the girl? A mutation? A genetic aberration?

  He said, “Both.”

  I asked about the tablet computer, the code it showed.

  Simon told me it was directly related to the girl’s condition.VIII

  Then he closed the laptop and led me over to a window. It was sunny out and I could see downtown Silver Spring from the vantage point. Simon patted me on the shoulder and told me that if I ever found a coded transmission from outside our solar system, a fast radio burst that appeared directed or designed, I was to send it to him directly. For this, I would be paid quite a bit of money. There was an added benefit. Simon was very clear: I was in the inner sanctum. I knew more than I should. If I wanted my family to be safe, happy, healthy, I would agree.

  And I did.

  I learned later, after the Elevation, that eight of my colleagues, at various universities around the globe, made the same agreement with Simon.

  Obviously, when Dahlia showed up with that pulse, I needed to be sure of what it was. I needed to be confident in my judgment. I also needed for her to try and let it go. She couldn’t, of course. That’s why the whole world changed.

  I sent the Pulse information she’d given me to Simon.

  He already had it, I’m certain.

  But I did what I’d agreed to do in 2022. There was a direct deposit into my bank account five days afterwards for the sum of $250,000. I was also sent a final message, my last communication with Simon, whoever he was, that my family and myself were out of harm’s way.

  I didn’t believe it, of course.

  Three weeks after the Elevation began, after my niece started suffering from worsening symptoms, I quit my job at the University and moved here. We bought a house and the land around it and got as far from the rest of the world as possible. I wasn’t escaping the Elevation; I was running as far as possible from Simon, from the bureaucracy behind him.

  I suppose that makes me weak. I never reached out to Dahlia, not directly, though I should have. I was impressed with how nonjudgmental she was. Dahlia never denigrated me in the press. She never lambasted me as the cliché boss that just doesn’t get it, the one who forces the strong-willed employee’s hands.

  You see, there’s always a story behind the story.

  I had a small part to play in the history of the Pulse Code and what happened to our world after it was discovered—a small but important part. It’s okay that people remember me as Dahlia’s boss, a forgotten astronomer, but I think it’s important that they know the larger picture too.

  This might have started with Dahlia’s discovery.

  But she was not the first: there were many before her.

  * * *

  I. This phrase is usually rendered as “Pandora’s box” but the mythological source for the idiom states that it was, in fact, a jar and not a box. Apparently in ancient Greece, things of value (or in this case powerful evil) were stored in large clay jars, not boxes of any sort.

  II. “Gravitational lensing” refers to the fact that mass bends light. The gravitational field of a massive object, like a planet, bends the space far around it. Even the light rays passing by will be bent. Astronomers can look for this bending light, dubbed lensing, to identify distant objects. Dark matter, Dahlia’s field of study, bends light in similar ways, though it is itself invisible.

  III. Gran Sasso is a reference to Italy’s Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, an underground research center for physics studies.

  IV. Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics.

  V. The whole “reptilian” conspiracy theory movement was born in the late 1980s. Like most conspiracy theories, it is a hodgepodge of esoteric thought (nineteenth-century spiritualism), fear of government overreach, New Age cosmology, and pulp fiction. The general thesis is this: sometime in the distant past, bipedal lizard people came to Earth and now reside in underground bases across the globe. From these bases, they control (and/or have replaced) various politicians, well-known actors and musicians, and even royalty.

  VI. The Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples is part of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics.

  VII. UFO believers regard all five of these events as foundational—cases of UFO sightings that scientists, historians, and other experts haven’t “proven” to be hoaxes or misinterpretations of common experiences (e.g., planes or planetary bodies mistaken for extraterrestrial aircraft). Of course, scientists and historians would argue that these cases are easily explainable.

  VIII. The video that Frank describes has never turned up publicly. I searched long and hard for it, utilizing every lead I could find. Frank was never able to provide any more information about the video other than what I’ve recorded here, so it remains something of an enigma. It is possible that he invented the story—maybe to confuse folks snooping around his personal history—or that what he saw was a complex fabrication, a video designed to scare him. Otherwise, the video was real. If so, it hints at a very dark prehistory to the Pulse and the Elevation.

  6

  FROM PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #313—10.19.2023

  And so it begins.

  I haven’t slept in nearly thirty-three hours. I haven’t been tired either. Is that bad? Outside of running to the bathroom (when my bladder was quaking ’cause it was so close to rupturing) and refilling my coffee and microwaving a few pieces of day-old pepperoni pizza, I’ve been in my seat at my desk in my office poring over the data from the Pulse. This is crazy!

  The Pulse is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.

  I sound melodramatic saying it but . . . it’s true. So true.

  As a kid, I never got into science fiction. Growing up, my father would take us to movies off base. He had a thing for the spectacle flicks—the ones with special effects and all the ooh-and-aah moments. Nico got really into Star Wars. Had the pj’s and all the toys. I preferred the moodier movies, the ones that felt more plausible, more real. Nerdy, right? Maybe it was because of what was going on with my mother—with all of us—but I wanted to see people dealing with real world—this world—problems. That sort of escapism didn’t do much for me.

  If I wanted aliens, I wanted something truly alien.

  The things in the sci-fi movies, they were always just another version of us—maybe with a few more bumps, different-color eyes, or three heads. But they met in bars like us. They drank alcoholic drinks the way we do. They fought, they fucked, but they were human in every way except shape and language.

  Even as a kid I knew it wasn’t realistic. If there was other life out in the cosmos, it wasn’t going to look or act like us. If we ever even saw them, that is. No, aliens—if they existed—might be so unlike us, so vastly different, that we might not even recognize them as living. Forget space amoebas or creatures of light; we’re talking beings that don’t even live inside our spatial planes—beyond invisible.

  The kind of beings that would send the Pulse.

  And the Pulse Code hinted at an intelligence I could barely fathom.

  Not necessarily superior, though it was, but utterly unlike our minds. We think linearly. Our consciousness is immersed in time. We are creatures of schedules and calendars. Of lifetimes and cycles. Our math, our physics—they’re the result of our time-bound brains. It is the lens through which our world and our lives make sense: things are born, they live, they die, repeat, repeat
, ad infinitum.

  And yet, the intelligence behind the Pulse Code was beyond time.

  I can’t even explain how I knew it but I did.

  I felt it. Right in my chest. Just this release . . .

  And even though I couldn’t translate the code—I couldn’t even figure out how it began or the mathematics it was composed of—I realized right away that it was both impossibly ancient and crafted only seconds before I found it. That sounds crazy, I know. Frank would see it and shake his head, say it was a mistake. Best I can describe the Pulse Code was like looking out at the ocean: the waves hitting the beach at your feet are finishing what the deepest ocean currents started generations earlier. All right there, in one immense, overwhelming vista.

  Too poetic but . . . you get the image, right?

  Frank was useless as usual.

  Not only did he doubt that I’d discovered anything worth looking at, he wasn’t even willing to give it any more than a second glance. So I stormed out of his office and went back home. I showered. I had a glass of wine. Thank God for wine. And I tried to see his point of view. I honestly attempted to clear my mind and approach the data with a new perspective, antagonizing it as though someone told me at the outset that it was a hoax. And you know what? I came to the same conclusion as before.

  If it was a hoax, it was the most beautiful hoax I’d ever seen.

  And I believed it fully.

  It’s funny, because I used to make fun of Mom for being gullible. She’d forward every chain letter email she’d get—usually they promised all sorts of luck and happiness—and was convinced that good things would come from it. When good things didn’t, she was crushed. Now here I am, convinced that I’ve just uncovered contact with an extraterrestrial race based on a single scrap of impossible to decipher code. But . . . but . . . this is different.

  It always is with me, isn’t it?

  But, God, I was such a wide-eyed child, so naïve about the world. So protected from human failing and misery. I remember judging each of the cities we lived in by their libraries. Augsburg, Honolulu, Seoul . . . I can’t picture the downtowns now, but I can still see the interiors of those libraries as though I was sitting in them at this very second. So many wonderful moments of discovery in those stacks. The thrill of finding a book that I’d never even heard of, covering a topic that I didn’t even know existed . . .