Dahlia Black Read online

  Well, that was heaven to a nerdy little girl like me.

  Of course, those bubbles I inhabited—moving from town to town, house to house, school to school, library to library, and book to book—would never have existed if my mother hadn’t created them. After Mom died, Nico and I went through her journals, working together to translate them using our combined German knowledge. We didn’t need much to see all that sadness, all that bitterness.

  If she were around, she’d be pissed at me about the pills.

  I know they’re a problem but . . . I’m getting better.

  It’s true. It really is. I feel . . . I’m just more focused than before. I don’t need all the emotional bullshit . . . They give me that little boost I need to get through the day. Nothing more. I could live without them, I . . . I just don’t have the strength right now.

  Besides, if I quit, I worry that I’ll end up disillusioned. Not as a housewife with drug issues but as an astronomer who jumps recklessly at every opportunity to find awe in the world again. That’s why I research dark matter, isn’t it? I’m always looking for that moment of discovery, that rush of new knowledge. Doesn’t get more enticing than matter that might not even exist.

  Nico likes to say I search the stars to find myself.

  He loves platitudes and aphorisms and summing up complicated ideas in bumper sticker–sized bites. Though Nico would never admit it, he’d probably feel a very deep satisfaction in forwarding chain letters. So, yeah, he’d boil me down to a sound bite of psychology: Dahlia spends all her time staring up into the night sky because she’s lost here on Earth. That’s exactly how he’d say it.

  And maybe he’s right.

  Maybe I have been lost.

  But now . . . I’ve been found.

  We all have.

  7

  JON HURTADO, FORMER NSA ANALYST

  SALT LAKE CITY, UT

  JUNE 13, 2025

  Though he lives in Los Angeles, Jon Hurtado and I meet in Salt Lake City, where he’s attending a conference.

  That might sound strange, considering this is a city that still suffers from rolling brownouts and rarely has Internet speeds exceeding 2 megabytes per second, which is, even before the Elevation, considerably slow. The organizers of this conference, however, want to highlight these technological disparities. This is a meeting of entrepreneurs and former government officials eager to get in on the ground floor of what they see as the future, reunited United States of America. Whether or not they can convince Texas and Alabama to come back to the table, however, is a matter of ongoing debate.

  But while Jon has fascinating things to say about rebuilding our country, we’re not here to discuss them. Jon was one of the few people who were close to Dahlia Mitchell, and his insight into her character and decision-making is crucial to our understanding of the Elevation and the Finality. It must also be said that Jon was there, in the thick of it, when the long-rumored organization the Twelve was exposed.

  Jon was Dahlia’s lover. Well, former. They dated for several years—going so far as to move in together for a brief, tumultuous time—before breaking up but staying  friends. That’s unusual. Most couples, after the split, they just can’t move forward in any way emotionally; in my experience, there’s always one party that just can’t let go. But Jon and Dahlia were different. What split them apart was physical distance and intellectual pride. They simply met at the wrong time. Both chasing careers, neither side willing to let their passions for work go. For her, it was the research and the academic ladder. For him, the deep dive into the clandestine work of saving the world. Star-crossed lovers indeed. They kept in touch over the years they were apart, texting, emailing, even calling every now and again. Even though neither of them had room for the other in their life, they weren’t willing to fully let go.

  When Dahlia discovered the signal and Dr. Kjelgaard wasn’t willing to listen, Jon was the next best person to turn to. That history—that emotional connection—was, for all intents and purposes, the thing that changed the course of Dahlia’s life the most: if she hadn’t come to him with the signal, it might have been forgotten.

  For a while at least.

  Jon Hurtado, the son of two Mexican immigrants, was in ROTC in high school. He followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the military. (His dad, Luis, was a second lieutenant in the Mexican army.) Jon served in the second Iraq war as a radio operator, intercepting enemy text messages and radio broadcasts, and coordinating air strikes through cell tower pings.

  After the war, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the NSA’s warfare intelligence-gathering unit, recruited him. As an analyst in the ROC (remote operations center) at Fort Meade, he monitored and infiltrated computer systems before being promoted to overseeing their virus containment unit—a “digital jail” where malware is safely broken apart and analyzed. Successful at TAO, Jon was recruited by the CIA to work on cyberwarfare programs and relocated to California.

  We have coffee in the lobby of his hotel. He is now a thin and youthful forty years old with a trim, graying beard and a full head of hair. Jon is dressed down in jeans and a hoodie. He has a cast on one hand, the result, he tells me, of a biking accident. (“I was biking with a friend around Silver Lake and ran straight into a deer—the place is overrun with them now.”)

  Dahlia is something else.

  It’s funny saying that.

  Makes it sound like she’s going to walk in the door any minute. I’ll be sitting on my porch and hear the door close behind me and turn expecting to see her but . . . it’s nothing. No one. Even though it’s been two years, when I talk about her, I refer to her in the present tense. I can’t help it.

  It’s not like she actually died, right?

  You asked me about how it all started. The signal. The code. The discovery.

  The way most people remember it, the whole thing began with her, with that one moment inside a radio telescope observatory.

  It’s never really the truth, though.

  That’s just how we remember it. Her face was all over the news. It felt like she woke up that morning as a nobody, a well-liked but not-well-published professor at one of the West Coast colleges, but by that evening she was the most talked about human being on the planet. And this was before it all happened, before anyone had any idea of the truth.

  Dahlia wasn’t one for fame.

  She was after the information.

  Frankly, she’d spent most of her career focused on the deepest recesses of space. Not the exciting parts, you understand? Not the black holes and the supernovae and the comets and the stars. But the spaces in between. You know how you see these photos of the Milky Way and it’s dense with planets and suns, like someone spilled sugar across a black stretch of cloth? Well, that wasn’t where she was looking. Her research, it was in the places where the stars were so far apart, no craft would ever reach them.

  This was just dead space. Forgotten, forgettable, empty.

  The kind of emptiness that gives you nightmares.

  As a kid, I used to have these falling dreams. Usually happened in the seconds right after I fell asleep, right after I closed my eyes. I’d feel the floor whip out from underneath me and I’d be tumbling into nothingness. Not down a cliff face or a staircase but just straight down into the void. Heart pounding, I’d jolt upright in bed with a gasp. Suddenly awake and terrified, filled with adrenaline.

  The first time Dahlia told me about the empty spaces she studied, I thought about those dreams.

  I imagined falling into those gaps.

  You’d fall forever there.

  Funny, I think I even told her that.

  I had this image of myself falling, growing old, getting some long beard in my spacesuit, and dying and becoming this skeleton tumbling through space for the rest of eternity; a speck amongst specks.

  Dahlia called me a romantic after I mentioned it.

  She said it wasn’t anything like the way I described it.

  The way I wor
ried about it.

  Apparently, you can’t fall in space. Not technically, anyway.

  In space, direction doesn’t exist. Just like time doesn’t. All these things we make assumptions about down on Earth, they’re illusions in space. You don’t fall because there is no up and there is no down.

  Anyway, this was two years before the discovery.

  Dahlia was up for tenure review and was pretty stressed-out.

  I met her at a party.

  No idea really how our paths crossed that night.

  It was a thing at someone’s houseboat docked at Pier 32. My friend Charles, a contractor with the agency, invited me on a whim and I had nothing better doing, so I figured some wine and cheese with a bunch of hipsters on a houseboat would be a change of pace. I’d spent the last year crunching numbers at NASA’s Langley Research Center, isolated in a windowless back room, glued to a computer monitor fifteen hours a day. Having a drink on a houseboat, watching the sunset, seemed a pretty nice escape.

  Turned out, Charles barely knew the boat’s owners himself. He was dating a woman who’d been invited. They broke up two weeks after the party.

  Anyway, I felt as though I was crashing the scene—a lot of pretty boring people crammed into a boat talking politics, art, movies, and small batch beers—and so I stepped out and walked the dock for a few minutes.

  The lull of the waves slapping against the boats, the stars sparkling up above—it wasn’t a romantic moment but it felt like it could easily have been the setting for one . . . And then she walked in.

  “The Seven Sisters.”

  Dahlia moved down the dock towards me, pointing up at the stars I’d been glancing at a few moments earlier.

  “The Pleiades,” she continued, “the seven daughters of one of the Titans. It’s an impressive cluster of stars. The brightest of them are easily hundreds of times more luminous than our sun.”

  I looked up at the stars. They certainly seemed luminous.

  “I did not know that,” I said.

  Then I turned back to Dahlia. She had her hair pulled up and was wearing a black dress. That was one of the few times I’d ever seen her in makeup and contact lenses; she was striking regardless. I hadn’t been in a relationship, at least anything meaningful, for a few years. I wasn’t actively looking either.

  You know that old chestnut about not finding what you’re looking for until you stop looking for it? Well, that’s always been true for me.

  That night was the start. We talked until dawn, forgot all about the party. Turns out that she wasn’t supposed to be there either. Just like me, a friend had invited her out. She found the conversation boring and needed air.

  Dahlia and I were together for two years and two months.

  We had our ups and downs. I traveled a ton, effectively living on the East Coast for a stretch of it, and she worked ridiculous hours. That led to a fair amount of tension—times I wanted to see her and she wasn’t available, other times she was hoping I was free but I had to travel. I wouldn’t say our fights were anything unusual. We’re both tough people to love.

  I still am.

  We broke up on President’s Day.I I was in a foul mood—I’d been called in to work an extra shift—and she had had a tough conversation with her brother. She was really hurt and wanted to talk through it all, get it off her chest. Only, I wasn’t emotionally available. I couldn’t have been bothered to tell her that, though. She came to me crying, I was barely listening to what she said.

  She blew up. Stormed out.

  That was it.

  I was in such a bad mood that I didn’t chase after her. Didn’t call either.

  I regret that asshole decision to this day. Took me some therapy sessions, talking with friends and my folks, to realize how badly I’d blown a pretty great thing. I was full of myself, figured she’d come back to me. But Dahlia is strong—strongest person I’ve ever met. She knew she could do better than me.

  So you’ll imagine my surprise when she called October 19, 2023. I can’t ever forget that date.

  She told me she needed to talk.

  Needed someone she could trust.

  I’ll tell you, I cried after I hung up the phone. That call, I don’t know why it got me so emotional, but it did. Maybe I was in a bad place, maybe work had really beaten me down, but I needed the uplift of that message—that I meant something to somebody. That I was someone she could trust.

  I met her at the Black Bear Diner in Monterey.

  She looked great. Comfortable.

  I slid into a chair across from her and complimented her shorter hair.

  She jumped right into it and handed me a flash drive.

  “This is going to sound nuts,” she said, “but last night I found a pulse that enveloped the entire planet. We’ve had brushes with unusual deep-space signals before, but they’ve always turned out to be evaporating black holes or solar flares.”

  “Or microwaves,” I said. “I read about some astronomers who got all excited about a crazy powerful signal. Turned out it was just someone reheating a bowl of pho in the break room . . .”II

  I smiled, expecting a giggle.

  She didn’t crack.

  “What’s on this drive isn’t a microwave. It’s not a black hole or a solar flareIII either. I’ve run the numbers over and over. It keeps coming up the same.”

  “What exactly do you think it is?” I asked.

  “Contact,” she replied.

  Dahlia let that sink in for a second.

  Then she continued: “This pulse is from outside our galaxy, Jon, and it is the most complex piece of mathematics I’ve seen. It’s beautiful. Mathematics means language, Jon. It’s a message. To us. But . . . we’ll need a supercomputer to get anything out of it. Took me all night to just review a fraction of the data.”

  I told her she should take it to NASA or SETI.

  “I gave it to Frank. He shot it down. I don’t trust my people, Jon, and my people don’t trust me. You’re the only one I do trust.”

  I swallowed hard hearing that. “I work for the NSA. We’re not exactly known for our honesty.”

  Dahlia reached across the table, took my hands in hers.

  “Please, just review it. If the data’s garbage, you can forget I ever brought it to you. You can call me crazy too.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but I have one condition. Dinner at Banzai Sushi on Friday. I’ll pick you up. Dinner. That’s it.”

  Finally, she smiled. Dahlia said, “I just handed you a flash drive with what could be the most important discovery in human history . . .”

  “And I’m offering you some kick-ass sashimi and a few good jokes.”

  She agreed and then left.

  I’m not ashamed to admit I did a little victory dance, right there in my seat.

  When I got home, I made a copy of the flash drive. Felt a little paranoid doing it, so when I went to hide it, I didn’t put it in any one of the usual places—not the lockbox or the sock drawer. A friend in the FBI once told me to hide stuff inside boxes of cereal.

  That’s what I did with the copy.

  Tucked it into a bag of Cap’n Crunch.

  I brought the code in to work the next morning. Dahlia warned me to be careful with it. She didn’t want it vanishing into the government black hole, winding up in some file or drawer somewhere in Reno. She wanted me to give it to someone that I trusted—someone who would recognize the importance of it.

  So first thing I did when I got into the office was show it to one of my coworkers, Zach Jaffe. He’s something of a clown, a bit paranoid, but he’s the best coder that I know. If anyone was going to get a read on this thing, it was him.

  You know what happened after that.

  * * *

  I. Jon went so far as to show me his dog-eared calendar from that year. On the entry for President’s Day he’d written, in blue, “Over with Dahlia.”

  II. True story. Australian astronomers were puzzled for over a decade by a strange signal they’d be
en picking up. They thought the interference was due to lightning strikes or something else coming from the upper atmosphere. Turns out it was a microwave oven in the break room.

  III. Solar flares are most often associated with “coronal mass ejections”—a release of plasma (and magnetic field) from the sun. These frequently interfere with electronic systems on Earth—a real bugaboo for astronomers.

  8

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH ZACHERY JAFFE

  SAN FRANCISCO FIELD OFFICE: RECORDING #0011—FIELD AGENT S. PENDARVES

  OCTOBER 27, 2023

  AGENT PENDARVES: Please state your name and occupation for the record.

  ZACH JAFFE: Well, I’m Zach Jaffe and I’m thirty. I work for the government.

  AGENT PENDARVES: Please be more precise, Mr. Jaffe. What do you do for the government and how long have you done it?

  ZACH JAFFE: This is being recorded?

  AGENT PENDARVES: Yes. Let me remind you that not only are you under oath but that you’re facing obstruction charges that carry a maximum sentence of twenty to twenty-five years in a federal prison.

  ZACH JAFFE: Hey, I’m just asking, okay? I’m the one that came to you guys, right? I’m the one who wanted to share what I know.

  AGENT PENDARVES: Again, tell us what you do for the government.

  ZACH JAFFE: NSA. Coding. I mean, that’s the long and short of it. You can dress up what I do in all the fancy technical jargon that you want, but I code. I used to get my digital rocks off cracking company and government databases. I used to say that I was looking for evidence of conspiracies—you know, CIA agents smuggling drugs into the inner city or assassinations that the public didn’t know aboutI—but really that was just my way to dress it up. I wasn’t actually looking for anything; I just liked being inside, you know? Anyway, I’m making this story too long. I got caught. Cops raided my apartment when I was at my desk, in my underwear, eating a Hot Pocket. They told me I was looking at something like ten years in prison. I made a deal and, well, after working for them for free for a couple years, I got to liking the gig. Worked my way up the NSA and the ROC.