Dahlia Black Read online

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  AGENT PENDARVES: The ROC?

  ZACH JAFFE: Remote operations center. I was in the Office of Tailored Access Operations. We were the specialists behind the specialists. Need someone to design a specific virus for a piece of equipment at a hydroelectric dam in Iran? We could design that and, even better, we could figure out a way to get it across the air gap. We were the other badasses with beards. SEALs kind of claimed that look first, but . . . we wore it better.

  AGENT PENDARVES: And you worked there with Jon Hurtado . . .

  ZACH JAFFE: Yes and no. I mean, he wasn’t in my department. Jon was more on the analysis side of things. His job was locating targets and mine was the infiltration. He and I did a few jobs together though and we got along. Shared an interest in music and trying to keep a punk attitude at the NSA. Wasn’t easy.

  AGENT PENDARVES: Jon brought you the Pulse code for analysis, correct?

  ZACH JAFFE: I got a thumb drive from him. Way he set up the story was simple: he said that the information on the drive was picked up by a radio telescope in Cali. He wanted to see if it matched anything we had in our database. I reminded him—gently, of course—that we’re at the NSA, not NASA. That’s when he said he needed it to be under the table, so to speak. I want that clear, okay?

  AGENT PENDARVES: I think we understand. He brought it to you with the idea that you’d be reviewing it secretly. This was not considered a government project. It was to be outside of your daily work routine. Yes?

  ZACH JAFFE: You put it perfectly. So he hands me this thumb drive and asks me to check it out. And that would be fine if we were at my apartment, when I’ve got shit—I mean, my stuff—contained. But we’re at work. And at work, my supervisors are tracking every single one of my keystrokes.

  AGENT PENDARVES: But you had a work-around.

  ZACH JAFFE: Of course I did. He had to flatter me a bit. I like to know that I still have that special touch. Anyway, I circumvented the tracking software on my machine and opened the data he gave me and had a look-see. I’ll be honest with you, my first thought was that someone was pranking him. I mean, the stuff on that drive, it wasn’t any coding language I was familiar with. It wasn’t our stuff; wasn’t anyone else’s stuff either. Just random looking, bizarre, and that meant dangerous. I was actually fascinated by it but didn’t want to dive too deep into that rabbit hole, you know? You guys must be familiar with the Max Headroom signal intrusion, right?

  AGENT PENDARVES: No. Does it relate to our conversation about the Pulse Code?

  ZACH JAFFE: I wouldn’t be bringing it up otherwise. No, seriously, it gets at what I’m telling you. See, in the late 1980s there was this weird thing that happened in Chicago. People were just hanging out, watching the 9:00 news or whatever, when the screen suddenly flicks out and this dude appears in a Max Headroom mask. He was kind of a cult TV figure at the time. So this guy shows up in a homemade studio set, bobs around to strange electronic buzzing sounds, and then is gone. We’re talking about someone hijacking a TV signal, and there was a code embedded in the intrusion signal—

  AGENT PENDARVES: Mr. Jaffe, please, we’re talking about—

  ZACH JAFFE: I know, I know, this is going to be important later. Hear me out, okay? There was a code hidden under the Headroom thing. It was super-sophisticated and almost no one knows about it. Me and a bunch of like-minded folks on deep-Net sites, we analyzed that code and found it was like a numbers station—a code for spies to broadcast from inside the CIA. The stuff was too cryptic to understand; I was able to make out a few words. Something about “mutation” and “throughout all time” and then a group name, something I’d never actually heard of, called the Twelve. The people I was picking apart this code with? They started dying. Yeah, accidents, overdoses . . . Crazy shit. Long story short, the code that Jon brought in, it looked like that Headroom intrusion code, and, frankly, I was a little bit worried about seeing it. So I didn’t look too hard.

  AGENT PENDARVES: The information you gleaned from the Headroom code—what did you do with it? Did you forward it along, or . . .

  ZACH JAFFE: No. Like I said, that stuff had some bad mojo around it. People were getting killed—

  AGENT PENDARVES: You said they had accidents, overdoses . . .

  ZACH JAFFE: (laughing) Right, right. Don’t tell me that you don’t know what I’m getting at. I mean, we’re talking people who weren’t suicidal suddenly up and offing themselves. No notes left behind. People who never fail to take excellent care of their cars who somehow overlook failing brakes. I won’t make you read between the lines: I’m saying these folks were murdered and someone, the dreaded they, made it looks like accidents, suicides . . .

  AGENT PENDARVES: Of course. So what did you and Jon do with the information that Dahlia Mitchell provided?

  ZACH JAFFE: So, yeah, I looked briefly at the code on that drive and then Jon asked me to run it against the code we’d picked up in our sweep the night before.

  AGENT PENDARVES: Explain that in more detail please.

  ZACH JAFFE: That’s what we do in Tailored Access: we basically bug the world and record it. Every country, every government, every president—we eavesdrop on them. We’re the ears of the world, so to speak. What Jon wanted to do was see if anyone else on Earth picked up the same signal that these radio telescopes did. I wasn’t a hundred percent on this, but whatever that code was, it was partial. He wanted to track down the whole thing.

  AGENT PENDARVES: And did you find anything?

  ZACH JAFFE: Yup. We did. There was another stretch of the same code pulled in by a radio telescope array in Russia. The FSB, the Russian security apparatus, they were freaked out about the code too. Chatter was all sorts of panicked. The Russians, they had no idea where the code was from, but it spooked them because their people suggested it was a cyberweapon.

  AGENT PENDARVES: And what did you and Jon think it was?

  ZACH JAFFE: We didn’t know. The fact that it was picked up from radio telescopes pointed up, like away from our planet, certainly had me guessing. But I couldn’t tell just glancing at the code what it could be. Weapon? Naturally occurring high weirdness? Someone’s lost pizza order? No idea. But I did know that I wanted nothing more to do with it. So we did what all good government employees do . . .

  INTERVIEWER: That is . . . ?

  AGENT PENDARVES: We sent it up the proverbial ladder and let our bosses deal with it.

  * * *

  I. Zach’s referencing a conspiracy theory associated with the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. According to those who believe the theory, cocaine was smuggled into the United States by the CIA and taken to America’s inner-city neighborhoods hit hardest by the drug war. Why? The CIA was using the money to fund the Contras, a revolutionary group seeking to overthrow the socialist junta controlling Nicaragua. Some historians think there could be truth to the conspiracy; others see the whole crack “epidemic” as a moral panic, a sort of media-fueled delusion like “Satanic ritual abuse” cases and UFO abductions.

  9

  KANISHA PRESTON, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR

  SARASOTA, FL

  JUNE 25, 2025

  Sarasota was never a large city, but now it is essentially abandoned.

  The beaches remain popular with tourists, but the few people who do live here are retired or work in the newly galvanized fishing industry.

  Five years after the global population dropped from 7.7 billion to 2.5 billion, the fish stocks in these waters have rebounded and are amazingly robust. Hogfish, black drum, king mackerel, red porgy, swordfish, and wahoo are all easily caught off the coast. Walking the white sand beaches of Siesta Key, one sees dozens of small watercraft plying waters that teem with dolphins and manatees.

  One of those small ships belongs to Kanisha Preston.

  Kanisha, now forty-six, hails from Baltimore and a middle-class black family. A single mom by choice, Kanisha originally attended medical school before switching to law. She graduated from Harvard Law School and went to the S
tate Department. Kanisha then served as senior foreign policy advisor on President Ballard’s unconventional Independent presidential run. When President Ballard won the White House, Kanisha was a shoo-in for national security advisor.

  Kanisha’s daughter, Rose, had special needs, and the expense of caring for her pushed Kanisha nearly to financial ruin. When Rose became Elevated, Kanisha watched with wonder as her daughter’s disabilities seemed to simply slough off. Sadly, she did not survive the transition from phase 2 to phase 3.

  Though Kanisha had a successful political career and was respected on Capitol Hill, she is best remembered today as the first political casualty of the Disclosure Task Force. Many questions remain about Kanisha’s role in the Task Force’s failure to inform the Americans about the first contact with an outside intelligence. While she defended her actions, there were many within—and outside—the Ballard administration that suspected she was a “double-agent,” working for both the President and the Twelve—an agency committed to stopping any public disclosure of and/or contact with any alien race.I

  One condition of my interview with Kanisha was that I would not broach the topic of the Twelve and Kanisha’s suspected contact with its director, Simon Household. I respected Kanisha’s wishes at the time. But later in this book I was able to answer some of the questions about her involvement with the Twelve when more research about the Twelve and Simon Household were made available after the Finality. Some are still restricted today.

  Kanisha and I met on Crescent Beach.

  She allowed me roughly fifty-eight minutes to speak with her, the time it took to walk from one end of the beach to the other.

  Deputy Director Broxon told me about the signal.

  He’d seen it because someone at the NSA was asked to review it. Didn’t take us long to track it back to Jon and then Dahlia, but in those first few hours, when we only knew it was data from a radio telescope, we were stunned.

  A signal from space, a message in a radioactive bottle.

  The way Broxon told me about it, how breathlessly he described what it meant, I could only think one thing: this is going to change the course of the administration whether we liked it or not.

  You need to remember, President Ballard was still in her first term, things were shit all over, and the country was in something of a lull and looking for a boost. In a lot of administrations, depending on the politics of the moment, this was the sort of thing that could have been easily swept under the rug and forgotten.

  I wanted to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.

  So I brought in Broxon, Chief of Staff Glenn Owen, White House Counsel Terry Quinn, Press Secretary Per Akerson, and Director of National Intelligence Lieutenant General Nadja Chen. We met in the cabinet room at the White House. Per and Nadja weren’t exactly thrilled to be there, especially to hear something about “a radio program from the little green men.”

  They changed their minds pretty quickly when they saw the code.

  I explained, as I’d been informed, that this pulse was a thousand times larger than any radio signal that had been picked up before. Even more, it was engineered. Technologically superior to anything mankind could create.

  That wasn’t bullshit.

  Before politics, I’d trained as a physician.

  I knew how science worked. There was a logic to this.

  Lieutenant General Chen wanted to alert the Joint Chiefs, but Terry put the kibosh on that early. He wanted verification, as though Broxon handing it to us wasn’t already enough. In the meantime, he suggested we chase down the best minds in the fields of exobiology, computer science, and astronomy, get their takes on the Pulse Code, and hold off on telling the President anything about it.

  I can tell you that once the wheels were in motion, everything happened pretty quickly. There’s this tendency to assume that change is slow in Washington, but that’s mostly on the policy side. When something big happens, something that potentially threatens the safety and security of the populace, then things happen fast. Orders are given and followed and . . . well, that’s what happened here.

  We got those experts in fast.

  It’s funny talking about those early stages. Most of the people who’ve come to talk to me want to know about what happened later—how we handled the Elevation, the Disclosure Task Force document, President Ballard’s struggles. Those first few days after the Pulse appeared are largely a blur. I made a lot of calls, took a lot of meetings, sent an entire continent’s worth of emails.

  And, to tell you the truth, the weight of it didn’t sink in until after I’d left the office. I was a single mother at the time. My own mother took care of my daughter, Rose, while I was working. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for a week or more at a time. That killed me, broke my heart.

  I actually had dinner with Rose the night after the Pulse came in. She’d finished her meal and was snacking on some fries when she looked up at me and asked me, “Mom, why is it that every day you go to work, it’s to fix things that bad people started? Don’t they ever just want to rest?”

  Watching her, I realized that for the first time in a really long time I was optimistic. You have to understand, Rose was right. Partially. There were so many bad things happening, and I had to stare them square in the face every day as part of my job in the administration. I don’t think I was jaded, but I’d gotten used to seeing the world as fundamentally shitty.

  President Ballard arrived on the political scene at a crucial time.

  I won’t say the world was in chaos, but it felt like it was on the verge of just crumbling apart. The gulf between rich and poor was bigger than it had been in eighty years, the reigning political parties stoked hate on both sides, neighbors didn’t talk to each other, social media had us ranting and raving about every little thing that made us angry. It sucked and we needed a change.

  When Ballard got into the race, it felt like she’d come out of nowhere.

  A true dark horse candidate.

  Her newness, her everyman persona—that got people excited. In a good way, a refreshing way. Ballard knew what we were all going through, what we all remembered and wanted to bring back—a hopefulness that the world would get better and that all it would take was a new perspective.

  Her winning the election wasn’t a shock to me.

  Might have rattled the markets and given the career politicians a gut punch they never really recovered from, but people like me—people looking for reinvention—we’d entered a new page in history, and I wanted to be a part of it. There was a lot of talk in the elections before that one about tearing the system down; it didn’t work out. Instead of electing people who had vision, the American populace, fed up and sick to death of politics as usual, brought in people with no ambition but their own. Deceived, they retreated even more into rancor and division.

  So Ballard seemed real. And she was real.

  When I joined the administration, I found a White House that was dedicated to rebuilding, to picking up the pieces, and truly hopeful. When the Pulse Code came in and we all thought it was a message from a culture far more advanced than ours, I felt this warmth in my chest. I felt like maybe the world was going to be an even better place now that we’d been discovered.

  I actually thought that: they had discovered us. And, whoever they were, they had plans to make our world better. Surely they did. I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

  Wow, how wrong I was . . .

  Of course, even though Dahlia made the discovery and she’s credited with it—rightly, I think—there were other people who found it too. You need to remember that, before the Elevation, we were at this wild moment in history where technology was everywhere and everything. It felt like you couldn’t go on a date or buy a new pair of shoes without the world recording it somehow.

  God, that sounds paranoid, but that’s how it was.

  * * *

  I. It is worth noting that the Twelve’s opposition to disclosure went beyond just contact with an alien intel
ligence: they were vociferously opposed to any public revealing of the interception of extraterrestrial signals or interaction with extraterrestrial “culture”—artifacts, communications, etc. If something was found, it must remain secret because, in their estimation, humanity would almost certainly be negatively impacted. This line of thought would, of course, color everything the Twelve did in reaction to the Pulse Code and the Elevation.

  10

  ABRAM PETROV, RUSSIAN ASTROPHYSICIST

  GRASS VALLEY, CA

  JULY 12, 2025

  After immigrating to California two years ago, Abram Petrov now finds himself in a double-wide trailer in the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains raising horses.

  It is certainly not the place this eminent scientist expected to find himself after a rich career in his home country. As other recent histories have detailed, Russia was particularly unbalanced after the Elevation, and, over the years that followed the Finality, it crumbled. We’ve all seen the images of Volgograd burning and the videos of the riots that savaged St. Petersburg. That was, of course, particularly ugly. Another social media mass hysteria with deadly results—a deepfaked video of Elevated children attacking and killing a couple; it was shared thousands of times, and within hours of its first appearance, the anti-Elevated violence began.I The well-to-do escaped first, of course. Those with connections to the States jumped on the first flights out of the country. While Petrov didn’t have money, he did have strong associations with a number of American universities and notable academics.