Dahlia Black Read online

  The way he describes it, Petrov’s last few days in his home country were filled with terror. When rioters appeared on their block in the middle of the night, he and his wife, Sasha, gathered everything they could fit in a couple pieces of luggage, jumped into their battered Lada Kalina, and took back roads to the airport. A journey that usually took them only forty-five minutes stretched out into an almost interminable three hours. Petrov visibly cringes when he relates the story. He tells me that driving through the city that night was like driving through hell itself.

  “The things I saw people do . . . ,” he says, shaking his head.

  A day and a half later they were in Schenectady, New York, at Union College, where a good friend, South African astronomer Lethabo Pillay, put them up in his apartment. They stayed two weeks, eyes glued to the television, as they, along with the rest of us, watched as Russia tore itself to pieces. From the unnerving riots to the overwhelming military response and the concussive white-hot blasts of the dirty bombs that decimated Moscow. When it was over, Petrov and his wife were citizens of no nation, refugees adrift in a country he’d only ever visited twice.

  Their marriage fell apart over the next few months.

  Sasha moved back east, to Romania, to be with her sister. Petrov, depressed and feeling unmoored, decided on a radical change: rather than stare up into space, he’d keep his eyes firmly on the ground; hence the move to California and the horses.

  It took me several days and multiple phone calls to Petrov’s neighbors to track him down. Despite having been in the country only a few years, his English is surprisingly good and he enjoys talking to people, telling stories of his time with the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and his work on the Pulse in Russia.

  There was an English writer, perhaps a poet, who said the following:

  The world will end not with a bang but with a whisper.II

  That is paraphrasing but the meaning is clear. All the bombs, all the wars, they are tragic but they are human. Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis: these things are a part of the planet—every now and then it needs to shrug its shoulders and let us humans know who is the boss—but they too are predictable. They are the bangs we expect, the ones we know will cause great distress, but we also know we can recover from. Every war ends. Every storm dissipates.

  But a whisper . . .

  We heard the same whisper from space the night that American scientist discovered it. But, unlike her, we were looking. You see, at the time we had many radio telescopes turned to the same location—the Bullet Cluster—to track down a mysterious signal we had recorded a very small percentage of a few months earlier. When I say it was a small percentage, I mean to say that it was only a few digits—like two or three notes in a song. Not enough to use or analyze but enough to make even the most jaded astronomer curious.

  And the jaded astronomer of which I speak? It was me.

  I was born in Leningrad. My father was a military man, very diligent, and climbed the ranks quite quickly. He was not what you might expect. He was a warm and loving man who doted on me, his only child. My father died when I was ten years old. It was cancer. I was devastated, as you might imagine. I kept my father’s uniform in my closet and I dreamt quite often of wearing it to my own graduation.

  Which is exactly what I did when I was twenty-three.

  I had a mind for mathematics. Still do. I do not know the reason for it, but I am able to recall numbers better than I can recall even faces. Some have suggested I have a photographic recall, but I do not see it this way. I have a practical brain; whether by training or by biological luck, I have been able to subdivide it into various portions. It is a bit cliché to say, but I relate it to a filing system, the kind you keep in a big metal cabinet. I have a file for languages (I speak three), a file for astronomy, and a file for math.

  I used each and every one of these files when we intercepted the Pulse.

  It was midafternoon, rather a boring time of day, and I got an alert that something unusual had been received at our site in Pushchino.III It is a massive array of radio telescopes, RT-22s,IV near some farms and very much out of the way from prying eyes and ears. Well, it was a massive array. It was destroyed in the months following word of the signal, but that is another story.

  Though the information I am about to tell you has certainly been widespread by now, I will give you more of the backstory on it. I do not think that the true history of the Pulse has been—or ever will be—told, despite your best attempts here at documenting what occurred. I am sorry, it is simply too complicated a tale.

  Regardless, this was not the first pulse that we in Russia had seen.

  The Pulse that Dahlia picked up was the second. The first has, until now, been forgotten in . . . how do you say? The dustpans of history? Yes. Well, this is because we did not understand what we were seeing. Dahlia’s brilliance was that she sought to comprehend the Pulse. Our mistake was simply trying to record it and leave the understanding to others. This was how things were in my country at the time.

  The very first pulse signal that we discovered was approximately three days earlier than Dahlia’s recorded event. It emerged from roughly the same section of the sky, and though it was weaker, it relayed much of the same information—that is, the code seemed quite similar.

  We told our superiors about it and were instructed to remain silent.

  So we did as we were told.

  I had grown up in bureaucracy. It was liberating in a sense. Sometimes I did not envy the people in positions above mine. They had to make decisions, and decisions can be weighty and dangerous things.

  After we sent the snippet of the pulse that we had recorded up the chain of command, we forgot about it. Perhaps, on my drive home to my flat, I wondered about the origins of the pulse, but I did not wonder long. By the time I was home and seated comfortably in front of my dinner, the pulse was a long-forgotten memory.

  That was it: the sum total of my involvement in the Pulse affair.

  I was told several days later that my superiors had been made very uncomfortable with the data we had sent to them. There were rumors that it was a weapon, possibly designed by the Americans. I knew better, of course. This was a signal from the deepest reaches of space. It was not a weapon and it was not anything man-made.

  When the Elevation began and word of Dr. Dahlia Mitchell made the newspapers in Russia, I grinned to myself. My wife, she saw my smile and asked me what I knew of the situation. I told her only that I was laughing to myself at the fact that the Americans were always claiming to discover this or that when, surely, there were others in the world who had picked up the same thing.

  * * *

  I. Deepfakes were images or videos that had been computer enhanced using artificial intelligence–based enhancement techniques. First appearing in 2017, these tools were used to superimpose images atop each other. The initial deepfakes were pornography (no surprise) but they quickly manifested as hoax videos: famous people and politicians saying vile or controversial things they never truly said. While programmers quickly developed ways of tagging these fake videos, many escaped into the wild (not by accident) and set off all manner of mayhem. Like St. Petersburg.

  II. Abram is mistaken. He is quoting T. S. Eliot, whose 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” contains this concluding stanza: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” Abram’s corruption of the original phrase—which had become quite commonplace and frequently misquoted—makes sense in terms of his intentions. I leave it uncorrected.

  III. Pushchino is a small town in Moscow Oblast, just on the outskirts of Moscow proper. It was home to a massive research center for the Academy of Sciences. One of those sciences was astronomy, and the site had a radio telescope array.

  IV. “RT-22” means, essentially, radio telescope, twenty-two meters in diameter. RT-22s are used to scan the skies for millimeter and centimeter radio waves.

  11

  HISTORICAL EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM A CONV
ERSATION RECORDED IN WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF GLENN OWEN’S OFFICE

  BETWEEN HIMSELF AND:

  NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR KANISHA PRESTON

  PRESS SECRETARY PER AKERSON

  DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE LT. GEN. NADJA CHEN

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IAN BROXON

  RECORDED AT WHITE HOUSE ON 10.27.2023

  KANISHA PRESTON: Astrophysicists see radio wave signals from space all the time, but not like this. This pulse is a thousand times larger than anything that’s been picked up before. It is incredibly powerful.

  GLENN OWEN: As in technologically superior?

  KANISHA PRESTON: As in way beyond anything we’re capable of creating right now.

  LT. GEN. CHEN: Do we know what it says?

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: No. But my people tell me the mathematics used to encrypt the data in this pulse is beyond advanced.

  LT. GEN. CHEN: I’d like authorization to alert the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We—

  GLENN OWEN: We need verification on this. It could be a fluke. Worse, it could be a hoax. I know there’s a suggestion we just detected a message from an . . . extraterrestrial intelligence, but until we know what that says, we shouldn’t make any decisions. If we start ringing the bell on this and it turns out to be bogus, we’re going to be pilloried.

  LT. GEN. CHEN: And if the Pulse isn’t bogus and we’re late to the party? How do we know the Chinese don’t already have it?

  KANISHA PRESTON: We don’t. The Russians do, though.

  LT. GEN. CHEN: Exactly.

  GLENN OWEN: Deputy Director, please start from the beginning.

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: One of our TAO operators, Jon Hurtado, was handed the drive by an astrophysicist at Santa Cruz. Dr. Dahlia Mitchell. Something of a dark matter expert. Apparently she reconfigured a radio telescope array to run some experiments and discovered this pulse. I’m not sure she understood what it was but she knew enough to share it with her ex-boyfriend.

  LT. GEN. CHEN: And there’s no evidence she gave it to anyone other than Hurtado?

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: Not at this juncture.

  PER AKERSON: Was she alone?

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: There was a graduate student working a late shift. Clark Watts.

  PER AKERSON: Has the FBI talked to either of them?

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: Yes.

  GLENN OWEN: Okay. So, in the meantime, we figure out what we’ve got. If it proves to be what everyone thinks it is, we tell the President. We disclose this the wrong way, we could have big problems. Any thoughts? There’s not exactly a manual for this sort of thing, is there?

  LT. GEN. CHEN: There is, actually. Majestic. 1947.

  GLENN OWEN: Oh, come on. Those dinosaurs? None of that is relevant anymore.

  LT. GEN. CHEN: I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them. They have protocols for this.

  PER AKERSON: You’re kidding, right? Majestic is ancient history.

  KANISHA PRESTON: Look, I just have to point out that if this is real, it’s coming from a much more advanced intelligence—one that may have already infiltrated all of our systems. Chances are, it’s a million moves ahead of us.

  GLENN OWEN: So we bring in the President’s science advisors, communications people, and the NSA. Deputy Director, do you have anyone you can recommend to decode this data?

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: I know one person, but . . .

  GLENN OWEN: Why the hesitation?

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR IAN BROXON: He’s a handful. Dr. Xavier Faber.

  GLENN OWEN: Bring him in.

  THE TASK FORCE

  12

  XAVIER FABER, PHD, COMPUTATIONAL LINGUIST AND FORMER MEMBER OF THE DISCLOSURE TASK FORCE

  NEAR BAYFIELD, CO

  AUGUST 8, 2025

  Rumors have dogged Xavier Faber’s life and career for several decades.

  He first came to public attention when he single-handedly proved the dynamic optimality conjecture, a computer-programming question from Sleator and Tarjan’s 1985 binary search tree paper that had been quite difficult—some argued impossible—to solve. The dynamic optimality conjecture is a concept proposed by two computer scientists, Daniel Sleator and Robert Tarjan, in the mid-1980s. The two invented different data structures, ways to organize information in computer systems, including the “splay tree” (a self-adjusting binary search tree designed to retrieve items from a computer’s memory more easily). In Sleator and Tarjan’s binary search tree paper, they wondered if a splay tree was dynamically optimal—that is, if splay trees can perform as well as any other search tree algorithm. It couldn’t be proven that they do—until Xavier came along.

  At the time, Xavier was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. He was something of a rabble-rouser—known to work on the quad lawn while blasting industrial rock music like Ministry from his dorm room windows.

  Xavier’s illuminating ideas led him to MIT and then NASA, where he worked on several aborted Mars mission programs—aborted largely because Xavier was considered too difficult. He fought with his colleagues, his superiors, even the janitorial staff (once resulting in a physical altercation that saw him get ten stitches in the ER). Xavier was fired after only a year at NASA and retreated to the woods outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he proceeded to develop machine-learning tools that he sold to various and sundry tech corporations. While this supported his rather unorthodox lifestyle—embarking on several annual adventures where he’d travel to a random spot on a map with only a single set of clothes and a cheap cell phone and attempt to stay for a month regardless of the language barriers—Xavier’s real passion was Skinwalker, the little-known multi-paradigm programming language he’d created himself. And it was Skinwalker that brought Xavier into the orbit of the Disclosure Task Force.

  These days, Xavier lives on a ranch in Southern Colorado, where he raises alpacas and tweaks his green home—a solar-powered oasis in the middle of the western United States’ largest energy gaps. He is married to a biochemist named Yamuna Chakravorty and they have two adopted children, eight and ten.

  Given his history and current off-the-grid existence, it should come as little surprise that Xavier was difficult to track down. After finding no way to contact him directly, I traveled to Denver and rented a car before utilizing several faded physical maps to find a small ghost town near his home. I camped there for two days on the advice of a local rancher that Xavier passed through the town on his weekly forays “down mountain” to scavenge car batteries from an abandoned car lot near a defunct rural airport. I flagged him down in the middle of a dirt road, and when he pulled his battered Jeep over to talk to me, he rolled down his window, and said: “Ten minutes. And if I’m not curious about why you’re here after those ten minutes, then I’ll drop you off at the nearest intersection.”

  I accepted and had persuaded him to talk within five minutes. I hate to be too self-congratulatory, but I’m a good journalist: I know how to get a source to open up. With Xavier, it took only one name: Dahlia Mitchell. He invited me back to his home, made me a dinner of trout (which he’d caught himself), Israeli salad, and jalapeño cornbread. After the meal, we sat out on his porch and stared up at the stars. With all the lights out in a two-hundred-mile radius of his cabin, we could make out just about every star in the vast Milky Way.

  Here’s what everyone asks me first: When did you really know?

  I don’t have an answer for that.

  Wish I did.

  You gotta understand how it all happened, at least for me. I was sitting in my cabin in Nova Scotia, just another Thursday afternoon, when a black chopper flies low over the trees and lands in a field about half a mile away. They didn’t try to hide. They’d come for me.

  I wasn’t a survivalist but I didn’t take too politely to unannounced strangers.

  Assuming they were there to jam me on some of the software I’d been developing for a few of our country’s
less savory friends, I grabbed a sledgehammer and went to town on my hard drives.I Had all twenty-seven of them busted to dust by the time the knock on the front door came. I answered it to find a guy with no neck and biceps the size of my thighs holding an HK416.

  He noticed the sledgehammer in my hands, asked me if I was Dr. Xavier Faber. I nodded and he said I needed to go to the chopper with him.

  That was extent of that. Flight time was roughly four hours. None of the soldiers who escorted me spoke to me. Several times, they bantered into mics on channels I wasn’t privy to, but for the most part they slept. I couldn’t close my eyes. My mind was racing. Why? Here’s the thing: I knew people didn’t want to talk to me because I’d written a few suspicious programs—programs they’d rather not have floating around the dark web. If they wanted me to spill on some of my contacts, they’d have made a more ostentatious show of force, try to prove to me that talking was my best and only option. The muscle wasn’t there to make statements; however, they were there because they needed something I hadn’t provided yet. Their handlers wanted my brain, not my products.

  We landed at an army base and jumped into a waiting train of SUVs, exactly the way you imagined it all looked. Glenn Owen, our illustrious White House chief of staff at the time, beamed when I climbed into the second SUV. He sat between two Secret Service agents. We made small talk. I’d seen him on TV and complimented his running of Ballard’s campaign. Though I never really had an interest in politics, her win as an Independent certainly caught my attention. I knew Glenn played an outsized role in keeping President Ballard focused on what mattered to the voters: jobs, security, low taxes, the usual stuff.

  “You haven’t exactly been recommended,” Glenn said.

  “Let me guess: Broxon?”

  Glenn nodded. “He’s worried we won’t have a short enough leash for you.”

  “He would be.”

  That was the extent of our conversation. I wanted to ask about why I was there, who’d really brought me in—’cause Broxon wasn’t a powerful enough person to have me tracked down for a meeting—but I knew I wouldn’t get the answers I was looking for.