Dahlia Black Read online

  We met at the White House. Cabinet Room. Door closed, and I found myself face-to-face with a collection of some of the smartest people in the United States. I knew a few of them.

  Dr. Neil Roberts, an exobiologist I’d worked with at NASA. He was mid-fifties and had published a few revolutionary papers about how life could survive in both the outer reaches of empty space and beneath the thick ice of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.II Like all such thought experiments, it was compelling stuff but, ultimately, hardly seemed useful in the grand scheme of things.

  I knew Dr. Sergei Mikoyan well. He was a linguist and spoke something like twenty-five languages. The man was a legend for some work he’d helped develop around machine learning—helping researchers teach computers how to differentiate between languages. I wasn’t part of any of the projects he’d been involved in, but I’d read his work and it was brilliant.

  The woman next to Mikoyan I didn’t know. When Glenn made the introductions, he said she was Soledad Venegas, a particle physicist. Soledad was young, maybe five years older than me, in her mid-thirties. Had short hair and big hoop earrings that resembled an atom with five orbiting electrons. A nice touch.

  Dr. Andrea Cisco was an astrophysicist at the University of Washington. Was well-known for her work on gravitational waves, though the few times I’d met her—at MIT conferences—she came across as harried and graced with even fewer social skills than most astrophysicists. She didn’t even look up at me when I was introduced.

  Those were the scientists. The other people in the room were with the administration. We had Kanisha Preston, national security advisor; Terry Quinn, the White House’s lawyer; and Lieutenant General Chen, the secretary of defense.

  I took a seat and made a little jab at Dr. Neil Roberts. That’s my style.

  “So, has NASA found any alien bugs, Bob?”

  He frowned and said, “Not since you were fired.”

  Touché.

  Glenn handed out custom tablet computers, one for each of us. They ran GNU/Linux with custom hardware and pretty intense security—hardwired kill switches for Wi-Fi, camera, GPS, and cellular data. These were new and had nothing on them but a single data file. We opened them and took a look.

  If you’ve ever been hiking—like not day hiking but a days-long trek into some remote wilderness—you’ll know the feeling that I got the first time I saw the Pulse. It was like climbing through a primordial forest, having to slash your way through dense undergrowth for days on end. Exhausted, bloodied, bruised, feeling like you’ve been pummeled within an inch of your life, you drag your broken body to the summit of some windswept peak and then look out over . . . the most gorgeous landscape you’ve ever seen. Lush valleys ringed by deep-green forests, little cobalt-blue lakes nestled at the base of soaring, snowcapped mountains. The air is crisp and pungent with pine. The sky is cloudless, the clearest blue you’ve ever seen.

  That was how the Pulse looked on that tablet.

  I’d spent a career navigating the turbulent waters of poorly written computer languages and badly designed code—through the inky swamps of Objective-C and the minefield of C++. At that point, even my own language, Skinwalker,III was clean but flawed. All computer-programming languages have one insurmountable issue: they’re written for and designed by human beings. I know there are exceptions, but most are inherently damaged, because our minds aren’t capable of anticipating all the potential problems down the road. That’s reasonable.

  The code at the heart of the Pulse was incomparable.

  That was why the brainiacs and me were in the Cabinet Room. The government was befuddled by it. Even though I’d only seen it for several minutes, I had no idea what the code was designed to do or who had made it. Though I’ll admit I had some guesses.

  Glenn gave us the background on the code.

  We got the story on who picked it up and where, but even though the thing was a mystery, one thing was clear: the government wanted this code broken, and fast. If it was from a foreign power, they wanted to know which. If it was natural—which seemed absolutely insane—they needed to understand how it was created.

  Glenn asked, “Is it a new sort of cyberweapon? Some sort of StuxnetIV that got out of the bag early? Or is this actually a message from outer space?”

  I was first to speak. “It’s not a weapon. Too complex.”

  Roberts, of course, rebutted me. “I wouldn’t be so quick. I’ve seen some incredibly complex malware, Dr. Faber.”

  “You’re confusing complex and complicated,” I replied.

  Glenn cleared his throat and stopped our banter.

  “Okay. Look, let’s switch it up. If this data is from out there, maybe it’s some sort of natural event,” he said. “What’s your read on that idea?”

  I said, “This is intentional and it’s vast.”

  Dr. Sergei Mikoyan asked: “How do we know this isn’t something randomly triggered, like an alarm?”

  “You’re not seeing it for what it is,” I said.

  Dr. Roberts, always the joker, said, “Remind me again why you lost your position at NASA.” He laughed hard. No one else did.

  Dr. Venegas was next: “What exactly are you arguing, Xavier?”

  It’d hit me a few seconds earlier, just before Dr. Roberts and I had our verbal tussle. Dr. Mikoyan’s question about randomness, entirely wrong, still got me thinking. The Pulse was perfect. So that’d mean the creator of the Pulse was brilliant and far more technologically adept than any of the folks sitting around that table. And that suggested something very bad.

  “You want to know what I’m getting at?” I asked the room before pointing at the Pulse Code swirling across my tablet. “I’m telling you that this says we’re doomed. This isn’t from here. It is from a culture, potentially a civilization, far more advanced than our own. Why would they reach out to us? What could we possibly gain from having contact with them?”

  Dr. Roberts, our resident optimist, suggested: “An exchange of ideas.”

  I told him I needed to see the rest of the Pulse.

  Kanisha spoke up. “You’ve got all we’ve got.”

  “That’s a problem,” I said. “I hope you have every radio telescope tuned to wherever in the sky this came from.”

  “We’re working on that,” Glenn said.

  “Better work fast.”

  I was getting frustrated. No one at the table was following where I was going. We’d all just been hit with the same information, but I’d expected more from them. You don’t just dump the greatest discovery in human history in a bunch of scientists’ laps and then sit back and wait until they have the answer.

  Kanisha could read my irritation. “Tell us why, Xavier.”

  “This is just the first pulse,” I said. “There will be others.”

  Everyone was quiet after that.

  Glenn stood. “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t,” I said, “not one hundred percent. But what we can tell from this thing already, it’s got some repeater sequences in it. Think of them like little timers. You wouldn’t add them if this was a one-off. If it doesn’t take, so to speak, then they’ll be sending it again. Maybe even if it does take.”

  We mulled it over. Not all of us convinced.

  “So we prepare for that eventuality,” Glenn said. “If this is what Dr. Faber suggests it is, we’ll need to inform the President. You all have the rest of the night to pull together a brief. I’ll be back in the morning to get it. We’ll provide all the coffee and tea and meals. Just have something ready.”

  The room cleared out, leaving the scientists behind. We looked at each other and, after a second of uncomfortable silence, got down to work.

  Giving you the blow-by-blow details of what happened that night would be incredibly dull. All you really need to know is that we drank a shit-ton of coffee, scribbling across eight hundred sheets of poster paper, had some real knock-down arguments, and came to a conclusion. It was just after dawn when Glenn reappeared. He looked
as though he’d gotten even less sleep then we had. Adjusting his tie, he closed the door and sat with a sigh.

  “So, what am I going to tell President Ballard about this thing?”

  Kanisha did most of the talking, at least at first.

  “We’re convinced this is from an outside intelligence,” Kanisha said. “It has none of the hallmarks of what we’re capable of here on Earth. You need to tell the President that we’ve picked up an alien communication and—”

  I had to interrupt her there.

  “I’m not convinced it’s a message,” I said. “We’re still debating that point, but in my mind this thing is more of a transmission. It isn’t something we can respond to. It’s something we get and have to deal with.”

  Glenn was disappointed. Despite the fact that we’d just told him that humanity had just received its first proof of intelligence beyond our own planet, he wasn’t pleased that we couldn’t neatly wrap this thing up.

  “Deal with it how?” he asked me, but looked at Kanisha.

  “We need to decode it,” Dr. Cisco said, “but we don’t have the tools here to do that. We need to establish a working group, get more people involved in this thing, and figure out exactly what this mess—I mean transmission—is. Once we have it deciphered, then we’ll know what threat, if any, it poses.”

  Glenn ground his teeth, mulling it all over.

  “So you want me to tell the President that we’ve just definitely intercepted an alien broadcast but we have no idea what it says or what it means. And if I’m hearing any of this correctly, it might even be something that should have us concerned. Dr. Xavier Faber, is this pulse some sort of signal for an invasion?”

  I said, “I think that’s a possibility.”

  “I can’t go and tell the President any of this until I know what that Pulse Code actually is,” he said. “Is this a recipe for intergalactic cornbread or does it contain battle plans for a million spaceships hovering off in the distance somewhere? Maybe—just throwing this out there—it means nothing. Could it be that at the end of the day you will decipher it and find that it’s the last word of some civilization that died two million years ago?”

  We had no real answer.

  But I had an idea.

  “Sir,” I said. Dr. Neil Roberts looked at me funny, ’cause he’d never seen me use that word to anyone. “Dr. Cisco’s right. We need to form a committee or a task force, or whatever you want to call it, and decode this thing. We need to do that yesterday. You give us the resources to do it, we can keep the whole process on the down-low, and we can give you an answer in one week’s time.”

  I have no idea why I suggested a week. Seeing how complex the Pulse Code was, it might likely have taken years to crack. But a week is what came to mind, and it’s what I said. The other PhDs looked at me like I was insane.

  “Fine,” Glenn said, “but the Pulse Code stays here, on the tablets, in the White House. As of right now, you all are the task force. Go home, get whatever you need, and then get back here tomorrow. Your one week starts at midnight tonight. Anything that comes up while you’re breaking the code, the very second you see something that concerns you, no matter how trivial it might appear, you let me know. I don’t need to tell any of us this, but if a single digit of the Pulse Code leaks outside of your working group, then you will be remanded to the custody of whatever branch of government I can think of that will hold you the longest. You understand? This thing gets out before we have a lock on it, and you will never be heard from again.”

  Glenn left and sent in several of his advisors and support staff to start making the logistical plans. I had nothing to go back to in Nova Scotia, at least not for a week, so I’d camp out at a hotel nearby and await the return of my colleagues.

  But, as you probably already know, that was the last time we saw Dr. Cisco.

  She died, tragically, in a car accident on her way home.

  Or that’s what we were told.

  * * *

  I. There’s a popular conception that you can delete the contents of a hard drive by waving a strong magnet over it. It’s an idea shown in movies and on TV. According to Xavier, however, it’s wrong. To be effective, you’d need a seriously strong magnet—not the sort of thing people have at home. Even more effective, he says, is just smashing the hard drive into tiny pieces.

  II. There’s long been conjecture that life may exist beneath the ice on Triton, one of Neptune’s fourteen moons. If it exists, it would most likely be microscopic.

  III. Xavier told me that the Skinwalker name was something of an inside joke. It is a reference to a late 1980s paranormal case involving a location in Utah known as the Skinwalker Ranch. Originally named the Sherman Ranch, it was, according to its owner and several paranormal investigators who decamped there in the 1990s, the site of some very odd goings-on involving UFOs and “skinwalkers”—shape-shifting witches of an evil disposition derived from Navajo folklore. Xavier had read about the ranch and thought the Skinwalker name was “really cool, really metal.”

  IV. Stuxnet is a reference to an incredibly advanced computer worm engineered by the computer scientists in the US and Israel. It was unleashed in 2010 to target Iran’s attempts at uranium enrichment by infecting and destroying their centrifuges.

  13

  FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #317—10.27.2023

  Today started with the worst headache.

  Like, the worst.

  I was in the shower and it just came on suddenly, crawling over my head with needle fingers from the nape of my neck to my temples and then settling down behind my eyes. I’ve never had an aural migraine before, but as I stepped out of the shower, everything was pulsing. The lights in the bathroom, the sunlight through the window—it was dimming and brightening in waves. I got back into bed, texted a colleague at work that I’d be late, and then curled into a ball.

  I woke up an hour later feeling kind of better. But not by much.

  Can’t imagine what people who have these sorts of migraines all the time have to go through. I took two Vicodin and drove down to campus. Frank was in LA for a conference and I didn’t have a class until after lunch, so I hunkered down in my office convinced I’d have time to go over some paperwork, catch up on the ever-growing pile of email, and maybe, just maybe, read through a couple journal articles I’ve been dying to get to. Sadly, none of that was to be. The Pulse was waiting.

  It was one of those Christmas morning feelings.

  I could barely stand the anticipation of seeing it again.

  After the initial excitement of discovery and handing it off to Jon, I’ve tried to keep myself focused on the dull realities of life—work, exercise, eating, sleeping, and checking out the cute barista at the café near campus. But I can’t. There is no normal in the world after the Pulse. I’ve been replaying my conversation with Jon, when I handed him the drive, over and over in my head. Tweaking every word, rolling them around to divine hidden meanings. The truth is, even then I was downplaying the importance of it. But I knew—I knew intrinsically—in each and every cell of my body that the Pulse Code was bigger than any other discovery.

  Again, me and the melodrama.

  Me dismissing things like the discovery that the Earth is round (it is, all you doubters) or the creation of penicillin or the invention of telecommunication seems flippant. What about the wheel? How about fire? Or calculus?

  They’re all steps forward. The cataclysms, wars, man’s inhumanity to man—they’re all horrible branches on the same tree of history. But the Pulse isn’t like that. It chops down the tree. When people know about the Pulse, when humanity understands that we are no longer alone in the universe, everything will change.

  I’m serious.

  And me, I was trained to be rational above all else. To weigh and study and calculate and to make all my decisions based on evidence. With that rationality comes an understanding: Discovery must be leavened with a healthy skepticism. Science simply
doesn’t work if scientists are losing their minds at each and every potential breakthrough. I know that. And yet I also know that the Pulse isn’t like finding a new star or black hole. It’s not even akin to determining the source of dark matter. All that stuff, it just falls by the wayside. And this is me, Ms. Dark Matter Is the Best Thing Ever, talking.

  This is bigger than a cure for cancer. (It might even lead us to one.)

  This is bigger than conquering death.

  Me writing this now, so soon, feels . . . I should be embarrassed by it. I should have kicked the Pulse Code over to ConradI or IshikawaII and then sat back and let them tell me how important it is. Maybe they’d find something I’d missed. But I didn’t and they won’t. I gave it to Jon rather than another astrophysicist or an astronomer because I knew they wouldn’t jump on it the same.

  Not like this. Not with this energy.

  Being an astronomer, I understood they would be as critical as possible but they’d take their time and crunch the numbers and then . . . then they’d do what they were trained to do: Move it up the ladder if it was important, if it was real. Up the ladder, they’d recheck the calculations, rerun the numbers, and see what was reproducible. There would be peer-reviewed articles and the machine would work properly. At the end, maybe two or three months from now, possibly even longer, the information would make its way to the officials who need to know. Then the public might find out. Or might not.

  The might not part is important.

  I’m not a conspiracy theorist.

  I hate that stuff.

  I don’t believe that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people willing to lie to keep an illusion alive. September 11 wasn’t an inside job. Norway exists. Climate change is real. What looks like conspiracy is really just individual failings magnified by the size of the apparatus around them: people make mistakes, the universe is random, things break for no reason, brains hiccup without explanation, emotions go off the rails. Fact is it’s a wonder any system runs smoothly.