Dahlia Black

by Keith Thomas

  Valerie was sweet.

  She assured me they were fine, that the whole scene wasn’t that bad. Yeah, right. Their aunt passed out on the floor, babbling about seeing waves of light emerging from the walls, pharmaceuticals scattered all around her. The poor boys are probably scarred for life.

  What an aunt I turned out to be . . .

  As I sat there, downing glasses of water and trying to keep my head from spinning, I realized something. That’s not quite right: it wasn’t a realization. It was more like an awareness. It felt like a muscle had relaxed inside my head. A clutch eased. I imagined my mind like an engine, and at that second, sitting there in the kitchen, I shifted from second to fourth gear. That’s stupid sounding, but it felt like a sudden charge, a ramping up of my thoughts.

  There were numbers, letters, formulas, algorithms, all flooding in.

  I needed to write them down.

  And fast.

  Valerie gave me a few pads of lined paper and some pencils and pens from the boys’ art cabinet and I got to work right there in the kitchen. I was at it for an hour, just letting the stuff flow out of my head, breaking pencil lead after pencil lead, lost in my own world, before someone broke me from my reverie.

  “Dahlia?”

  I looked up to see Jon standing there.

  He was so out of place that at first I didn’t recognize him. He was also wearing a suit and he looked handsome. He hadn’t shaved, which was natural, and I remember telling him to just grow a beard, but he liked that in-between stage, that indecisiveness. That should have been a red flag from the start. But he was too damn cute then and he’s still too damn cute now.

  Anyway, he was there and he looked pretty concerned.

  “I heard about what happened,” he said. “You okay?”

  I told him I was fine and that it was good to see him.

  “So, what . . . what do they think it was?”

  Valerie stepped out of the room and let Jon and me have some privacy. I sat with him on a window seat overlooking my brother’s backyard, where a wooden playground turned dark brown in the drizzle. Jon took my hand; he really was worried. His hands were so warm. It felt good, comforting.

  “They aren’t sure,” I said. “Could be it’s just a mental break from stress. Sometimes people see things with a bad migraine. Flashing lights that undulate. It’s nothing really unusual. In my case, I was seeing things that—”

  “Gravitational waves,” Jon said. “I heard.”

  “Right,” I laughed. “I’m just shocked I wasn’t seeing dark matter. That would make more sense, don’t you think?”

  Jon didn’t reply. He told me that he’d sent the data I’d given him up the chain of command just like we’d discussed. Then he lowered his voice. Just as I’d expected, there was agreement that this was something special—something from outside our universe. While Jon didn’t have the details on what the next steps were, he did know one thing was certain.

  “They’re taking it very seriously,” he said, “and they want to talk to you.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “There’s a committee tasked by the President to look into this.”

  “So they want to interview me? I, uh, I’m not exactly in the best place right now. I’m not even home. I suppose I could do a video call or—”

  Jon said, “I’m here to pick you up, Dahlia. They need you in DC tonight.”

  “Me?”

  “You did discover this thing.”

  “But I’ve already been interviewed. For hours, Jon. I told them everything that I knew, what happened and how it happened . . . gave them my analysis and the raw data. What more could they want from me?”

  “You talked to agents. These are scientists. People like you.”

  I was going to ask what the urgency was, but I knew. I knew how big this thing was and I was happy they were taking it seriously. Still, the thought of hopping on a flight to talk to some bureaucratic suits wasn’t exactly the first thing on my mind. I had to finish what I was working on. I had to . . . the urge was . . . I couldn’t even believe I was taking the time to talk to Jon.

  “What is this?” Jon asked, looking over the papers and my scribbles.

  “I don’t know yet,” I replied, “but I think it’s important.”

  Jon just nodded and then kissed my forehead.

  “We need to leave in about twenty minutes,” he said.

  A half hour later I said goodbye to Nico, Valerie, and the boys and then climbed into Jon’s SUV for a quiet drive to the airport. I wrote the whole way, my mind possessed by the numbers I was writing down. They made no sense as they came out, just on automatic. I figured that when I’d put them all together, I would know what I was saying, what I was trying to get out.

  On the flight, just after the plane leveled off and the stewards began pushing their trolley of drinks down the aisle, Jon told me what was happening outside my head.

  Then I saw it.

  There was Wi-Fi on the plane and I watched a few minutes of news on my cell phone. The coverage was breathless—panicked, even. Most of the video that the networks were running was pulled from social media. There were these handheld videos made with cell phones of people freaking out in doctors’ waiting rooms. I saw a video clip, really short, just a few seconds long, of a man using chalk to scribble mathematical formulas on a driveway. And then there was a clip of a young woman standing on the railing of a balcony; she was trying to reach out into the air above her and mumbled something about “she’s so young . . . so young . . .” And then she fell. The video ended.I

  I gasped, horrified, and shut my phone off. This thing, whatever it was, was spreading fast, and it felt so uncomfortably similar to what I’d experienced.

  “What are these people saying they’re seeing?”

  Jon said, “Ghosts, some of them. Others are seeing things that people aren’t supposed to see, like ultraviolet colors, radiation—”

  “Gravitational waves?”

  Jon shrugged. “I haven’t read of anyone else seeing those.”

  “You think I’ve got this thing, though?”

  “I’m worried about that possibility,” he said.

  I told him that I felt fine. I wasn’t seeing anything, wasn’t hearing anything. But he motioned with his eyes to my hands. The whole time we’d been talking, with my gaze locked on his, I was writing. I’d scribbled out at least two additional pages of numbers and letters and formulas unconsciously.

  We arrived in DC and were met by several Secret Service agents. They asked our names and we confirmed who we were. Then we were escorted to a van with blacked-out windows. It all felt like a spy show, like I was caught up in something that wasn’t going to end well. Maybe it wasn’t as heavy as that, but . . . I was anxious.

  Who wouldn’t be, right?

  The agents didn’t say where we were going.

  We drove for about fifteen minutes, in complete silence, before the van pulled into a parking garage. There was another van. Only, this time the people standing outside it, waiting for us, were wearing hazmat suits. Seriously.

  I asked Jon what this was all about.

  He said he didn’t know. I believed him.

  I was ushered out of the van and one of the people in the hazmat suits, a woman, said, “Dr. Dahlia Mitchell, I’m with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Your presence has been requested at a meeting with the Disclosure Task Force. This meeting will be confidential. We’re authorized to bring you there now.”

  I turned to Jon. He nodded. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m going to see you after this, right?”

  Jon said, “I’ll be waiting.”

  I climbed into the second van, next to the people in hazmat suits. The driver was separated from us by a thick plexiglass window. The van drove but I couldn’t see where: the windows were all too dark. No one spoke to me during the ride, so I kept working on my notes. They watched me as I scribbled, but they remained silent.

 
After about thirty minutes we arrived.

  The doors opened and we were inside another parking garage, this time underground. The place was empty—no other cars. But there was a trailer, the kind you see at FEMA sites for researchers and medical staff, set up in the middle of the garage. It was lit up like Christmas. The people in the hazmat suits walked me across the empty garage to the trailer. The trailer door opened and a man stepped forward; he was wearing jeans and a hoodie. Seemed out of place.

  He said, “My name’s Xavier Faber. Good to meet you, Doc.”

  We shook hands as the people in the hazmat suits backed away towards the van. Then I climbed aboard and Xavier closed the door behind me. He locked it. The trailer was essentially one large office. There was a big oak table at the center, surrounded by eight chairs. In those chairs were four additional people.

  None of them were wearing hazmat suits.

  All were dressed casually.

  “Welcome to the Disclosure team,” Xavier said. “We have a lot of questions.”

  And so do I.

  * * *

  I. I was struck by Dahlia’s description of this video and decided to track it down. As you can imagine, it was difficult. Sadly, there were many similar videos that were posted in the first few days of the Elevation. On October 29, 2023, fifteen people died in nearly identical circumstances: standing on rooftops or balcony railings, reaching out to touch something only they could see. The only clue to differentiate this instance was the fact that the woman Dahlia described said “she’s so young . . .” With help from a video archivist at a now-defunct national news network that catered to airing more sensationalist material, I was able to find the video clip in question. The woman’s name was Trisha Menzel and she was twenty-six years old. A copywriter at an engineering firm, she had been married two weeks before the Pulse arrived. At the time of her death, her wife claimed that Trisha had been seeing the ghost of a neighborhood friend who died in a car accident twenty years earlier.

  29

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM A DISCLOSURE TASK FORCE MEETING

  RECORDED AT THE WHITE HOUSE ON 11.7.2023

  KANISHA PRESTON: Dr. Dahlia Mitchell, have a seat. We’re all very eager to talk to you.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: The people in the protective suits, what, uh—

  KANISHA PRESTON: You’ve heard about what they’re calling the Elevation, right? Some people are quite concerned we’re dealing with an outbreak, a pandemic of some sort.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: But not you all . . .

  DR. XAVIER FABER: We’re tough like that.

  DR. SERGEI MIKOYAN: It’s more complicated. It’s not so much that we feel as though we’re safe; it’s more that we’re not convinced that this is a virulent plague. We don’t think it’s a matter of contagion. The Elevation seems more . . . genetic. In our estimation, everyone on Earth has already been exposed.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Exposed to what?

  DR. SOLEDAD VENEGAS: The Pulse.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: Excellent to have you here, Dr. Mitchell. As you’ve been told, we’ve been studying what you discovered. It’s . . . well, I’m sure you know it’s remarkable. We have a lot of questions, as you can imagine.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: What makes you think the Pulse is responsible for this . . .

  DR. SOLEDAD VENEGAS: The Elevation. Our belief is that the Pulse Code contains something akin to a Trojan horse, the kind computers are infected with, and that it is designed to affect human DNA. We’re not sure how.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: I think I know . . .

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Okay. Wow. Um . . . we weren’t expecting that. We’d hope you’d come in and tell us more details about how you found the Pulse, the original analysis you did, but . . . great. Tell us what you know.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: I’ve been writing. It came to me early this morning. Just flooded into my head, all these . . . answers. I’ve got it all here, all spread out over scrap paper. I think that if you take a look over it all, look at it closely, you’ll see that it’s the solution for the Pulse Code. Here . . .I

  DR. XAVIER FABER: This is . . . this is extraordinary. How did you say you got it?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: I woke up this morning and I knew it. That sounds silly but it’s true. I think you’re right: the Elevation is the result of the Pulse. It is designed to alter human DNA, but that’s only part of the process. It targets the brain and rewires it. Look here at this sheet . . . This is a biological program, like a genome editing tool designed to increase the neural connections in the prefrontal lobe of the human brain.

  DR. SOLEDAD VENEGAS: But it doesn’t affect everyone. Only a certain percentage of the population seems to be targeted. Perhaps it is self-limiting.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: I think it’s only just beginning. This is the first wave, the early responders. I don’t know why it’s affecting the people it is now, but I suspect there will be many more later.

  DR. NEIL ROBERTS: Dahlia, do you know why? Does this work you’ve been doing, this code, give you any insight into what exactly the Pulse is increasing neural connections for?

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: No.

  DR. XAVIER FABER: Dahlia, we’ve been tasked by President Ballard to draft a statement to the American public about the Pulse. We need to know what to tell the people before this thing blows up in our faces. Now, with the Elevation, our timeline has been supremely crunched. We need to give the President a message, a vision for how humanity should react and what steps we need to take. We need to have that message on her desk in twenty-four hours. We’ve already got a draft but . . . well, recent events have made it obsolete.

  DAHLIA MITCHELL: Okay, what can I do?

  KANISHA PRESTON: Tell us everything you know about the Pulse. You’re Elevated, Dahlia. And I’m guessing you have insight the rest of us don’t.

  * * *

  I. I’ve seen photographs of the notes Dahlia wrote on those scraps of paper. They’re impressive. I was, again, reminded of Art Brut. There was no single thread of thought in the notes—as far as I could follow them—but multiple concepts jostling for space on the page at the same time. The notes take up every available inch of blank space on the paper; some are written in tight, exacting lettering, while others are big, sweeping, and barely controlled. If these notes were the product of a group of people passing the sheet back and forth, it would make sense. But the fact that they come from one hand, one mind, makes them all the more remarkable. They are, in many ways, emblematic of the Elevation itself: uncontainable, ineffable.

  30

  FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #322—11.12.2023

  We finally left the quarantine room.

  Our work is done. Our report is written.

  What to tell the world about the Ascendant and how to say it.

  It feels like we’ve been held in solitary for the past two days.

  There’s no way to classify it other than quarantine if you’re kept isolated both physically and emotionally. While we were able to talk to each other, we had no idea what was going on outside of our little wing of government hell. Did the world end? Did we go to war? Did Christ return? We had no idea. Stepping out of those barracks was like emerging from a cave after a year in darkness. We were all in shock, blinking too much and laughing inappropriately. It was just so good to breathe real air, feel the sun on our skin, and hear unmuffled sounds!

  Didn’t mean we were entirely free, of course.

  And I couldn’t call Nico or get on my cell to see what had happened since we’d been isolated, but at least we had new faces in front of us. The first were soldiers. Guys with bushy beards and wraparound sunglasses ushered us from the barracks into a blacked-out bus. We rode it in silence, trying to see the outside world through the heavily tinted windows. We went on the highway and then took side roads. All I saw were the flashes of passing cars and the blur of trees.

  While we drove, I became reflective.

  It’s too melodramatic, like my usual, to say that I was in a chr
ysalis while we were in quarantine. But I did go in as one person and I came out as another. The itching, the tickle, that I’d felt inside my head when the migraines started has vanished. I don’t see the gravitational waves either.

  I feel comfortable—normal in a way.

  Something I haven’t felt in a long time.

  But my mind is hungry. It’s famished. That sounds weird to say, but I need information. Over the last week, my senses have been in overdrive: I hear everything louder and I taste everything stronger. My sense of smell, of touch, my sight—it’s all enhanced and sharper.

  Even though I look the same on the outside, I doubt I’d recognize myself if I sat down and had a conversation with Nico or even Jon. My responses would be different from before. The emotions would be more intense, and yet my analysis of them, running like a constant commentary track at the back of my head, would be even more critical than it was prior to being put in quarantine. I feel like more than one person.

  This is the Elevation, and I know that if a surgeon were to cut open my brain and unfold the cerebral matter, she’d find a whole new landscape has grown inside my head. This is what the Pulse was designed to do.

  This is what they wanted.

  —-

  Our destination was a nondescript building in what I assumed was a suburban office park near DC. You know: ugly.

  It had a massive parking lot that was populated by light poles and some recently planted scrawny trees. Leaving the bus, we were led by the armed men towards a glass-and-stone building.

  “SEALs, I think,” Xavier said, motioning to the bearded guys.

  “That make you feel better?” I asked.

  “Just saying,” he said. “Means that this is all still hush-hush.”

  “I didn’t think it’d change,” I said. “Gonna be hush-hush from here out.”

  We entered the building and took an elevator to the third floor. The place hadn’t been completed yet. There was the empty shell of what would one day be an office, but the ceilings, the flooring, the lights—none of that was in; just windows, concrete, and dangling electrical cables that hung vine-like from the non-ceiling. The floor itself was massive, like an airport hangar. We made our way into it, and at the center there was a single four-walled conference room.