Dahlia Black

by Keith Thomas

  It looked like a movie set, something whipped up overnight.

  Which it probably was . . .

  We were ushered inside to find a large oak table, leather office chairs—eight of them—standing lamps, even a potted plant and a water cooler. There were digital whiteboards on two of the walls and several mounted flat-screen monitors. We settled in and the soldiers, or Navy SEALs, gave us bottled water and packets of graham crackers. We ate and drank in silence as the men filed out.

  The snacking and silence lasted for about fifteen minutes.

  I think we were all just so happy to be someplace new that we didn’t want to break the magic of the moment and ruin it with questions. Maybe not. Maybe we were all just so exhausted that we knew if we said something—like “So, what happens next?” or “Nice place here. Hope we stay awhile”—that it would sound embarrassingly stupid. So we ate in silence.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  We all looked at each other and then Dr. Venegas said, “Come in.”

  The door opened and a man in a black suit and baseball cap entered. He took off his cap, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and then sat down with a huff in an empty chair at the head of the table. He grabbed a bottle of water, downed it, and then looked us over, nodding to himself. Then he laughed.

  “This is the crew?” he asked, not really looking for an answer.

  “Who are you?” Xavier said.

  “My name is Glenn Owen,” he said. “I’m going to introduce you to the President of the United States.”

  Holy shit.

  31

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Each country dealt with the Elevation in their own way.

  This, of course, was before anyone had made the connection between the Elevation and the Pulse. The government realized something was wrong, but President Ballard and the Disclosure Task Force hadn’t made any recommendations. Truth is, they were still mum on the events shaking the world being anything but a viral outbreak of strange proportions.

  While there were scientists like Dr. Jan de SchlotenI already suggesting that the Elevation had an unlikely origin—his conjecture was that the Elevation had not evolved but was created, either in a government lab or a private facility. He was one of the first to speak about this sort of idea publicly—beyond the stuff Sai Laghari and his followers trotted out on his website and in the site’s forums.

  That isn’t to say that all countries followed similar paths in their response to the Elevation, but no two were quite the same. The European block, for example, severely curtailed travel to and from the EU. France and Germany worked together to contain populations of Elevated in a rural hamlet on the border between the two countries. Portugal locked its borders, and there were several outbreaks of violence in Italy, with several terrible incidents of mob violence in Venice. Norway and Finland were the first countries to close their airspace, even after it was determined that the Elevation was not communicable. The European Union countries wound up being, in the long run, those least prepared for the toll the Elevation took on their populations. Panic, as we know, is nearsighted. And many European leaders found it difficult to get out of the fight-or-flight mode. That’s what hurt them the most in the end.

  European media had a field day comparing the Elevated to AIDS or even, in a few remarkable instances, Ebola victims. There was, in fact, a commercial playing on UK radio that compared Elevation “sufferers” (that was the word they used) to people stricken with leprosy. Before the Internet went down in England, I saw a viral video of rural Britons, armed with shotguns and rifles, rounding up folks they thought had the Elevation and shoving them into the backs of vans. This sort of stuff played out all across the world, of course, but it was worse in the UK and northern Europe. And that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how barbaric things got.

  The Drammen Incident laid bare the true fear.

  What happened in this Norwegian city of over 50,000 people was ugly, very ugly. Thousands were gripped by a collective panic no one had seen since the Black Plague. Over the course of the Elevation, there were more non-Elevated people—folks suspected of being Elevated—murdered in Drammen than anywhere else on the globe. And it wasn’t just lynch mobs turning on strangers, immigrants, the destitute, though that did happen first. It was neighbor turning on neighbor and, in many cases, family members assaulting their own kin. I was told by workers from a human rights commission who visited the city a few months after the Finality that they found a ghost town run by children.

  In comparison to Europe, South America turned inward.

  Countries like Brazil and Argentina rallied massive support to tend to their own people and provided logistics to bordering states to handle the swell of Elevated. This plan took a while to develop—the participating countries didn’t exactly have the infrastructure in place to handle more than a small number of affected people—but when they had their systems up and running, they became shining examples of how to handle a global pandemic of this sort.

  The people in charge of the Elevation response in South America realized very early on that the Elevation was not a communicable disease—that it was more like a mental condition that likely had a genetic component, like autism or dementia. While much of the rest of the globe was in a frenzy, treating the Elevation like cholera, the Brazilians and the Argentinians were carefully designing a systematic and well-funded response. They also knew quite early that there was no treatment for the Elevation. Just like autism, it was something that was likely chronic and had to be managed over time. So they set up “pop-up cities”II where the Elevated could be monitored carefully. I find it quite remarkable that the governments of these countries, in crises only a few months before, were able to rally so effectively.

  They were real bright spots in otherwise very dark times.

  That’s the 20,000-foot view, of course. I studied more than fifty-six countries in detail. What I found was that those countries that had significant internal divides before the Elevation—places where inequality was widespread and quality-of-life scores were on the lower end—struggled the most in dealing with the outbreak. Countries like the United States, Russia, India, and Australia had substantial trouble righting the ship, so to speak. Oddly enough, countries that you might have assumed would close up and lock themselves in tight didn’t. Japan and Israel come to mind in terms of countries that unexpectedly, at least in my mind, opened their borders even more. I’ve heard it said a few times—and I actually consider it true—that the Elevation effectively solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  Think about that for a second . . .

  The most curious case, however, was that of Indonesia. It’s worth diving into what happened there in detail, as it speaks volumes about the world response to the Elevation as a whole.

  The first widely publicized cases of what was to be called the Elevation appeared in the United States, Canada, Nigeria, China, and Uruguay during the week of October 22. The associated videos, articles, and medical reports went viral pretty quickly. When they spread across global social media platforms, people in other countries started to take notice, The response, essentially, was: “Hey, we’ve got some folks suffering from this same sort of thing too. We aren’t able to explain what’s going on, but now we can work together to figure it out.” That’s exactly how the CDC and the WHO were supposed to function: everyone sharing what they know and helping each other find a solution. Of course, that’s the ideal situation.

  After those very first cases got serious publicity—a video of a little boy seeing inside people’s bodies is effective in any language—the wildfire spread faster than anyone could have imagined. I spoke to several epidemiological experts—people who were in positions of power at the CDC—about those early days. They had it rough. A lot of them didn’t sleep for days on end, watching as the Elevation took off, spreading faster than air travel. Before the Elevation, the only way plagues and other viral outbreaks spread quickly in the twenty-first centur
y was due to sick people getting on planes. However, this . . . this was nearly instantaneous. It seemed that one day there were thirty cases across the world. The next there were 52,000. By November 1 every country reported at least two hundred cases of people with the Elevation.III

  Indonesia, however, was an outlier.

  By the time each and every country had reported at least 100,000 cases of the Elevation, Indonesia had only reported fifteen. Everyone knew that was impossible right from the start. The Indonesians were clearly fudging their numbers or, even worse, trying to keep a lid on whatever was happening inside the country.

  With the Elevation spreading uncontrolled, it was a while before anyone checked back in with Indonesia officials. They simply had too much to deal with back at home. Those first two months were so solipsistic, in a word, that it was hard for any agency to look beyond its own borders. In the States, we were dealing with the emergency situation in Florida,IV the disasters in Chicago and Minneapolis,V and the chaos in Phoenix.VI So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that when epidemiologists and public health experts finally turned their attention back to Indonesia, they were in for quite a surprise.

  Three months after the Elevation had really spread wildly across the globe, experts were looking at insane incidence rates. There were approximately 78 million cases in the United States, 100 million cases in Mexico, 130 million cases across Europe, a staggering 215 million cases in China alone, and places like Iceland had an unthinkable 45 percent of their population affected by the Elevation. That’s nearly half the population removed from public life and work. It’s no wonder social structures crumbled and had to be propped up by international partners.

  But in Indonesia there were only 3,200 cases.

  This was in a population of roughly 270 million people. Countries to the east and west of it, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea, were looking at incidence rates around 30 percent of their populations. There was simply no reason that Indonesia wasn’t affected at the same rate as the rest of the world was.

  It made no sense.

  Sure, academics suggested ideas about genetic diversity and cultural peculiarities—that perhaps there truly weren’t as many Indonesian Elevation cases because their understanding of the Elevation was different from that of the rest of the world. In the long run, it was flawed thinking. It should have come as no surprise that Indonesian officials would trot out these very same hypotheses every time someone from the international community pressed them on what was truly going on. Though there was a media blockade, word occasionally leaked out that there were indeed many more Elevation cases than the Indonesian government was letting on.

  That is until Dr. de Schloten began publishing his papers.

  It was inevitable that there would be a race in medical circles to understand the anatomy of the Elevation. With the condition spreading so quickly and taking such a heavy toll—at least 15 percent of the people affected by the Elevation died because their bodies couldn’t tolerate the immense physical changes their brains were undergoingVII—anatomists needed to find the trigger, so to speak. They needed to determine where the physical changes that were taking place inside the brain were originating.

  When they appeared, de Schloten’s papers were incredibly illuminating. For the first time a physician was able to isolate several areas of the brain where the Elevation had the greatest effect. A better way to put it might be that these were areas where the brain had been most transformed. Right away, it was obvious that the pineal gland was heavily altered in folks who struggled with severe forms of the Elevation.VIII After that, the optical nerves and the fornix were highlighted.IX But each and every brain was different in unpredictable ways. The only way to truly find correlations between them was to study a vast number.

  This is where things got hairy with de Schloten.

  He was a gregarious fellow and was happy to talk to the media—the kind of outspoken doctor who loved the limelight. There were suggestions at the time that he had gotten involved in Elevation research solely for the potential spotlight. The man was not the most rigorous of academicians. And yet, he had an access to the corpses of the Elevated that dwarfed that of even huge universities and public health systems. I think by his own count—and his data, when it was made available, backed these numbers up—he and a team of twelve technicians had autopsied over 2,152 bodies.

  That’s a lot of dead Elevated people.

  For a while, the question of where they all came from was lost in the excitement over what de Schloten was publishing. Though a lot of doctors who worked on the Elevation wouldn’t like to admit it, much of what we know today about the process came from de Schloten’s work—sort of the way a few researchers used Nazi doctors’ data after World War II.X They may not have asked too many questions about the experiments they’d gleaned the information from, but they used it nonetheless.

  When the question of procurement finally came to the fore, de Schloten’s reputation came tumbling down in a matter of hours. An undercover reporter with a Danish outfit known for guerrilla reporting methods snuck into de Schloten’s operation—the man had this massive morgue set up in a modernist building—and interviewed some of the techs and got access to the paperwork.

  All the bodies that de Schloten was cutting up were from Indonesia.

  When confronted on it, ever the politician, de Schloten claimed he wasn’t sure exactly where the bodies had been obtained because he relied on a broker. Authorities in Holland raided his morgue and took possession of the corpses and the files. Every single one of those brains came from an Indonesian man, woman, or child. They’d been shipped in via military aircraft, and that meant that the Indonesian government was directly involved. Scandal ensued. Tense diplomatic talks began.

  It was during those diplomatic talks with the Indonesian officials that the first videos were smuggled out of the country by people willing to risk their lives. The videos were, well, horrific. Turned out Indonesia had a bad Elevation problem, in line with the rest of the world. At least 30 percent of the population was affected, though there was evidence suggesting it was somewhere more along the lines of 35 percent to 38 percent.XI

  What happened there was a classic purge. When the Elevation started, old rivalries bloomed. The government saw it as an opportunity to wipe out its enemies: dissidents, criminals, immigrants, homosexuals, the infirm, and the “blasphemous.” They instituted a killing machine, using fear and intimidation—and also bribes—to convince families and friends to turn over their Elevated loved ones to the state.

  I’ve heard Indonesia officials argue that the program began with them trying to help the affected. They offered treatment and wanted the Elevated all in one place to make that easier. But it quickly got too chaotic as the numbers went up and up and up. Soon treatment became euthanasia as fears of contagion spread. At this time the country was effectively closed off. No outside information was getting in or out. And the Indonesian populace didn’t know what Brazil and Argentina and the US knew: that this thing wasn’t viral or transmissible. Locked in this awful echo chamber, what happened next happened swiftly.

  By the end of the third month of the outbreak, Indonesia had murdered over 13 million of its people, though the true number will never likely be known. Some of those bodies wound up in Amsterdam with de Schloten. The rest of them were burned or dumped into the ocean to be eaten by sharks.

  As I mentioned, the Indonesia story was useful for putting the whole Elevation and, eventually, the Finality into perspective. When humanity was faced with a process, a transformation that made us—forced us, really—to evolve into a new species, we panicked. A lot of people turned from something that we normally would have seen as good—a way forward in a world that had been beset by so much strife for so very, very long—and embraced an inner evil.

  We, as a species, were given an opportunity to become something more than human, and most of us chose not to take it. All our religious convictions, all our talk abou
t the betterment of mankind, all our faith in guidance from on high—it went out the window when we were faced with change on that scale.

  Turns out that when the world we’d known our whole lives was transforming—not necessarily for ill, just being made different—we retreated to our least accepting, most fearful selves. Which may in fact give us a hint at the real reason why we got the Pulse when we did. A lot of people assumed the Pulse was sent to Earth because humanity had reached some sort of pinnacle—perhaps socially, scientifically, or technologically, or maybe all three. They wanted to believe we got the signal because we, humanity, were finally ready to join the larger universe—that we were now able to ascend some galactic ladder to our better, final forms.

  I wish that were true.

  But as the case of Indonesia proved, we were far from ready as a species. A few months back, I spoke to Viacheslav Kudryashev, a Roman Catholic professor of analytical philosophy at Notre Dame, who had an interesting take on the why of it all.XII Like me, he was curious to know what caused the Ascendant to choose us: Was it because of our intelligence? Our technology?

  For him, the answer was no.

  All the interviews he’s read, all the papers and research, all the conversations he’s had, have led him to one disheartening conclusion: the Pulse Code arrived on Earth when it did, not because we as a species had reached an apex of intelligence and beneficence, but—quite the reverse—because we’d bottomed out.

  As Viacheslav told me, the first two decades of the twenty-first century saw humanity divided, a species at war with itself. We had embraced technology and it brought out the worst in us: social media gave every person on Earth access to a loudspeaker to shout from their corner of the globe, no matter how big or small. And the deafening voice that resulted was one filled with hate. Pain, embarrassment, rage, impotence, disgust—all these emotions were championed over love, respect, and altruism. The algorithms that determined the users were shown to be skewed negatively, posts about violence spread the fastest, and the anonymity of the Net allowed everyone to unleash their worst, most craven impulses. This led directly to inequality and war.