Dahlia Black

by Keith Thomas

  “The Ascendant didn’t choose us because we were something special,” Viacheslav told me, “They chose us because we’d forgotten that we mattered.”

  * * *

  I. Dr. Jan de Schloten was an Amsterdam-based coroner and virologist who became quite infamous after his research into the Elevation was uncovered.

  II. Though the idea of a “pop-up city” is appealing in a fantastical sense, they more closely resembled tent cities—the sort of thing that governments would establish for refugees of foreign wars. Despite being temporary and out-of-the-way, these places could house thousands.

  III. The United States, France, and Brazil reported over 5,000 each.

  IV. Miami had an incredibly large number of Elevated—10,600—and they overwhelmed the already stretched medical infrastructure.

  V. A generating station in suburban Chicago exploded, killing twenty-seven workers, when an Elevated man locked himself in the control room and proceeded to shut off every automatic system while ranting about “coronal blooms.” The event in Minneapolis claimed the lives of six pedestrians: a man who died of a stroke while driving—later determined to be due to the Elevation—lost control of his vehicle and it plowed into a tourist group from Arizona.

  VI. Riots broke out in downtown Phoenix on November 16, the day after concerned social service officers forcibly removed a young girl diagnosed with the Elevation from her grandparents’ apartment after complaints by neighbors. The riots lasted two days. Two people died and three buildings burned down in the chaos.

  VII. Many people—like the driver in Minneapolis—suffered from strokes, aneurysms, and heart attacks. Some were felled by far rarer conditions like neurodegenerative disorders.

  VIII. The pineal gland is an endocrine gland located inside the brain that produces melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep and wake cycles in the human body. It resembles a pine nut, hence the name. In ancient times the pineal gland was considered the “seat of the soul.” Today, some religions and New Age adherents consider it to be the “third eye,” allowing adepts to gaze inwardly to the soul or outwardly to other dimensions. In the Elevated the changes that marked the pineal gland hinted at tumor-like symptoms: visual disturbances, headaches, mental deterioration, and some dementia-like issues.

  IX. More brain parts. The optical nerves are, like they sound, the nerves connecting the eyes to the brain. The fornix is a triangle of white matter between the hypothalamus and hippocampus. It is involved in recall memory. The combined changes in these structures—personality centers, visual interpretation, and memory—could account for a lot of what the Elevated were seeing.

  X. While little “useful” medical information came out of the Nazis’ disgusting research experiments performed in concentration camps, there were endurance “tests” that were conducted at Dachau by Sigmund Rascher that many considered useful. Dozens of research articles have cited the data collected by Rascher, and this data was used in the development of things like survival suits for fishermen.

  XI. The New York City–based international nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch compiled an in-depth report on global Elevation rates in 2026. Using interviews with survivors and medical personnel, they were able to piece together very reliable estimates of Elevation incidence.

  XII. Professor Kudryashev is perhaps best known for his incredibly controversial book about the Evangelical church’s response to the Elevation, Romans: How Hating Thy Neighbor Became Loving Yourself (2025). I won’t go into detail on the book’s thesis—it seems pretty self-explanatory, given the title—but in one chapter near the end of the book he detailed how he saw social media as the primary driver of violence and inequality in the twenty-first century thus far.

  32

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT FROM AN FBI INTERVIEW WITH DR. ROBERT R. JACOBSEN

  TAMPA FIELD OFFICE: RECORDING #001—FIELD AGENT S. SCHWEBLIN

  NOVEMBER 26, 2023

  This interview took place towards the tail end of the Elevation.

  Dr. Jacobsen had been working with the Bureau as an independent consultant prior to and during the Elevation. When he himself became Elevated, he was subject to a barrage of tests and extensive, detailed interviews. The following excerpt is from a video documenting the last of these interviews.

  In the videotape, of which I have a digital copy, Dr. R. R. Jacobsen, an older bald man, sits in a straight-back chair at a small table across from an FBI interviewer. They are in a nondescript room with a single door.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: Dr. Jacobsen, can you state your name and profession?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: At this moment, my name is Robert Jacobsen and I have been the Walser Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester for the past five years. I’ve been practicing psychiatry for the past twenty-two years—though, as you can guess, that has changed recently.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: And please explain how exactly that has changed?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: I am no longer Robert Jacobsen. I am in the process of becoming something quite a bit more than he was.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: What are you becoming?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: I would say more than human, but that is incorrect. I am still human. My body is thoroughly human—at least, the bones and muscles and tendons of it. But my brain . . . my brain is no longer my own territory.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: “Territory”?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: You, the government, the people, the media—you’ve been assuming that the Elevation is an invasion. You’re only partially correct. For millennia we’ve been looking up at the sky and envisioning a time when intergalactic invaders rode in on saucers to pillage our planet and enslave us or, even less likely, befriend us and invite us to join some sort of outer space kibbutz. That’s not the way this works. The Earth will be terraformed, transformed, but it won’t be from without . . . We’re being invaded from within.

  The intelligence behind the Pulse and the Elevation isn’t interested in taking over our planet. That’s too simple and too human in conception. Ever since we started walking on two legs, we’ve been beating each other about the head to claim what we want: land, sex, resources, money, souls. That is our way. That is not their way. It takes a lot of work to traverse the emptiness of space. So many resources. What if you could invade and transform a planet without even touching it?

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: So this is what they’re doing?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: In so many words. They’re taking over our reality by transfiguring our minds. But here’s the thing: when it first started and I was studying Dr. van Ranst’s work on the early Elevation victims, the ones who didn’t take, I figured that they were changing our brains to adapt us to a new reality—a reality that they inhabited. Does this make sense?

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: I think so, but please explain in more detail.

  R. R. JACOBSEN: I was being optimistic, but there is no room at the table for optimism, as they say. There was some suggestion from the Disclosure committee that the intelligence behind the Pulse existed on a different plane of reality than we do. Maybe, some of us considered, the Elevation was their way of readying our minds to interpret this other reality the way you’d acclimate a climber to scale the highest peaks, slowly changing the quality of the air that they breathe so they can survive at those extreme heights. It made sense, the fact that people like Dahlia Mitchell could see gravitational waves, and that little boy . . . But I was wrong. The Elevation is misnamed: they aren’t elevating us so that we can live with them. They’re elevating humanity so that they can live inside our minds. That’s the territory they’re terraforming.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: That’s a disturbing theory, Dr. Jacobsen. What is your evidence to back that up? And let’s say that your theory is correct: How would this intelligence make its way into our brains once they’d established a foothold?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: Good questions. Speaking as Dr. Jacobsen, I would say that my evidence is entirely anecdotal. Yet I know it is true. I know it is true because it is happening inside my head at th
is very moment. The oldest joke in psychiatry is that the schizophrenic patient is actually seeing the reality the rest of us miss. The voices, the hallucinations, are glimpses behind the veil. Now, with the Elevation, it isn’t a joke. There is no punch line but the end of the human race.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: I’m not sure I’m convinced, Doctor. What about the second part of my question? How do they get inside once the mind is ready?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: Dr. Jacobsen doesn’t know the answer to that. I will tell you this: They aren’t coming on space vehicles. They aren’t going to teleport or shimmer in like some New Age angels. My brain is undergoing a transformation that can’t be explained in our language, using our primordial understanding of biology and physics. The folding, the twisting, the shifting, the opening and closing of the flesh of my cerebellum—it isn’t to make room for some sort of physical parasite. It also isn’t a womb in which a new entity will grow. I am not an incubator, but my head has become an executable.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: An “executable”?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: Computer programming terminology. It means a program that is ready to be run. They are cleansing, folding, and manipulating our brains in a way that allows the gray matter to be activated. And when they are ready, at the Finality, the program they have implanted in the very fabric of our minds will run. When it runs, every Elevated human being on this Earth will vanish.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: Vanish to where?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: Not where. The place they came here from, it isn’t a where. It isn’t a when, either, but I think you’ve discovered that already. We’re slipping in between. That’s the best way I can describe it. I need you to understand—I need everyone on this planet to understand—that when the Elevated go—all two billion of us—it will be as though we were never here. There will be no forwarding address left behind, no way to reach us. In less than a thousandth of a millisecond, we will simply be gone. The rest of you will be left with questions that you can never answer.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: The Finality? You keep using that phrase as if we’re familiar with it. Should we be? What does it mean?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: It’s just you aren’t familiar with it now. You will be. In just a short time it will be the only thing that anyone in this world talks about. Just this second, I conjured it into existence. A few months ago, you’d never heard of the Pulse, but it had been there all the time. A few weeks ago, the Elevation sounded like a sports drink. That is the way it will be with the Finality. You heard it today and it will be on everyone’s lips tomorrow and even more the next day. For generations, people have talked about the death of humanity. Cataclysm. The Apocalypse. That is the Finality.

  AGENT SCHWEBLIN: You’re saying that when the Elevation ends, the world will end as well? And the intelligence behind the Pulse will make that happen?

  R. R. JACOBSEN: The world will never end, at least not for a few more billion years. See how simple-minded and blinded we have been? No. The Finality isn’t the end of the world. It is the end of humanity.

  On the videotape, there is a sudden flash of light, and Dr. Jacobsen has moved to the other side of the room. One second, he is in his seat across from the interviewer. The next second he is standing near the door with a revolver—pulled from the guard stationed outside the door—pointed at his own head.

  Dr. Jacobsen looks towards the camera, focusing on it and narrowing his eyes, before he nods once and then pulls the trigger.I

  * * *

  I. It’s important to mention that this was one of the only instances of presumed “teleportation” ever recorded. The forensic video experts I showed it to told me that the footage wasn’t faked—that is, it wasn’t edited for effect and Dr. Jacobsen’s movements weren’t the result of computer-generated enhancements to the image. That meant, as far as they were concerned, that it was real. I spoke to physicists and physicians, trying to get a bead on exactly what had happened. No one could properly explain it. An engineer at the University of Wyoming suggested that Dr. Jacobsen’s sudden movement was due to sleight of hand—that the flash was generated by something on his person, some sort of explosive. That idea didn’t wash with another expert I talked to at Stanford. She told me she thought that somehow—and her explanations were way over my head—Dr. Jacobsen had been “temporally displaced”; that is, he jumped through time and space. The whole incident, and the video of it, is something of a curiosity. Perhaps never to be explained. Honestly, I like that aspect of it: even at the end of time, some mysteries should remain.

  33

  FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #325—11.26.2023

  I woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t know where I was.

  Not a good feeling. Not ever.

  I looked around the room and saw it was a hotel room and remembered we’d been moved after we’d finished the Disclosure documents. I saw a bed, a window with sheer curtains, a television, and a flimsy dresser. There was a dull yellow glow of the hallway lights beneath the door. Outside, through the curtains, I saw streetlamps burning away in the darkness.

  But that wasn’t all I saw.

  There was another room superimposed on top of the hotel room.

  At first, I thought it was double vision and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles. Then, slowly, I opened them again. I saw the other room just as clearly as before.

  It had plain walls that were the color of quartz. It was lighter than the hotel room I was in but I could see the source of the illumination. It seemed to be drifting down in a white haze from the ceiling. There was no furniture in this other room.

  I sat up in bed.

  It’s hard for me to truly describe what I was seeing, other than that I was looking at an image laid over another image. Like I’d woken up inside a hologram. When Jon and I were first dating, we went to a movie; he has a thing for really bad comedies and I like seeing him laugh. After the show, there was a guy promoting an augmented reality headset—an AR headset—in the lobby: the kind of bulky visor you wear to see computer graphics superimposed over the real world around you. The one we tried, there was a game where meteors came flying down at you through the ceiling. It was fun but . . . frankly, they got the look of meteors completely wrong.

  The room I woke up in looked like an augmented reality setup.

  I even reached up and felt my face, feeling totally silly, thinking someone might have slipped an AR headset on me. Of course, what I was seeing wasn’t computer generated. It was real. It was right in front of me.

  I tried to navigate the few feet between the bed and the window. It was difficult: I was walking in two places at once. Or at least that’s how it looked. Here, in reality, my feet were on a bland carpet. There, in that other place, my feet felt as though they were in sand. It was warm. I tried to avoid a low coffee table but ended up slamming into it.

  When I got to the window, I tried to reach out and touch the glass. In the hotel room, I was touching the wall: eggshell paint, slick under my touch. There was no glass in the other room’s window; my fingers passed into air and I felt sunlight on my skin. But it was what I saw through that window that held me spellbound.

  Even though the wall in the hotel room was blocking it, I could see a field beyond, tall grass waving slowly in the wind. There were mountains in the distance, and just at their base a city . . . It sparkled in the bright light.

  And then it was gone.

  Just—blink—vanished.

  My vision slid back into the focus, the way two lenses line up when you look through binoculars. I was in the hotel room, and the other room, the other place, was gone. I sat back in the bed and replayed what I’d seen in my mind.

  I could still feel the warmth of that sun on my arm.

  It was so nice. Soft the way sunlight can feel.

  I really don’t want to tell anyone about this. The other Elevated, the ones who’ve made it this far, I’m sure they’ve been seeing it too. I don’t know what to call it, but I think it is where they are fr
om. It is where we are going.

  It is nearly dawn now.

  The sky is pink.

  Traffic noises have started up outside. Cars are honking. I have ten meetings today. There are follow-up discussions with President Ballard’s staff. There are reporters. There are scientists eager to take a crack at the Pulse Code and prove us wrong. They won’t. They can’t.

  In an hour I’ll go downstairs to the lobby and have weak coffee and a reheated croissant or a bowl of granola. I’ll probably see Dr. Mikoyan down there; he gets up early and goes for long walks to think in the dawn air. We’ll make small talk before a shuttle comes to pick us up.

  I want to talk to Nico and see Jon.

  I need to tell my big brother about this.

  I need to share it with Jon, see his eyes go wide.

  But even though we’re out of quarantine, our communication is restricted. No visitors yet. I really want to tell someone about what I’ve been seeing, about the world to come. About how special it all is . . .

  Ha. Writing that, I feel like a missionary. Like some believer who’s just washed up on an unknown shore. And not scared of what’s to come, not frightened about what I might find, but excited. Thrilled to be sharing the faith, this understanding that we’re truly not alone, with the rest of the world—with the rest of the human race.

  Maybe only some of us are chosen.