Chapter
THE CALL
1,077 words · 6 min read
Cell service returned somewhere past the Wilbur gate, on the winding descent toward Highway 20. Jennifer's phone buzzed in the passenger seat—the accumulated weight of a weekend's messages reasserting itself. She let it vibrate.
The hills were bronze in the late afternoon light. She'd driven this road dozens of times, the transition from sanctuary to signal. Usually it felt like loss. Today it felt like a delivery.
She thought of Starseed's hands shaking in the pool. Susan's face when the spirals matched his drawings. Jennifer didn't need a framework to know the ground had shifted. She felt the resonance in her marrow—something David would call noise until she gave him data he could measure.
She waited until the straightaway past the lake before she called.
David picked up on the second ring. "You're early. I thought you were staying through Monday."
"I was. Something happened."
A pause. She could hear him shifting in his office chair. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. David, listen. No interrupting."
"That's never a good opening."
"There's a woman here. Susan Harris. UC Davis, National Academy. Serious biology. She's been doing drone surveys of Bear Valley—her buckwheat plots on serpentine soil. She found shapes, David. Nested curves. Spirals thirty meters across. Organized variation where there should be noise."
She told him the rest—the convergent data, Starseed's recognition, the CGR analysis. She framed it carefully. She knew her husband's metrics.
The silence stretched until she could hear the wind across her windshield.
"Independent observation," David said finally, his voice shifting into the problem-solving register. "Convergent perception from unrelated sources."
"Yes."
"That's not nothing. Send me her contact information. I'll reach out tonight."
Susan Harris was not what David expected.
He'd pictured someone softer—the type who'd find themselves sharing a hot spring with wellness seekers. But the woman on his laptop screen had the focused stillness of a predator. Silver hair cropped short. Eyes that assessed him with the same rigor she probably applied to a soil sample.
"Dr. Mitchell. Jennifer speaks highly of you."
"She speaks highly of you too. Your metapopulation work is cited well outside botany."
A slight nod, acknowledging without preening. "And I looked you up. Photonic quantum architecture. Room-temperature coherence. Either you're a genius or a very successful self-promoter."
David laughed. "The jury's still out. Can I see what you showed Jennifer?"
Susan shared her screen. The drone footage played—Bear Valley from above, the buckwheat rendered in false color. And there it was: not the patchy noise of stressed plants on toxic soil, but curves. Nested arcs sweeping across the hillside like the whorls of a fingerprint.
"I've been walking these plots for years," Susan said. "From the ground, you see individual variation. From the air…"
"When did you first notice this?"
"Two years ago, when I started the aerial surveys. I assumed imaging artifacts. Stitching errors, software glitches." Her voice went flat. "It's not a software error. It's a script."
David leaned closer. "What's the scale?"
"The largest spiral is about thirty meters. The smallest repeat below the drone's resolution. It's fractal, or close to it." She paused. "There's more."
The screen shifted. A square plot dense with points—a Chaos Game Representation.
"You sequenced them," David said.
"Non-coding DNA from samples inside the geometric zone and outside it. CGR should show random distribution for junk sequences. Entropy." Susan's voice was controlled, professional. "Look at the clustering."
David felt a cold prickle at the base of his skull. The points weren't scattered. They organized—forming the same nested curves as the plants on the hillside. Order in the sequence where there should be noise.
"That's not possible," he said.
"No. It's not." Susan's face was steady, but her eyes were raw. "I ran it six times. Different samples, different sequencing runs. Same result. The plants inside the geometric region have non-coding DNA that's organized at a level that shouldn't exist without selective pressure. And there's no mechanism I can name that would select for this."
David sat back, his mind running the data against everything he knew. Finding nothing.
Something about these curves nagged at him. A half-memory, shapes he'd seen in another context entirely. He pushed it down. That was hobby. This was data. The two worlds didn't touch.
Except something was rhyming now.
"Two independent methods," he said finally. "Aerial imaging and genetic sequencing. Both showing the same anomaly."
"Three, if you count Starseed's visions." Susan's mouth twitched. "Though I imagine you'd prefer to leave that aside."
"Jennifer told you about my skepticism."
"She told me you're rigorous. I can work with rigorous."
Through the window, the Palo Alto evening was settling into dusk. Sprinklers. Traffic. A world that made sense.
"I have a portable Raman spectrometer," David said, his voice thinning with something like hunger. "Field-deployable mineral identification. If there's something in the geology driving this—trace elements, unusual chemistry—it would show up in spectral analysis."
"You want to come to Bear Valley."
"I want to walk the ground. Run the spectrometer and see if anything correlates." He paused. "Dr. Harris, either we've both had a synchronized breakdown, or the world is stranger than we account for."
Susan was quiet. Then: "I'm sixty-five with tenure. I can afford to be confused for a while." A ghost of a smile. "Thursday. McLaughlin Reserve."
"Thursday works."
"David." The smile faded. "Jennifer mentioned a third data point. The man at Wilbur."
"Starseed."
"He has drawings. Six years of them. If you want to understand what's driving this, eventually you're going to have to look at what he saw."
David's mouth twitched. "One anomaly at a time. I'll see you Thursday."
"Thursday."
The call ended. David sat in the darkening room, the CGR plot burned into his memory. Nested curves in the landscape. Organization in the sequence.
His phone buzzed. Jennifer: How did it go?
He typed back: Thursday. Bear Valley. I'm bringing the spectrometer.
A pause, then: I knew you'd see it.
He wasn't sure what he'd seen. But he knew what he felt—the electricity of something that didn't fit. He'd felt it before, in the early days of his quantum work, when everyone said photonic architecture couldn't scale.
They'd been wrong then.
And those curves kept nagging at him. Shapes from another context. A hobby he'd kept separate for twenty years.
He pushed it down. Thursday first. Data first.
But the rhyme was there, waiting.
