Kalisha Dixon dreamed she was lost in a vast house resembling the residence corridor of Front Half but furnished like an eclectic mansion. She answered a ringing phone that looked like the one from her childhood kitchen and heard a faint Spanish-speaking girl asking if she could hear her. Kalisha recognized the meaning despite limited Spanish and confirmed she could hear, but the connection cut off.

Continuing through the house, Kalisha entered a series of rooms—drawing room, ballroom with a checkerboard floor, and a modern kitchen marked by a BERKOWITZ FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker she somehow knew indicated the owner. She answered another ringing phone and this time heard a French-speaking boy asking the same hearing question with slightly better clarity before he also vanished.

She moved into a straw-walled room with a packed dirt floor and colorful mat, recalling the Institute’s remote assassination of African warlord Badu Bokassa via Dr. Hendricks’s “sparkler.” A much larger phone there connected her to a clearly audible girl speaking in what sounded like a South Slavic language (Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian), again asking if she could hear her. Kalisha replied, but the voice disappeared.

In a chandeliered bedroom, an even larger phone produced a Dutch-speaking boy asking if she could hear him, but the line cut instantly. The next, immense phone in a sunroom rang deafeningly; Kalisha knocked the receiver off to stop the painful sound. A boy’s amplified Italian voice boomed the same question, “Mi senti?” and the overwhelming volume jolted Kalisha awake.

Across the sequence, Kalisha noticed that as the phones grew in size, the voices came through more clearly, suggesting an intensifying or converging contact from multiple children in different countries or languages, all attempting the same simple connection.