Midnight Warnings and Ghost Calls

Brian Grayson, a seasoned airline pilot, is jarred awake by a midnight call from his mother, Melinda, who insists with chilling certainty that he must not fly his scheduled flight. Her conviction is uncharacteristic, rooted not in superstition but in a deep, inexplicable certainty. Simultaneously, across the country, Layla Chen, a DARPA archivist, receives a call from her long-dead mother's voice, warning her not to fly. These calls, echoed to hundreds of pilots, trigger a nationwide ground stop, paralyzing air travel and sowing confusion and fear. The uncanny precision and emotional resonance of the warnings—delivered in the voices of loved ones, living or dead—set the stage for a day when the boundaries between technology, memory, and the supernatural blur, and the world's routine is upended by something both intimate and unfathomable.

Ash Point's Haunted Legacy

Seventeen-year-old Charlie Goodwin, uprooted from Brooklyn to rural Maine, finds herself at Ash Point, a decommissioned naval airfield steeped in local legend and family tragedy. Her mother's murder haunts her, as does the story of a B-52 crash during the Cuban Missile Crisis—a crash that claimed her great-grandfather, Captain Hightower. Charlie's father, Greg, tries to build a new life with a brewery and museum, but the past clings to the place. Charlie's videos, featuring conspiracy-minded Abe Zimmer and his grandson Lawrence, draw attention to the airfield's mysteries. The site's eerie quiet, the ever-repaved runway, and the looming wreckage of the B-52 become symbols of unresolved history, grief, and the way trauma lingers in both families and landscapes.

The Secret of Nashua Nightshade

In 1961, Dr. Martin Hazelton, a physicist haunted by personal loss and the specter of nuclear war, toils at the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center. His experiments with graphite—dubbed Nashua Nightshade—lead to a breakthrough: planes coated with his material, when flown through electrified, storm-seeded clouds, vanish and can be summoned back with a mysterious watch. The process is as much accident as design, blending science and the inexplicable. Hazelton's work, shadowed by his mental health struggles and the memory of his dead brother, becomes the foundation for Project Kingsolver, a secret military effort to create the ultimate weapon: a bomber that can disappear and reappear at will, immune to enemy detection and destruction.

DARPA's Seeker Script Unleashed

In 2025, Layla Chen oversees Seeker Script, a DARPA project designed to clear American airspace in emergencies by sending AI-generated calls in the voices of pilots' loved ones. The system's chilling effectiveness is revealed as pilots across the nation are grounded by warnings they cannot ignore. The technology's power to manipulate emotion and override reason is both its strength and its danger. As the government scrambles to explain the unprecedented ground stop, blame is deflected toward foreign adversaries, but the truth is more unsettling: the system was triggered by the reappearance of a long-lost B-52, and the line between technological control and supernatural intervention grows ever thinner.

The Balloon and the Watch

Charlie witnesses a mysterious weather balloon descend near the B-52 wreckage. Investigating, she finds a radiosonde containing an old, dust-covered watch and a cryptic note: "Survival = Find storm cloud, fire nightshade, set watch backward and add voltage. You will catch up." The watch, wrapped in graphite-laced tape, glows unnaturally in sunlight. Its presence, along with the balloon's anachronistic markings, hints at a breach in time and the persistence of secrets. The discovery unsettles Charlie and her companions, as the boundaries between past and present, science and myth, begin to dissolve at Ash Point.

The Ground Stop and National Panic

As the FAA's ground stop continues, airports fill with stranded travelers and the media speculates wildly. The government, led by Layla Chen and the intelligence community, struggles to contain the narrative and prevent panic. The grounding is officially blamed on a software glitch and possible foreign interference, but behind the scenes, the real cause is the detection of a B-52—missing since 1962—returning to American airspace. The stakes are existential: the plane carries a live nuclear warhead, and its reappearance threatens to expose decades of secrets and provoke global catastrophe.

The B-52 Returns

Against all logic, the B-52 Loring Loonatic materializes over the North Atlantic and lands at Ash Point, its crew unchanged since 1962. Charlie and Lawrence, drawn to the runway, witness the impossible: men out of time, bewildered by a world transformed. The military scrambles to contain the situation, but a botched intervention sends the crew—along with Charlie and Lawrence—back into the air. The plane, carrying a nuclear bomb and the weight of history, becomes a wild card in a world unprepared for its return.

The Past Collides with the Present

As the B-52 flies over modern America, its crew—Captain Hightower, Bellamy, Granville, and the enigmatic Marilyn Metzger—struggle to comprehend their displacement. Charlie and Lawrence, hostages and witnesses, try to convince Hightower of the truth: it is 2025, and the world has changed. The crew's confusion and fear escalate, culminating in violence and tragedy. Meanwhile, the government debates whether to destroy the plane, risking nuclear fallout, or let it land and risk exposure. The collision of eras, technologies, and moralities forces everyone to confront the consequences of secrecy, ambition, and the human need for connection.

The Truth About Project Kingsolver

Through flashbacks and revelations, the full story of Project Kingsolver emerges. Hazelton's invention, born of grief and genius, was weaponized in the desperate days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The military's impatience and willingness to sacrifice lives for strategic advantage led to the disappearance of the Loring Loonatic and its crew. Marilyn Metzger, both observer and participant, embodies the moral ambiguity of those who serve secrets. The project's legacy is one of awe and horror: a technology that bends time, erases evidence, and leaves its creators and victims alike stranded between worlds.

The Impossible Flight

With the B-52 pursued by modern fighters and helicopters, Hightower faces an impossible choice: land and be disappeared by the government, or attempt another leap through time using the watch and Nashua Nightshade. Charlie and Lawrence, realizing they will be silenced if they stay, decide to eject over the ocean, trusting in rescue and the hope that their story will survive. Hightower and Metzger, armed with the watch and the last of the Nightshade, prepare to vanish once more, uncertain of where—or when—they will emerge.

The Price of Secrecy

Charlie and Lawrence survive their harrowing ejection and are rescued, but are quickly swept into a web of debriefings, medical tests, and nondisclosure agreements. The government crafts a cover story, erasing the true events from public record. The fate of Hightower, Metzger, and the B-52 remains unknown, their leap into the unknown both a triumph of human ingenuity and a testament to the dangers of unchecked secrecy. The survivors are left to grapple with trauma, guilt, and the knowledge that some mysteries are protected not for safety, but for power.

Ejection and Escape

Charlie and Lawrence's decision to eject is both an act of desperation and defiance. Their survival, against all odds, is a testament to resilience and the unpredictable mercy of fate. Their return to the world is bittersweet: they are alive, but forever changed, burdened with secrets they cannot share and memories that will never be believed. The world moves on, but for them, the boundary between past and present, reality and myth, will never be the same.

The Aftermath and Unanswered Questions

In the aftermath, Charlie and Lawrence are offered freedom in exchange for silence. Their experiences are dismissed as trauma-induced delusion, and the official story buries the truth. Yet, in private meetings with Layla Chen, hints of acknowledgment and understanding surface. The government's interest in their blood, their memories, and their silence reveals the ongoing tension between knowledge and control. The fate of the B-52, the watch, and the vanished crew remains unresolved, a question mark hanging over history.

The Weight of Memory

Throughout, the novel explores the burden of memory: Hazelton's grief for his brother, Charlie's longing for her mother, Hightower's yearning for a world that no longer exists. The characters are haunted by what they have lost and what they cannot change. The past is both a refuge and a prison, and the quest for understanding is as much about healing as it is about truth. The story suggests that some wounds never close, and some mysteries are not meant to be solved.

The Enduring Mystery

In the end, the mystery of Ash Point, the B-52, and Nashua Nightshade endures. The world returns to normal, but the possibility of the impossible lingers. Charlie, offered a future by DARPA, chooses to hold on to her questions and her hope. The novel closes with a challenge: what if the safeguards and secrets that protect us are themselves fragile, and what if the true danger lies not in what we know, but in what we refuse to imagine? The story leaves readers with a sense of awe, unease, and the conviction that the past is never truly past.

Characters

Charlie Goodwin

Charlie is a seventeen-year-old girl uprooted from Brooklyn to rural Maine after her mother's murder. She is sharp, skeptical, and emotionally scarred, using humor and social media to mask her pain. Her relationship with her father is strained by grief and his obsessive pursuit of a new life at Ash Point. Charlie's journey is one of forced maturity: she is thrust into a world of secrets, danger, and the supernatural, where her perceptiveness and courage are both a blessing and a curse. Her connection to the past—through family, place, and the B-52 crash—drives her to seek truth, even when it threatens her safety and sanity. By the end, Charlie is marked by trauma but also by a fierce determination to remember, question, and hope.

Lawrence Zimmer

Lawrence is Charlie's classmate and reluctant ally, the grandson of conspiracy-minded Abe Zimmer. He is the embodiment of small-town steadiness: loyal, responsible, and a bit square, but with hidden depths. Lawrence's relationship with Charlie evolves from awkwardness to genuine partnership as they face extraordinary danger together. His skills—practical, methodical, and rooted in tradition—complement Charlie's impulsiveness. Lawrence's psychological arc is one of self-discovery: he learns to trust his instincts, confront fear, and embrace the unknown. His survival, and his choice to study poetry, signal a quiet rebellion against expectation and a search for meaning beyond the ordinary.

Dr. Martin Hazelton

Hazelton is the tragic genius behind Nashua Nightshade and Project Kingsolver. Haunted by the childhood death of his brother and his own mental health struggles, he channels his grief into scientific obsession. His work is both miraculous and monstrous: he invents a technology that can erase planes from existence, but at the cost of lives and his own peace of mind. Hazelton's relationships—with Marilyn Metzger, with the military, with his own memories—are fraught with longing and regret. He is a man who seeks control in a world defined by chaos, and his ultimate act is one of sacrifice: he tries to give the vanished crew a chance at survival, even as he is consumed by the consequences of his creation.

Marilyn Metzger

Marilyn is both observer and participant in Project Kingsolver, a woman whose personal loss (her fiancé vanished with Flight 19) fuels her pursuit of secrets. As Hazelton's confidante, lover, and sometimes handler, she embodies the ambiguity of those who serve the machinery of secrecy. Her intelligence and emotional acuity make her both a guide and a threat. Marilyn's motivations are layered: she seeks truth, justice, and perhaps redemption, but is also complicit in the very systems she critiques. Her presence on the B-52 in 2025 is both a miracle and a warning—a reminder that the past is never truly gone, and that those who chase mysteries may become them.

Captain Hightower

Hightower, Charlie's great-grandfather, is the pilot of the B-52 lost in 1962 and returned in 2025. He is a man of his era: disciplined, formal, and committed to his mission, yet capable of warmth and humor. His struggle to comprehend the modern world is both poignant and terrifying, as he is forced to choose between orders and conscience. Hightower's interactions with Charlie and Lawrence reveal his adaptability and his longing for connection. His ultimate decision—to trust, to leap into the unknown, and to seek peace rather than destruction—marks him as a tragic hero, caught between the demands of history and the possibilities of the future.

Abe Zimmer

Abe is the archetypal old-timer, full of stories, suspicions, and stubbornness. His tales of Ash Point's secrets, once dismissed as ramblings, prove prescient. Abe's relationship with Charlie and Lawrence is paternal, protective, and sometimes exasperating. He represents the persistence of memory and the value of skepticism in a world of official narratives. Beneath his bluster lies genuine care and a willingness to act when it matters. Abe's survival and role as museum director at the end suggest that the keepers of stories, however flawed, are essential to the preservation of truth.

Layla Chen

Layla is the chief archivist at DARPA, responsible for tracking and containing the agency's old mistakes. She is analytical, pragmatic, and haunted by the ethical implications of her work. Layla's deployment of Seeker Script reveals both her brilliance and her unease with the power of technology to manipulate reality. Her interactions with Charlie are marked by a mix of admiration, caution, and a desire to recruit the next generation of questioners. Layla's arc is one of reckoning: she must confront the limits of control, the dangers of secrecy, and the possibility that some mysteries are beyond even her understanding.

Granville and Bellamy

Granville and Bellamy are Hightower's fellow crewmen, men out of time and out of place. Their psychological unraveling—culminating in violence and death—embodies the trauma of dislocation and the dangers of rigid thinking. Granville's breakdown and Bellamy's tragic end are both products of the impossible situation they face and the legacy of a military culture that values obedience over adaptation. Their fates serve as a warning about the costs of secrecy, the fragility of sanity, and the human toll of technological ambition.

Greg Goodwin

Greg is Charlie's father, a man undone by loss and desperate for renewal. His decision to move to Ash Point and pursue his late wife's dream of a brewery is both an act of love and a flight from pain. Greg's inability to connect with Charlie, his fixation on the past, and his blind spots about the dangers around them make him a sympathetic but flawed figure. He represents the struggle to heal, the risks of denial, and the ways in which personal grief can intersect with larger histories.

Iris Stoka

Iris is a key scientist on Project Kingsolver, representing the new generation of thinkers at ARPA. Her fascination with systems, automation, and the removal of human error positions her as both a visionary and a potential threat. Iris's rivalry with Hazelton, her drive to perfect the technology, and her willingness to push boundaries reflect the double-edged nature of scientific progress. She is a reminder that genius, unchecked by humility or empathy, can be as dangerous as ignorance.

Plot Devices

Dual Timelines and Intersecting Narratives

The novel's structure alternates between the Cold War era and the near future, using parallel narratives to build suspense and reveal the consequences of hidden actions. The 1962 storyline, focused on Hazelton, Metzger, and Project Kingsolver, provides the origin of the mystery and the moral dilemmas that shape the present. The 2025 storyline, centered on Charlie, Lawrence, and the return of the B-52, dramatizes the collision of eras and the persistence of unresolved trauma. The interplay of timelines allows for foreshadowing, dramatic irony, and a deep exploration of how history is both made and remembered.

Foreshadowing and Symbolism

Key symbols—such as the graphite-laced watch, the weather balloon, and the B-52 wreckage—serve as anchors for the novel's themes of memory, loss, and the permeability of time. The repeated warnings ("You must not fly today"), the ever-repaved runway, and the recurrence of storms and clouds all foreshadow the eventual breach between eras. The use of AI-generated voices and deepfakes as both plot device and metaphor underscores the dangers of technological manipulation and the fragility of truth.

Unreliable Narration and Psychological Realism

The novel frequently blurs the line between reality and delusion, especially in Hazelton's sections. His mental health struggles, the ambiguity of his memories, and the possibility that his inventions are as much magic as science create a sense of uncertainty and unease. Charlie's trauma, her fainting spells, and her struggle to distinguish between prank and supernatural warning mirror this instability. The result is a narrative that is both suspenseful and deeply human, inviting readers to question what is real and what is constructed.

Government Secrecy and Conspiracy

The actions of DARPA, the military, and the intelligence community drive much of the plot, as they seek to contain, explain, and exploit the impossible. The use of Seeker Script, the crafting of cover stories, and the willingness to sacrifice individuals for the sake of national security highlight the moral ambiguities of power. The novel critiques the culture of secrecy, the dangers of unchecked authority, and the ways in which truth is both weapon and liability.

Thematic Echoes and Recurrence

Throughout, the novel uses repetition—of warnings, disasters, and choices—to suggest that history is not linear but cyclical. The recurrence of storms, the repetition of ejections, and the echoing of voices across time all reinforce the idea that the past is never truly past. Yet, within this cycle, there is room for agency, redemption, and the possibility of change. The characters' choices, however constrained, matter; their hope, however fragile, persists.

Analysis

Departure 37 is a genre-bending fusion of science fiction, historical thriller, and psychological drama, using the conceit of a vanished B-52 to explore the intersections of personal and collective trauma, the dangers of technological hubris, and the enduring power of human connection. The novel interrogates the ways in which history is both constructed and concealed, showing how the pursuit of security can lead to moral compromise and the erasure of inconvenient truths. Through its dual timelines and richly drawn characters, the book asks what it means to live with the consequences of invention, to grieve what is lost, and to hope for what might be found. The use of AI and deepfakes as both plot device and metaphor is especially resonant in a contemporary context, raising questions about authenticity, manipulation, and the limits of control. Ultimately, Departure 37 suggests that the greatest mysteries are not those of science or war, but of the human heart: our longing for meaning, our fear of the unknown, and our stubborn refusal to let go of hope, even when the world insists on forgetting.

Last updated: September 26, 2025