It was hard to take Anders seriously, because he said so many strange things. The year before, he had told us that the enemies in Doom actually exited the game to collect ammunition from another game on the computer. When he later told us that the Renault Twingo that had been found wrecked by Hilleshög had in fact been massacred by enormous killer grubs, we weren’t really scared, especially since almost one entire wall of his room was covered by a gigantic Tremors 2 poster.
But Anders wasn’t the only one talking about monsters and conspiracies after the flood. The Berggården school was abuzz with rumors about what was really going on in the evacuation zone, and everyone seemed to have their own favorite version of the truth. Some said that something which made insects grow had leaked out of the Gravitron, and others said that the particle accelerator had opened a black hole, out of which nameless horrors from a parallel reality spewed forth.
Johanna showed us a document. She claimed it was a fax from the biological institution at the university in Lund. According to her, the fax outlined an analysis of water samples from the flood in northern Färingsö. Understanding the scientific jargon was next to impossible, but there was one phrase in the document that made us very excited: an “abnormal biological component” was mentioned in the summary. Suddenly, avoiding tap water seemed very reasonable.
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
During the spring of 1997, the military arrived with their specialized machinery to assist Krafta with containing what was now known as “the Loop Scandal.” The Gauss freighters over Färingsö were joined by several massive naval cruisers, and every gate and entrance ramp swarmed with trucks, cranes, and strange machines that we had never seen before.
You could see two AMAT-2 machines out in the field from the jogging path in the forest behind Sånga. During an outdoor recreation day at school shortly after Easter, Lo and I absconded from the sanctioned activities and made our way to the AMAT-2 machines. Up on the gun turret, Lo told me his parents were getting divorced and that he would be moving with his mother into the city after the summer. The worst part of it was that he said it like it was something positive, like he didn’t even like Färingsö anymore. He did not seem to care that he was abandoning me in Berggården, so I said every bad thing that I could think of about life in the city, about how horrible it is to be a child of divorce, and about how he was really much better off out here on the island.
When that failed to elicit any reaction, I also threw in a bunch of nasty things about his mother and how he would probably be bullied by everybody at his new school because of his front teeth, and finally Lo sobbed a shrill cry. “BUT WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!” Lo stared at something far away, and I think during that silence we decided to never speak about it ever again.
SURVIVING A PANDEMIC FROM 51 PEGASI B
It was Lo’s mother who told us—when Lo and I objected angrily as she served tap water at the dinner table—that it was Stefan’s brother, Håkan, who had worked at the Clovers facility. Stefan himself could never keep a job. “He’s had a rough life.”
And it got rougher still. One day when we went over to his house, his garden looked very neat and orderly, and an older woman claiming to be Stefan’s mother opened the door. She said that Stefan had moved out; he had finally found his own place where he could keep all his things.
Stefan’s own place turned out to be a small concrete shelter from the Loop era. He had barricaded himself in there, wearing a homemade protective suit. His body was wrapped in strips from what appeared to be a foam mat, and his head was covered by a gas mask and an orange hardhat. We recognized him by his voice.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he yelled through the window when he saw us walking up the almost completely overgrown path. He was not happy to see us. He continued yelling at us.
“THE CONTAGION IS AIRBORNE! STAY AWAY!”
ILLEGAL COPIES
“Particle-based teleportation has never worked and will never work.”
Lo and I were seated on a worn couch in the Astronomer’s basement. We were waiting for his latest toy, a 4xCD burner, to finish a cracked version of the latest operating system. Lo was hunched over his Gameboy, about to break his Tetris high score. Stefan continued his rant.
“They experimented with it in the early sixties and it went straight to hell every time. The problem was that they basically created an expensive photocopier. Whatever came out on the other end was only a copy, and it wasn’t even fully coherent. You know, they ran tests on dogs and it was a damn mess. That’s why they ended up pouring all their resources into relativistic technology. It’s really bizarre that all that old equipment is still out on Rönn’s field behind the power station in Björkvik. It’s a goddamned miracle there hasn’t been an accident yet.”
We stood in the hallway, tying our shoes. Before Stefan handed us the disc, he opened the CD case, stuffed his nose down there, and took a deep breath.
“Aaaah! I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Make sure that Lars Ribbing doesn’t see that, for God’s sake.”
THE TIME OF BLOSSOMING
When Sebastian Fredriksson in 9A disappeared in the summer of 1997 and it was rumored that he had perished in one of the old machines down in Björkvik, the county had had enough. The islands were going to be properly cleaned up, along with what was now a tarnished reputation.
The bedrock would be cleansed, and all the old crap rusting in the landscape would be removed. Every single abandoned machine, every steel sphere and magnetrine disk, and even every single small rusty nail and sharp point that in any way posed a health hazard or cluttered the view, was doomed. Grandiose plans were drawn up and the entire shrimp-colored town hall in Hägerstalund seethed with fresh resolve. Golf courses, gyms, and sport centers would be built, and the stationery would get a new and fresh graphic profile, clearly signaling that a glorious new era lay before us.
A FAREWELL OF SORTS
After what could have been a romantic getaway with Lars, my mother came home with a black eye, and it was immediately obvious that our stay under Officer Ribbing’s roof was coming to an end.
The last time I saw Lars was when he picked me up after school in his police cruiser to have a conversation “man to man.” He didn’t really say much. Most of it was about things he had done that, according to him, I would somehow understand as I got older. He shook my hand before I stepped out of the car, as if we had made some sort of deal. That was the last time I saw him.
A GENERAL SENSE OF STYLE
Lo was gone when school started in the fall, and I thought school would be unbearable without him. But amid the excitement of starting junior high school, all the natural laws had been upset.
Just imagine the miracle of Jimmy Kraftling’s unexpected onset of acne, and his amazing status descent from King of Middle School to Completely Anonymous Seventh Grader. It was as if the decontamination of the Loop had removed something from inside me, and had left me washed clean and smelling of aftershave.
Anyway, a few weeks later I had new friends who smoked cigarettes, and by Saint Lucy’s Day I wore a leather jacket and had enjoyed my first drinking binge.
WELCOME TO YOUR NEW INSTALLATION OF LIFE ’98
Finally, in October of 1998, the decontamination project was over and the cordons were removed. Among fields and wooded slopes, the houses stood steaming in the cold autumn air, newly-washed and ready for their tenants to move back in. The former marshlands were dry, now torn up and hollowed out. Under the newly rolled-out lawns, the ground was covered by imported Dutch soil of the finest quality. The cooling towers had been demolished and ferried away, the telescopes at the observatory were neatly recycled, and in the depths of the bedrock the tunnels of the Loop were filled with 11,242,223 cubic meters of hardened carbon fiber–reinforced concrete—the result of what was probably the largest and costliest concrete cast in Swedish history.
The last traces of the Loop era were finally gone. As I stood in front of the mirror in my old room for the first time in t
hree years, rubbing wax into my hair, I happened to glance out at the landscape outside the window and was struck by a brief sensation. It was a sense of something having been lost, but also a sense that I was already forgetting what it was. I shook the feeling off, turned up the volume on my stereo, and returned to more important things—in thirty minutes I was supposed to be at Martin Hagegård’s party and my hair had to be just so.
Somewhere deep within the bedrock, where the nation kept its radioactive waste and where only machines labored, there were now endless rows of echo spheres filled with concrete. If we had been able to linger there without being incinerated by the radiation, and if we had been able to put our ear to the spheres, we might have heard it—the nervous heartbeats of something in there, slumbering restlessly.
More from the Author
Tales From the Loop
The Electric State
ALSO BY SIMON STÅLENHAG
Tales from the Loop
The Electric State
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Simon Stålenhag and Free League Publishing
Originally published in Sweden in 2016 by Fria Ligan AB
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Free League Edition Credits
Illustration & Text—Simon Stålenhag
Editors—Tomas Hårenstam & Nils Karlén
Graphic Design—Christian Granath
Project Manager—Tomas Härenstram
Color Adjustment & Prepress—Dan Algstrand
Translation—Martin Dunelind
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-9821-5071-6
ISBN 978-1-9821-5072-3 (ebook)
Things From the Flood Page 3
