Tales From the Loop Read online

  The melody still echoed across the landscape in the morning, and Kalle called Olof. Together they went in search of the ice cream truck. They followed the sound all the way to the gravel pit. It was strong there.

  They went into the tangled marsh at the far end of the gravel pit, and after a while they found it. The ice cream truck was wedged between two tree trunks, the cabin completely ripped open. The speaker dangled from the remains of the roof and still emitted its happy melody, and in the cargo space there was tons of ice cream that had begun to melt. Jackpot.

  Kalle wiped his mouth and summarized their theories: “The only viable conclusion…”—and I swear he stopped to push up his glasses—“…is that two giant carnivorous Gorgosaurus libratus were drawn to the melody, and then attacked the ice cream truck.”

  SKETCH BOOK 2: DINOSAURS

  ROBOT TRANSPORT

  Balanced machines had a major breakthrough in the ’60s when Iwasaki presented the first functional artificial nervous system. Suddenly, our machines were bestowed balance and grace previously reserved for biological organisms. Of course, wheeled vehicles were still superior on the roads and in civilian society, but in forestry, mining, warfare, planetary exploration—every single field of operations where there were no roads—robots were a revolution.

  Thanks to the Loop, Mälaröarna had become a robot paradise and we knew all the makes and models.

  Riksenergi had an impressive array of robots at their disposal. Paarhufer’s and Maltemann’s four-legged models were used for service work in open terrain. Two-legged unmanned units were used in high-risk areas within the Loop itself. Two unmanned, completely autonomous, two-legged robots, specially designed for Riksenergi by Swedish ALTA, patrolled down by Jäsängen. They were designated ABM100 but were usually called the “Fire Watchers.”

  All this was fascinating of course, but what enthralled us most were the machines that moved inside FOA’s facility on Munsö. Several secret projects were carried out there. Research was focused on biomechanics, evolutionary robotics, and cybernetics. Rumor had it they were trying to create machines that were able to feel and reason. Apparently they made progress; they were unable to stop prototypes escaping on several occasions.

  THE ESCAPEE

  It stood under the oak tree in the yard—an oily, sad little tin-can thing, its head partially entangled in some sort of canvas cover. It had discovered me and stood perfectly still, its head fixed in my direction. As I approached, it rocked nervously to and fro where it stood. It flinched, rustling its wiring, each time the snow crunched underneath my boots. Soon I was close, so close I could reach the cover hanging from one of its lenses. I leaned forward, managed to get hold of the canvas, and yanked it off. The optics underneath it quickly focused. It was marked FOA on the side, which meant this was an escapee from Munsö. Then our front door rattled, and with three quick bounds the robot was gone. The door opened and there, on the steps, stood my father.

  SKETCH BOOK 3: MACHINES

  THE TOWER HOUSE

  It truly was an enigmatic house. My father used to say it was just a regular house that a giant had lifted and flipped over on its side. Tons of old things towered along the walls, almost all of them things that had no place in a home. A big, shaggy German Shepherd strolled along the paths among all that junk, and somewhere in the middle of the clutter, always busy disassembling something, was the dog’s master: my uncle, Alf. To say that it was messy would be wrong. There was an order here, and a feeling of recycling—sort of like a compost heap. Olof’s house was messy in the worst sense of the word. It smelled of stale urine, and you just wanted to go home. The rooms in the Tower House smelled of oil, coffee, and dog, and somewhere a radio was always playing. I loved playing with the dog, even though my fingers became greasy and covered in hair.

  In the basement there was a room connected to the extensive tunnel systems of the Loop. It was furnished with an old green couch, a coffee table, a couple of steel cabinets, and a locked steel cage. Inside the cage were hard hats, coveralls, and a board hung with keys. The far wall was dominated by a huge locked steel door marked with a big eight. Next to the door was a red telephone with a single button. The room was lit by a vending machine in one corner, filled with pastries and soda cans. If you were lucky Alf would conjure some coins from thin air, and you were allowed to feed them to the machine.

  I often stood there, quiet and happy with a half-eaten pastry in one hand, my ear pressed to the steel door.

  A lot of buildings out on Mälaröarna had a connection chamber in the basement. Usually they were found in houses built when the Loop was constructed. They were filled with coveralls, protective gear, first aid kits, and a direct line to emergency services.

  JENS AND HÅKAN SWITCH BODIES

  I can’t help smiling when I think about the twins, Jens and Håkan. They had moved in from Skåne and were almost identical physically but behaved very differently, for those that bothered getting to know them. Håkan was a real menace who always ended up in trouble and Jens was a daydreamer, slouching along with his shoelaces untied. That was how their characteristics were divided when they came to our school in the third grade. They told us such a funny story.

  Håkan claimed they had found a giant steel pod at a rest stop on the way from Skåne to Stockholm, when he went down to pee below the freeway. The pod had a hatch that was wide open, so he entered. In the same moment that he set foot inside the pod he was back in the family car again.

  He sat in the back seat, in shock. His mother wondered why Håkan was taking such a long time, he was only going for a pee. Håkan didn’t understand anything. How had he returned to the car so quickly? “Mom, I’m right here,” he mumbled. Now he saw that Jens was gone. Håkan’s mother turned around and stared at him angrily. Then she looked down at his clothes—even their parents were sometimes unable to keep the twins apart, and not only when it came to their names—and said, “Stop messing around, Jens.” Håkan looked at his own reflection in the rear-view mirror and his breath caught in his throat. He had Jens’ face and clothes! He ran out of the car and down to the pod again.

  He found his confused and frightened brother in the pod. Amazing! Jens looked exactly like Håkan; they had simply switched bodies. Håkan led his brother back up to the rest stop and explained how things were now: Håkan was Jens, and Jens was Håkan.

  According to Håkan, their parents never noticed.

  POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA

  A project as big as the Loop could never have been realized without international collaboration. Even if Swedes would have liked to see it as a Swedish project through and through, it was clear that a lot of the technology and expertise behind the facility was developed in other countries, primarily in the USA. American experience and technology from similar projects in the Nevada desert turned out to be invaluable in the construction of the Loop. Some even say that the whole project was only possible because of an American desire to have a technological presence in the Baltic Sea area. There was much speculation about what part the Loop played in the Cold War, and some questions may never be answered. On the other hand, almost all the children on Mälaröarna remember the echo spheres that lay scattered across the landscape. Seemingly disconnected and powerless, sometimes they could emit noise; sometimes they were warm to the touch; and sometimes something flickered inside, like flashes of lightning. Some claimed they had seen the echo spheres leak water for days, in volumes that they couldn’t possibly contain. Many remember the inscription on the side that said:

  Manufactured by

  ROGOSIN LOCKE INDUSTRIES, BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  According to Magnus in 6B there was surely a connection between the echo spheres and the USA. Literally. The one thing he was admired for was his accurate penalty shots when we played soccer during recess, so his stories may have been designed to get some attention during the winter months, when the soccer field lay frozen and empty. What follows is what he told us.

  Magnus spent his winters fre
netically practicing penalty shots in the field behind his house. There was an old echo sphere there. He opened its hatch and used it as a target. In February, he was in good shape and made almost every shot. The sphere rang like a gong with every hit. To get a bigger challenge he walked off and placed the ball a good 40 meters from the echo sphere. He made a perfect kick that sent the ball like a target-seeking missile straight through the hatch. But—instead of the satisfying ring—there was total silence.

  Magnus climbed into the sphere to retrieve his ball and somewhere there his fairly pedestrian, boastful story morphed into a long, incoherent hero’s tale about how he passed through a portal in the echo sphere to a small town in the American desert. He had roamed there for days until he was caught by the sheriff and was imprisoned in a factory, where they had tried to grind him into tissue to be used in the construction of cyborgs. Luckily, he had managed to escape with the help of a four-legged war machine called Rosanna, and he then freed the town from a corrupt mayor, breaking the hearts of every single cheerleader in the town in the process.

  THE SPECTRE FROM SIBERIA

  During the seemingly endless winters in the ’80s, Riksenergi invested in a number of all-terrain vehicles, the eight Vectra Lynx among them. The Lynx spurred the imagination, because it was based on a prototype of the Soviet Gurevich that had been used as a recon vehicle during the Baikal Wars in the ’70s. The Vectra version was neither armed nor armored, but you could still discern the vehicle’s military past when you saw how easily and aggressively it traversed snowy cutovers and hillocks. My fascination with everything to do with Riksenergi began when I was just nine, and I used to walk around with a small camera to take pictures of all things related to Riksenergi.

  The Vectra Lynx was one of my favorites and the only wheeled vehicle on my top ten list. If I saw suspicious tracks in the snow, I would follow them for hours. I even had a model kit of the Soviet combat version that I had assembled and painstakingly painted, with every single detail in place and to spec. On my bedroom wall I had a poster with the legend “Gu LRV 29 – THE SIBERIAN SPECTRE” that showed the Lynx in a dramatic combat scene in a flurry of snow, the ground covered with Chinese war robots that had been blasted to pieces.

  THE SÄTUNA SPIDERS

  The Sätuna Spiders were a form of security vehicles meant for repairs in hazardous environments, like the Gravitron chamber in the Loop—a gigantic hall deep beneath the Loop’s center that housed the magnificent Gravitron, the heart of the facility. The floor in the Gravitron chamber was extremely hot and had a very strange topography: it was sectioned off in small quadrants, where every quadrant had a different height and gradient, making the floor almost inaccessible.

  The spider vehicles ended up in Sätuna in 1978, when Göran Friske had the idea to buy used equipment from Riksenergi and convert it for agricultural purposes. He bought thirteen used spider vehicles with the intention of developing a new kind of farming machine that could negotiate any terrain. Unfortunately, the Spiders turned out to be too slow and their operational costs were too high, so the prototypes simply stood in an old field behind Friske’s farm.

  THE DÄVEN MONSTER

  The factory on Dävensö had been almost completely reclaimed by nature by the late ’80s. At the back of the factory complex, in a large concrete building, was a big hall where the roof had caved in a long time ago. Once upon a time the final assembly of huge magnetrine discs had taken place here, beneath the waters of a large reservoir. The ruins of that hall were a favorite spot for the local children to sneak into.

  Large schools of tiny perch swam beneath the surface. Now and then you could also see a bigger fish.

  Stories were told of something huge and horrible living down there in the water. Maybe a water spider, or some amphibian, had nested in one of the reservoir’s many dark crevices and given birth to something malformed, a lifeform changed by heavy metals and chemicals that had leaked into the water. Maybe it was something that had arrived from another dimension through a tear in space-time, caused by the experiments down in the Loop.

  Maybe there was something down there in the reservoir, but the only thing that ever floated to the surface was the body of Ragnar Jönsson, a local thug. He used to stay in a trailer out on Dävensö and it was assumed that he had fallen into the water when he was drunk, and had drowned.

  THE MOOMIN

  Ninety vane turbines followed the shifting temperaments of the wind with silent, studious precision in the water outside Lagnö. Their round pressure hatches made them look like funny little old men that peeked up above the surface out there. They were commonly known as the Moomin, and they had a very important task to perform. The pumps on Lagnö needed minutely-detailed data to be able to adjust pressure and empty deuterium, in a steady flow without dangerous fluctuations, from the outer tunnels of the Loop. Just a minor interference could send shock waves through the structure of the entire Loop, even into the Gravitron chamber itself. The jagged alabaster floor would disperse any such shock waves of course, but the smallest deviation could send the pulse spheres of the Gravitron into an uncontrollable spin. The safety systems were rigorous and the risk of a meltdown seemed practically nonexistent, but the thing was that no one really understood the Gravitron. An anxiousness shone through in the thousands of pages of safety manuals, which pervaded all activities at the Loop.

  When we swam down by the guest pier at the boat club in summer, we would dive down to the bottom wearing masks and explore all the old junk that had been deposited in the mud over the years. Shopping carts, old plastic bags, beer cans, fishing lures, and incomprehensible iron constructions stuck up from the mud down there. When you disappeared under the water’s surface, the hubbub of summer days was cut off and you entered the silent netherworld of Mälaren. Distances were distorted and, down there in the green glow, the sound from a distant boat—not even visible on the surface—could be heard loud and close. I remember at the end of August, when the vacationers started to migrate back to the city and the guest pier was deserted, you could hear the distant breaths of the vane turbines rise and fall under the water, like monotonous whale songs in the chilly water.

  THE SCRAPPERS

  Thirty years of Loop operations had filled the Mälarö landscape with strange objects. A kilometer along Ettans Road, two brothers, who had a knack for all things mechanical, had slowly allowed their garden to be populated by scrap. Old front loaders, spine arches, field hats, solar turbines, whisper flares, and magnetrine discs threw shadows over the stunted apple trees.

  The two brothers were skilled mechanics and made a living fixing people’s cars, but there was always a sense of hidden tragedy in their house.

  In the summer of 1992, Autoproffsen opened their first workshop on Svartsjölandet and the brothers were unable to compete with their prices. A year later they were out of work. They became more and more reclusive, and soon they erected a large warehouse in their backyard where they could work undisturbed. You could hear mechanical noises from within the warehouse well into the night.

  One day, in the fall of 1993, the brothers were gone. Their property was cordoned off and strung with police tape. Some said the brothers had committed suicide; others claimed they had been preparing some act of madness. During fall break that year, Pontus and Mackan of 5B said they had entered the warehouse and found a gateway to another dimension, also wrapped in police tape.

  THE SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION OF CONNIE FRISKE

  If you stood down by the bus stop at Löftet during quiet nights you could hear a low buzz coming from Göran Friske’s focal towers. Every other minute the towers were calibrated to the moon’s position in the sky, and the soft whine from their servo engines drifted across the fields. Nowadays it’s quiet at Löftet’s bus stop and the impressive arches are gone. Only the barns remain.

  Up until his daughter’s death, Göran Friske cultivated a plant that he called lunar root. The towers focused the light of the moon and a flower box was placed in the focal
point. A root vegetable grew in the box. This vegetable was said to have amazing properties: besides easing rheumatism, migraines, back pains, headaches, and all sorts of ailments, it could also cure cancer and other deadly diseases, according to Friske. In the picture, the towers are shown at the assembly stage. The small cylinders on the inside of the arch are the flower boxes. The main arch was lowered through the roof of the barn for harvesting and planting. Then the tower was raised so that its axis reached above the roof. This gave the tower enough mobility to track the movement of the moon across the sky, during all seasons.

  Friske’s daughter’s body was so badly burnt that cause of death was hard to determine, though there was serious speculation that it had been something as odd as spontaneous combustion. Constance Pernilla Friske had extremely high levels of acetone, a highly flammable substance in high concentrations, in her body. The medical examiner’s assessment was that the acetone in her body was a side effect of a so-called ketotic state, probably caused by a one-recipe diet.

  If Göran’s career as a local entrepreneur and neighbor had been a mess already, it was completely derailed when it was revealed that Connie had, since an early age, been living on a strict diet consisting almost exclusively of lunar root.

  THE HOUSE OF THE SAVAGES

  At the end of a forgotten dirt track in Karlskär was a completely run-down house. The blinds were always down, and something dark ran in rivulets down the Eternit facade. A moist mass of cardboard boxes, pillows, and mattresses had erupted from the front door, like the house was vomiting forth its stomach contents.