Things From the Flood Page 2

  First of all, nothing happened once I had the robot on my desk and connected to my computer, per Lo’s instructions. It was definitely powered up; the green signal lights were on, but the computer couldn’t establish any connection with it.

  Then Lars and my mother came home from the party earlier than expected, and I barely had time to squeeze the Creeper Sphere into my closet before my mother appeared in the door to my room to say goodnight. I was leaning unnaturally against the closet door and stumbled through a lousy improvisation about how nice and quiet everything had been at home. It was really a cosmic mercy that Lars and my mother were drunk enough to not notice the remains of my activities—the tire tracks in the snow in the garden, the wheelbarrow tipped on its side outside the garage door, and the leaves and twigs on the basement floor.

  Once Lars and my mother had fallen asleep (Lars had passed out on the living room couch), I cleaned up any traces of my failed secret robot endeavor and cursed all the future lectures by Lars Ribbing, First Chief Supervisor of Domestic Finances, that I would be forced to suffer through.

  OFFICE LANDSCAPES

  After the flood, my father’s main assignment at Krafta Systems was to decontaminate hard drives that had been damaged by the water. Thirty years’ worth of research data was slowly being eaten by corrosion. Technicians worked around the clock to save the precious information that arrived continuously from the flooded facility out on Mälaröarna.

  I helped out on some occasions—sometimes I sat with my father down in the workshop and blow-dried circuit boards and hard drives—but most of the time my father was completely preoccupied with analyzing data, and there wasn’t much for me to do but hang around and wait.

  One late afternoon, in some kind of expression of guilty conscience, my father allowed me into the copy room where there was a computer that you could play games on. On the desk next to a paper cutter was a red floppy disk with Krafta’s logo printed on it. Lo had told me to keep my eyes open for such red disks at my father’s office; it could be a so-called SÄK5 disk, which was a type of key carried only by Krafta employees with very high security clearance.

  My father lingered in the doorway for a long time, asking me about school and what it was like in Lars’s house. He was trying to spend some kind of quality time with me, but all I could think about was that disk, so I answered his questions mechanically, hoping he would give up.

  When he finally left me alone, I popped the disk into the computer and looked through its contents. It didn’t look good—it only contained a text document. I opened the document and an image was slowly drawn across the screen. It was an image of one of my father’s colleagues with a red plastic ball on his nose. He was grinning and holding up both his thumbs toward the camera. Text emerged below the image: “Welcome to Torsten’s and Agneta’s annual masquerade: ‘4th Floor Fun Fest’ on February 24.”

  I slammed my forehead down on the keyboard in defeat, and a long string of t’s scrawled across the screen.

  UNLOCK. EXPLORE. REPEAT.

  I stood there with itchy gloves and boots full of snow. The heat flowing up from the Loop had melted the snow completely from the hatch. I wiped the snot from my upper lip and looked back at the pole with the old disk lock, and I realized that I still had the disk that I had stolen from my father’s office. It was in my jacket pocket. I wasn’t expecting anything other than the usual “INVALID ID” that was always the result of inserting your own disk in a disk lock, but it was still worth a try. I shuffled through the snow to the lock, opened the cover, and inserted the disk. After a long silence the reader inside buzzed and the display lit up:

  CONFIRMING ID.................... OK

  ID: SÄK5 APPROVED

  WELCOME BJÄRED, TORSTEN

  My heart dropped five meters. It had worked. Without thinking, I pressed the big green button marked OPEN, and a mechanical screech cut through the air. Behind me, I saw the blinking of yellow warning lights—the hatch was opening! I struggled through the snow and up to the open hatch. Steam rose from the dark abyss. A ladder descended into the darkness. This was dangerous, forbidden, illegal, and so awesome. I made a snowball and held it over the hole. Warm, moist air flowed up, carrying a scent that reminded me of the furnace in our old house.

  I dropped the snowball. It disappeared down into the darkness and the universe held its breath. The air stood still. My heartbeat thundered in my ears, the snow creaked in the bushes, and a bird took flight somewhere.

  And there it was: the sound of the snowball hitting water, deep down in the flooded innards of the Loop.

  COVERT OPS

  After I had stumbled upon the SÄK5 disk, Lo and I had been promoted to commandos on secret missions deep behind enemy lines. We had compact binoculars and notepads, and we could spend hours in the evacuation zone. Lo took this very seriously and, even though we didn’t have walkie-talkies, he still insisted that we end every sentence with “copy” or “over and out.”

  “I observe five men at the barracks at two o’clock, copy.”

  “You secure the western flank and I will secure the eastern, rendezvous behind the oak tree, over.”

  “Foxhound, update your position, copy.”

  Lo never wavered.

  An ALTA quadruped was recharging in a glade behind a storage shelter in Sånga-Säby. It patrolled in slow circles, and the challenge was to get as close as possible without being discovered. Lo loved this game. He wanted me to divert the robot’s attention by throwing pine cones into the shrubbery behind it, so he could run up and check if the door to the storage shed was locked.

  “Our unit is starving. There may be provisions in there. Over,” Lo whispered. I was wet and cold, and those pincers scared me. I whispered as quietly as I could that I didn’t want to play anymore, but Lo didn’t answer. He was busy observing the robot through our binoculars. I tried again.

  “Foxhound requests permission to return to ba—” I was interrupted by a sudden snap among the twigs on the slope behind the robot. In terror, we watched as the robot twirled around with shocking speed, and we saw how it moved across the entire glade in a second, like a lightning-fast spider. A frightened pheasant flew out of the shrubbery, cackling in terror, and narrowly avoided the robot’s pincer, which snapped through the air behind the bird’s tail.

  Lo stared at me, terrified, and hissed: “Request granted, return to base, over and out.” Then we ran.

  SEBASTIAN SEUFFERT’S DRAGONS

  Was Sebbe suffering from Loop Disorder? Some people thought so. His father had worked down in the Gravitron, and Sebbe never came to the community youth center. He had spent an unhealthy amount of time down in the Loop, waiting for his father’s shift to be over.

  We never found out the truth, but I do remember that Sebbe smelled bad. I don’t mean puberty sweat, but an odor of a kind that made you realize that something was wrong in his family. It was a stench that he brought with him from a home filled with insanity. He almost never talked, but simply sat quietly in a corner. When the class was divided into pairs to work on some assignment there were always problems—sometimes students stated openly that they didn’t want to sit next to Sebbe “because he smells bad.” Cue nervous giggles.

  I felt sorry for Sebbe, and I walked him home from school a few times. He barely made a sound.

  After the flood, notes about runaway cats appeared on the bulletin board outside the library. It was a cat plague, some said. Others claimed it was related to the flood. Sebbe finally moved to a special needs school in Norrtälje sometime during early spring, and a rumor started going around that he had been behind the cat disappearances. A Krafta service technician was said to have found him on a wooded headland in the fields behind Solbacka, covered in blood and sitting in the middle of the aftermath of a cat massacre. They said at least fifty cats had been spread out around him, gutted and cleaned like fish.

  Like I said, Sebbe was usually very quiet during those walks from school, but I remember him saying something that
made no sense at the time, but which would make the whole cat story more chilling later.

  “You have to come to my place and make cat food. We can make cat food together and feed my dragons. They are growing quickly now.”

  JURY-RIGGING

  Two huge iron spheres stood in the garden behind Stefan’s house. They gaped emptily and looked like giant cement mixers. But Stefan claimed that they were fully functional “Weismann Portals,” just like those that had been developed in the Loop. He had built them himself from parts that he had appropriated from the Clovers facility during the years he worked there. “They’re the real thing,” he had said. The last and most important part, the so-called Meitner Pendulum, he had retrieved from a strange dodecahedron that had appeared by Svartsjö after the flood. It must have been some sort of portable Gravitron—a field generator.

  After much effort, Stefan had set up the spheres, installed the Meitner Pendulum, and powered them up. They seemed to work, and Stefan had tested the contraption by climbing high into a tree by one of the spheres and then throwing himself straight down into its opening. “It’s a perfect, stable connection!” he’d said. He knew this because, instead of hitting the bottom of the sphere and breaking his legs, he had been catapulted from the opening on the other sphere, and had soared over his garden and landed in his neighbor’s compost heap.

  THE VAGABONDS

  Scores of robots escaping the Russian AI pogroms moved into Sweden. Somehow, they had made their way across the ice to Färingsö and settled down in the outskirts of the forests, reeds, and deserted houses. They were called vagabonds. They were an odd group, and were fascinated by colorful fabric, complex patterns, fur, and feathers. Anything organic and soft was exotic and highly valuable to them, and they seemed to have developed some form of religious worship of biology and nature. We found their graffiti everywhere—on trees, rock faces, and concrete walls.

  Many of the inhabitants of Mälarö disliked the vagabonds and were alarmed when they appeared in Berggården. A growing fear, and a discontent that nothing was being done, could be sensed in store checkout lines and in posts on bulletin boards.

  Sometime in January of 1996, Jimmy Kraftling and his gang of miscreants had a fight with a vagabond down in the gravel pit, and Knuckles returned with three fingers missing from his right hand. It remained unclear whether the fingers had been removed by the vagabond or by one of the many homemade New Year’s bombs they had been seen carrying down into the pit, but the inhabitants of Mälaröarna didn’t care to find out. After the incident, the police were called and riot units gathered up any vagabonds they could find, after which the machines were sent to the recycling center in Nacka to be demolished.

  RIVER FLESH

  The local community developed a fear of water. It was said that something from the flood had leaked out into the groundwater. It started as a rumor—I heard it first from Stefan, as one of his many crazy theories—but soon, otherwise-rational parents and teachers also decided that it was best not to drink water from the tap. Some said it was radioactive water from the core of the Loop, which had leaked after the flood. Others said it was something else, some form of bacteria that made people sick.

  One night during dinner, Lars told us that they had received a call about an accident involving a Saab 900 in Österby. They had found the car overturned in a ditch, and the conditions inside the car were the most sickening thing that Lars Ribbing had seen during his fifteen years as a police officer. It had been impossible to discern if there were any human remains inside the car because the whole compartment was filled with unknown organic tissue. In Lars Ribbing’s own words: “It looked like someone had squeezed a giant squid into the car.” We all sat in silence, poking at our moussaka.

  “It’s the space water!” Stefan Eklöf said later that week, as I was waiting for him to find the 8-megabyte RAM that he had promised me. He was digging through a box filled with old junk at the same time as he gave me a comprehensive status report.

  “The idea was to open a portal to the Soviet Union for the Americans during the Cold War, but it all went to hell. The Clovers facility only had one single purpose! It was to map Earth’s exact position in the universe so they could establish a stable grid of coordinates. They had to know exactly where the Soviet Union was, in the cosmic sense—the problem was that Håkan, who was in charge of mathematics, mixed up some damn decimal points and suddenly they ended up on 51 Pegasi B instead, 53 light years off. It’s an ocean planet, it seems. And now some damn space bacteria are on the loose. They sure are busy now, the Krafta people.”

  THE CULTURE

  “Your mother and I don’t like that you spend time on your own at the Astronomer’s house. Something isn’t right in his head,” Lars finally said. After that one time that Stefan showed me his “culture,” as he called it, I was prepared to agree with Lars. Three bathtubs stood in Stefan’s basement, and a strange collection of seemingly random items—cans, reel-to-reels, cameras, and so on—was submerged in the water.

  “It’s something involving the combination of plastic and metal!” Stefan said. He picked up a very small pin from the water using long fire tongs, and he inspected it closely. He muttered approvingly at some microscopic detail before returning it to the tub.

  “Come here and look.”

  Stefan opened the door to his garage. Inside the garage, he had the most bizarre collection of objects I have ever seen.

  MACHINE CANCER

  “Now would be the time to rob the bank in Hägerstalund,” Lars said. The entire Ekerö police force was busy handling the side effects of the so-called Machine Cancer. The utility machines on northern Färingsö began acting up. They were impossible to control and roamed around like sick animals. Soon odd growths were found on their joints and limbs, and the police were busy around the clock handling the damage wrought by the errant machines. An endless procession of Krafta salvage vehicles carried away defunct robots, and there were constant traffic jams on the road to and from Färingsö.

  They said it was because of the neural grease. All balanced machines and autonomous robots were continuously lubricated with a form of wax that saturated the artificial nervous system and enhanced conductivity in the nerve fibers. Krafta had recently begun using a new, experimental neural grease, and it was supposed to be this new grease that caused an uncontrollable growth of nerve fibers that in turn made the machines run amok and finally break down.

  Of course, all of this was nonsense according to the Astronomer.

  “It’s crystal clear! Our visitors from 51 Pegasi B have found the perfect hosts!”

  SOCKARBY QUARRY

  Between Sånga and Berggården lay Sockarby Quarry, a gaping wound in the otherwise picturesque farming landscape of Mälaröarna. Ruby-colored ore had been mined here up until the 1950s, and the huge Karman Färna blast furnaces had long since polluted the ground with slag products and turned the area into a stinking, deforested wasteland.

  An ancient parish house sat by the slopes of the slag heaps. It had originally been erected to offer the coughing miners and their dust-filled lungs some divine guidance in life. Now it was decrepit and falling apart, and everyone was surprised when a priest and his two children moved into the house in early 1997.

  The priest was named Paveli Wuolo, but he quickly got the nickname “The TV,” because of the enormous square glasses he wore (there was speculation that he could receive cable channels on them). Paveli Wuolo’s grand plan was to renovate the parish house and bring GOD back to the inhabitants of Berggården. The house smelled weird; it had a sharp odor of soap, as if someone was constantly trying to scrub all of the old miners’ anguish out of the walls.

  Paveli himself was a fountain of joy. We often saw him up on some scaffolding, happily singing with a brush in one hand and waving it around like a conductor in front of the facade of the parish house. When he saw us walking up the driveway, he jumped down from the scaffolding, extended his long arms, and yelled, “MY ANGELS!” He emb
raced Lo and me in a long, boa constrictor–like hug (Paveli was huge: at least six foot ten). We would give polite answers to his questions about how we were doing and what our parents were up to, but of course we didn’t go there to meet Father Wuolo. The reason we came to the parish house was that the Forum’s best robot hacker lived in the basement: Paveli Wuolo’s godless daughter, Johanna, also known as S0ulFuck3r.

  S0ulFuck3r was a legend, having stolen hundreds of classified documents from Krafta servers by using an old STM laptop to hot-wire a Cormorant 226. She claimed that she had used a Tamagotchi and fishing line to lure the quadruped robot into one of the cramped positronic exhaust wells, where it got stuck, and thus the Cormorant’s dangerous pincer arm was rendered harmless.

  A BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY

  There wasn’t a single centimeter of wallpaper visible in Anders Näslund’s room. The walls were completely covered by posters. Body parts, demons, space ships, zombies, flying saucers, and betentacled monsters created a gaudy patchwork behind Anders’s pimpled face as he told us the story in a breaking teenage voice. His uncle had narrowly avoided being swallowed alive when a “Tellus/Pegasi drone” attacked his car out on northern Färingsö. Anders claimed that this was the result of the pregnancies he had observed in the robots infected by “Machine Cancer.” Anders clearly gestured the quotation marks around the words.