Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  What this earth-shattering tip had been about had long since been streamlined out of the tale, but when they got to the coffee, and the bowl containing the sugar and the small pyramid-shaped packets of milk were placed in front of them, the radio amateur had reacted as though something had just bitten him on the leg. He’d thrust the chair away from the table, imploring the waitress to remove the goods at once–now, straight away, have we even ordered that?–and there he sat, keeping his distance till she finally did as he’d asked.

  In the end, the journalist couldn’t resist. When lunch was over and they both stood up to leave, he took a detour past a nearby table and let one hand pluck a handful of the miniature milk tetras from the sugar bowl. Next minute, as they squeezed out through the revolving door, he’d dropped a couple into his visitor’s overcoat pocket.

  Not that he ever got to see the result, but the mere thought of the man’s reaction when he got home and realised that his pocket held two of the terrifying packets, presumably having eavesdropped on him all afternoon–that alone had won the tale legendary status. Over the years, it had been told at Christmas dos and work parties so many times that it had in the end become true. Whether or not it had happened was neither here nor there.

  After that lunch, Strandell’s tip-offs had grown increasingly rare. Despite that, he would still make occasional contact, always to warn of some extreme event in store. And always, without exception, when there really was no time to listen to him.

  It took him almost seven minutes to plug in all the devices on the table, and when he was done he got to his feet and beckoned the two women over.

  ‘Background,’ he said when they were in place. ‘My name is Alexander Strandell. I’ve been in contact with you before.’

  The pause that followed confirmed that this did not come as a surprise to either of them. So he carried on talking, gesticulating as he did so to underline the importance of what he had to say.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t take me seriously. But just give me these ten minutes. I think you’re going to agree with me about this.’

  ‘Seven of them have already gone,’ Christina said. ‘Tell us why we’re in here with you and not out there doing our job.’

  Instead of answering he bent over his little set-up on the table.

  The computer was black, the size of an encyclopaedia volume, and might once have been considered both cutting-edge and ultra-portable. Seen with today’s eyes, it was heavy and awkward, and the blue-green desktop screen revealed that the operating system was at least three generations too old. His dirty fingers hammered in commands via a keyboard whose letters and symbols had been worn away by years of use, and the result was a whirring from the hard drive along with a riot of windows and data tables. Some of them displayed barely discernible columns and values, while others displayed curves and wave movements that could stand for just about anything.

  ‘The first time I heard it was back in summer,’ he said as he carried on working. ‘Early August, to be precise. This is my first note.’ He pointed at a row of numbers as though it might help them to understand. It failed to do so.

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘Their transmissions.’

  Something about those words caused Christina to sit up straight.

  ‘Who are they? What transmissions?’

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he used the arrow keys to steer the cursor up to the top number in one of the windows. A date, as far as Christina could make out, and next to it a time, and something resembling a graph showing peaks and troughs. A sound file?

  He looked up at them. Pressed return.

  For a second, Christina could feel her stomach protesting inside her. What the hell was this about?

  Two. Four. Six. Nine. Three. One.

  A voice. A woman’s. It was so devoid of feeling, so monotonal, that it seemed to balance on the cusp of death. Crackling digits, read aloud in English in a slow, meaningless series, rang chillingly through the empty lunch room.

  Seven. Nine. Nine. Two. Four. Four. Seven.

  They stood there, listening without breathing, and when the dirge ended it was followed by a tone that played for a few seconds before the count resumed again. Exactly the same numbers, the very same monotone.

  Two. Four. Six. Nine. Three…

  When the bearded man finally turned it off, Christina was standing with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her hands gripping firmly at her upper arms as though she was freezing with cold.

  ‘What is it?’ she said eventually, her unease sneaking through.

  ‘It’s a number station,’ he said.

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘That’s the thing. No one knows.’ He looked at them with deadly serious eyes, lowering his voice. ‘Long story short,’ he said. ‘The shortwave band. It spans two to thirty megahertz. It is divided into countless transmission frequencies, all of which are arranged into area of use and type of traffic. In favourable conditions, you can hear transmissions from any part of the globe.’

  He paused. Now he had their attention, and his enjoyment of that fact was plain to see.

  ‘The first reports of this kind of number station came in the early nineteen hundreds. No one knows who the sender is, no one knows who the receivers are, just that they’re there, on different frequencies. Spouting their sequences, incessantly, day in and day out.’

  ‘Why?’ Beatrice’s voice sounded just as unsettled as Christina’s.

  ‘No one knows for sure. Coded messages? Signals to spies out in the field? Maybe. What we do know, on the other hand, is that most of them disappeared along with the Cold War.’

  At that point he paused for several beats, as though having come to the heart of the matter he was about to share with them.

  ‘And that’s just it,’ he said. ‘This particular frequency has been dormant since the nineties. Until now.’

  The room fell silent, and the bearded man known as Tetrapak looked at them with an ominous intensity, waiting for them to say something.

  ‘Who is transmitting?’ It was Christina who spoke first. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I believe it to be instructions.’

  ‘Instructions for what?’

  For a moment, he said nothing. Instead, he flung his arms wide, towards the windows. Towards the power cut and the silence and all that empty darkness out there.

  ‘For today.’

  There was something about the way he said it. In his voice, the devices strewn on the table, the meaningless numbers, in the implication that it had something to do with a Cold War that no longer existed and–for Christ’s sake, she asked herself, had she really got snarled in the ramblings of a person afraid of coffee creamer?

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said, for want of anything better.

  ‘After a while, the transmissions were altered,’ was his reply. ‘Significantly.’

  ‘In what way?’

  He bent down over the screen, clicked down to another date in the list, finger poised above the keyboard.

  ‘This is the nineteenth of September.’ A pause. And then he tapped the space bar.

  As he did so, both women backed instinctively away. What came pouring out of the computer now was not words, but a prolonged blast of amalgamated, atonal noise, scraping and hissing and familiar yet not, a grating sound that lasted for almost a second before it disappeared again, just as sharply and abruptly as it had come.

  What the hell was that?

  Christina and Beatrice stood frozen as the echo disappeared into the empty lunch room, followed by a couple of interminable seconds of discomfort while their memories caught up.

  It sounded like a modem. That was it. Like a computer connecting to the internet, that sound that could be heard at every desk in the mid-nineties until technology moved on and eventually disappeared like a species with no place in the food chain–but this sound was faster, deeper, richer.

  ‘Suddenly it’s as i
f the entire ether is awash with transmissions,’ Tetrapak said before anyone had managed to distil their thoughts into words. ‘They are all on frequencies surrounding the number station, unusually clear and pronounced, short blasts of sound that last for a few seconds. Day after day. At around the same time too.’

  He returned to the lists on his screen, played a few new transmissions consisting of scraping noises, grizzling cacophonies that alternated as he made his way down through the list. They were becoming more and more frequent, he explained through the din, and above all they were coming at various levels of intensity and from different sources. Sometimes they were echoed at once by another transmitter, sometimes close by and sometimes from a completely different part of the globe. He had never heard anything like it before, and it had scared him, and then he had grasped what it was.

  Receipts. The repeats were confirmations of delivery, from someone who had received the message confirming that it had arrived.

  ‘It was as though they were fine-tuning a system,’ he said, his face expressing pride and seriousness and foreboding in a single expression. ‘As though they were constructing a whole new channel of communication. What we’re listening to is computers talking to one another, on frequencies that haven’t been used since the end of the Cold War.’

  Christina looked at him. What he was saying was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. But isn’t that also the mark of a good conspiracy theory? That it seems to have some basis in fact, that it’s plausible, and if you get yourself sucked in from the likely angle then you don’t see all the gaping holes elsewhere?

  Even if what he said might actually be true–even if this was an entirely new and secret mode of communication–there was no evidence whatsoever pointing to any connection with the power cut. Even less to suggest that there was in fact anything strange about it.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ she eventually said. ‘I don’t understand what you think this has to do with today.’

  At that point he turned to the computer again. He switched off the sound, letting the silence settle as the swirl of computer bleeps echoed out in the darkness.

  ‘Shortwave,’ he said. And then he expanded. ‘Who uses shortwave when we’ve got the internet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Christina. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Whoever knows that the internet’s about to go down.’

  10

  The first email had arrived in the middle of the night. Outside, it was still November. A definite wintry chill had arrived from somewhere, taking Sweden by surprise the way it did every year, as predictable as the self-assessment tax return but equally impossible to remember. William Sandberg had made his way past abandoned cars, hazard lights blinking, their summer tyres unable to find grip in the thin layer of polished snow. He’d spent a whole night walking in the snowfall, silence settling around him as echoes disappeared between flakes, swarms of sparkling dots moving like insects in the wind. He was wet and freezing cold, and throughout he had forced himself not to feel any of it. Just as he always did it, night after night after night.

  It had been staring out at him when he got home in the small hours of the morning, demanding his attention. Just an email, nothing more. A single message in an otherwise completely empty inbox, marked as a thick blue band across half his screen. Visible from across the room even as he came through the door.

  Before long, his lungs were screaming inside his chest, reminding him that he had just stopped breathing. It was as though he was experiencing a sense of elation and a falling all at once, and at first he didn’t recognise the feeling. Was it a heart attack? Was it hunger?

  It was hope.

  This, he’d allowed himself to think, was the moment he’d been waiting for. What else could it be? And he had ended up standing in the doorway of his study, with the parquet flooring creaking beneath his feet as though quietly protesting against the law of gravity, with snow swirling past the window like a badly tuned television. Not daring to go inside, wanting to keep the hope alive for as long as he could.

  The email address was one he hadn’t used for years. He’d kept it because it was associated with memories, and it had remained untouched for years, because those memories were painful. At least that was partly why. Partly, it was also because grown-ups have grown-up email addresses: combinations of first and surnames, something that fosters trust, that’s serious, anything but this. Not AMBERLANGS.

  He’d simply hadn’t had any use for it. If Sandberg communicated via email at all, he did so at work. And even if he knew that the computers in his home office were invisible to the outside world, hidden behind Virtual Private Networks and basically impossible to access from elsewhere, his trustworthiness would not be improved by asking people to contact him via a non-existent word on a free mailhost.

  It wasn’t until his life started falling apart that he’d logged on again. Much to his surprise, the account was still there, and that somehow gave him a sense of security, as though it was meant to be, even though looking for meaning was something he couldn’t resent more. But his hope and his longing outweighed his good sense, and so that became the address he had chosen to give out to the ones he met on his nightly rambles. Morning after morning he had come home hoping to find something in the inbox, hoping that one among all those lonely, frozen people he’d met might have had something to tell him.

  That was the simple truth. They were the only ones who knew about that address. No one else should have been able to email him there. But then again, nothing in William’s life was as it should be any longer.

  Eventually he had dared to approach the computer.

  In an instant, he felt the hope replaced by something else.

  He was tired, off-kilter and unbearably alone, and maybe it was that, or the darkness and the silence that made everything grow out of proportion. For Christ’s sake, it was just an email. Yet still he could feel an icy chill spreading inside him, as though someone had opened a trapdoor in his groin.

  What the hell was this?

  He reread the text on his screen. On the left, where the sender should have been, was nothing. Underneath that was the subject field, also blank. Still, what ramped up his unease was the text in the message window on the right-hand side.

  Contact me. I need your help.

  Nothing more. No name, no subject, barely any content. Just an order, or maybe a plea, hard to know which. And he stood there for several minutes, paralysed, his heart pounding hard. It was as if the email itself was a sign, an omen of something bad, something unstoppable that was just about to take place.

  In a way, he was right. But how was he to know?

  In the end he’d forced himself to shrug it off. He’d taken a shower, donned clean clothes and made some coffee. Things he’d made habits of, because you must have habits. He’d sat at the kitchen table, with the newspaper open in front of him but without reading, and had gradually convinced himself that the email was just a mistake and had been meant for someone else. It was strange, sure, but it was trivial and meant nothing, and in the end he’d gone back to the computer and deleted it from his inbox.

  Two days later, another email had arrived. Contact me. The same instruction, waiting in the morning gloom. But this time with an extra concise line beneath the first.

  Please.

  He spent hours trying to trace the sender. The ‘from’ box was empty, but technically it comprised a blank space. It was hiding a Hotmail address, and the name attached to the account was ROSETTA1998, but that was as far as it was possible to get. That combination of letters and numbers didn’t exist anywhere. He found no references, not as an email address, not as a term in any other context.

  He split the email into its component parts. He searched the email’s headers and concealed information, switched the letters around, ran it through various encryption software for analysis, tried to locate some other meaning. Not necessarily because he thought it would help, but he’d been doing it professionally
for so long that he did it automatically, almost without thinking.

  And just as he’d thought, it led nowhere. The message contained neither more nor less than what was visible–whoever had sent it didn’t want to be traced. The question was why? Who asks for help without saying who they are?

  Eventually he had sat down at the computer and written a reply. Just as brief, just as monotonal, just as cold. Who’s this?

  Silence followed: no new emails–not that day, nor the next, or the day after. And the unease had waned and turned to exasperation, and then the exasperation to apathy, the same apathy of eternal darkness and meaninglessness as life itself. He had allowed himself to forget about it.

  Three days later, Sandberg had arrived home in the half-light of morning, as he did every day. He was exhausted, he had talked to people in tunnels and shacks, had asked and pleaded but with no reply.

  And there, in his inbox, was a new message, same sender.

  Stockholm Central Station, Arlanda Airport Express, third of December, 4pm precisely.

  This time he didn’t refrain. His fingers hammered the keyboard, as though the rage and fear and exasperation would come across the harder he typed. He asked who the fuck it was contacting him, how they’d got hold of his address, and above all why on earth William would go anywhere to meet anyone who he had never met and didn’t know what they wanted.

  But no more emails arrived. No one got back to him. For the second time, the unease left him–but what refused to go was the hope. The hope that someone would have something to tell him after all.

  Three weeks later he arrived at Stockholm’s Central in a yellow taxi, walked through the great hall to the northern platforms, and was knocked down by three discreet men.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ the woman opposite said once William had gone quiet. ‘Who did you think you were going to meet?’

  He avoided their eyes as he answered.