Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  In the East, the same thing had been known as psychotronics. And needless to say, it hadn’t worked for them either. It hadn’t worked because it was impossible, and when the race between East and West had finally run its course the projects had been shut down and classified, presumably more out of embarrassment at what they had been doing than to keep any progress secret.

  With hindsight, it was silly, laughable, nothing more. It was pseudoscience, nonsense bred out of desperation in an era when science did not know what it does today. And yet—

  ‘If you’re trying to tell me that that’s how they know I’m here,’ William said, ‘if you seriously believe that someone’s been reading my thoughts… I don’t think you’d like to read what I think of that.’

  He let his gaze drift into the non-existent view ahead of them. Felt his jaws tightening, because in spite of everything, there was still a little part of him that was already saying what if. Only he could have known about the email from Piotrowski. Only he could have known that he’d decided to head for Warsaw. And even he hadn’t known that he was going to check in to the Hotel New York until the very moment that he did so.

  Despite all of that, they had found him. Of all the millions of cameras in all the world they had happened to choose that one, a camera in a country where he shouldn’t even be, and the chances of all that happening at random were so infinitesimally small that there had to be another explanation.

  There was–and he didn’t like it one bit.

  ‘With all due respect,’ he said, in a voice that contained nothing of the sort. ‘With all fucking respect, that stuff is no more than sophisticated nonsense.’

  Instead of replying, she took her foot off the gas, let the car slow down on the narrow road and waited for the turning that she knew was going to emerge from the mist.

  The building. That’s where they were heading. From up close, it looked like a solitary airship being born from the Earth’s core, countless storeys of glass shooting straight up from the ground with countless tiny spotlights in all the countless offices inside. The large car park unfolding in front of them must have been thousands of square metres and yet not a single car was parked there. Undeterred, she continued across the deserted area, not stopping until she arrived in the far corner, a patch where the powerful industrial floodlights on their high masts could not quite reach.

  She turned off the engine, and sat quietly as she tried to formulate her response. ‘You’re right. I’m not going to deny that. For three, four decades, a lot of stuff went on that with hindsight seems anything but sensible. Research driven by fear, superstition, fantasy. They were fumbling in the dark, because the dark was all there was to fumble in.’ Again she shrugged her shoulders. ‘But we’ve come a long way since then.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She took the keys from the ignition, got out of the car and started walking into the darkness.

  It was only once they got inside that William realised how big the building really was. Above them, the enormous lobby stretched upwards like a great column of nothing, a great atrium of air all the way up, at least thirty storeys, to a glass ceiling with the lead-grey night sky above it. The floors of the building wove around the atrium in loop after loop of curvaceous balcony, walkways that formed complete circles in front of the glass walls of offices which lay in darkness.

  In the centre of the lobby was a reception desk, as round and clinical as everything else, made of white metal and glass, and with the names of the building’s tenant companies etched into steel plaques behind it. It was divided into two semicircles, and on the floor between them were two unoccupied workstations. The lights were off, the computer and TV screens flickering to themselves, alone and without an audience.

  William panned across the rows of static CCTV, the entrance, the car park, and there, in a dark corner: their car. And last of all—

  It was no surprise of course, yet it still put a knot in his stomach. There, on one of the many monitors, he saw himself. Dark blue suit, baseball cap and windcheater, leaning on the reception desk and with his eyes fixed on a screen which–if the resolution had been high enough–would in turn have shown him, looking at a screen, and so on into infinity.

  ‘William?’

  Rebecca’s voice echoed around the vast space. At the edge of the ground floor, three transparent lift shafts reached up through the storeys above, and she was standing by one of them, the door to the glass lift open in front of her. She beckoned him over.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked as he joined her.

  ‘That depends who you ask. According to the prospectus, this is Eastern Europe’s leading centre for scientific research and development.’

  She pushed the top button and William could feel them moving, shooting upwards like a pneumatic post capsule in a world where they were the only ones alive.

  ‘If you ask me, it’s a bloody expensive glass tower that hadn’t reckoned with the financial crisis.’

  From below, the various floors had seemed small and claustrophobic, but as they stepped out onto the highest gangway William realised how wrong he had been. Beyond their glass walls, he could see whole office landscapes opening out, with doors leading to meeting rooms and kitchenettes, and far over there, on the other side of everything, were the massive glass windows and the dark grey night outside.

  The gangway led to an anonymous glass door, and Rebecca pulled out a keycard, punched in a code, and waited for the lock to let them pass.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said as she continued into the darkness on the other side.

  ‘Thanks,’ said William, stopping just inside the door. ‘To what, if I may ask?’

  She answered without a smile. ‘Welcome to Michal Piotrow­ski’s sophisticated nonsense.’

  44

  After a while, suburban Bromma stops being Bromma and becomes forest. Metal roads become gravel, Thirties villas with effect lighting become small summer hideaways in overgrown gardens, empty and infirm, like abandoned elderly folk waiting for eternal rest.

  Christina Sandberg let the news team’s light blue Volvo struggle through a more and more hostile layer of snow, away from the main road and across pitted roads past rows of little post boxes. She passed signs that told her she wasn’t allowed, and she thought about turning back–but to what? Instead she kept going, just a little bit further, and then further, passing minute after minute of wooded track without seeing a single house.

  Eventually the road ended with a robust fence of thick wooden poles. A boom barrier blocked her path, complete with a little yellow sign. Private, it said, and she stopped, found herself just sitting there behind the wheel.

  She was already regretting it. But there was something about what he’d said that made it impossible to turn around, not now. He was the last fragile straw for her to clutch at in a world that had lost everything, her only alternative to darkness and loneliness and emptiness. The only way she could avoid facing herself.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she turned off the engine and stepped out into the darkness. A vast starry sky had begun to push its way through the gaps in the clouds, and the silence was different out here–clearer and drier and rustling of crystals.

  Slowly, she approached the barrier. The road on the other side seemed to run on into the darkness, but no matter how she peered she could make out nothing at the far end–no buildings, no lights, nothing. And sitting in a warm, locked car had been one thing, but now, alone in the darkness with the cold biting her skin, what was she supposed to do? Climb inside? Shout and see what happened? Or just leave?

  Truth was she knew nothing about him. He seemed harmless, but what does seemed mean? He was a conspiracy theorist, fearful verging on paranoid, and there might be all kinds of installations on the plot–weapons, traps, God knows what–and suddenly she changed her mind—

  She had just started to back away when the light came on. The next thing she knew, she lay on the ground, her eyes were sti
nging, arms folded in front of her face to shield her from the intense whiteness that shone from everywhere. She had recoiled, slipped on the frozen ground, and now her knee hurt, her back too.

  Motion sensors. Of course he had motion sensors. He was paranoid, and if anyone was going to have an alarm round the perimeter of their land it was him. She could make out at least six different floodlights, mounted on the gateposts and the trees around her, and as she lay there like a human deer, frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car, she slowly realised that the floodlights might just be the beginning. Maybe she’d triggered an alarm somewhere, perhaps there would be dogs barking before long, loping towards her on the other side of the fence.

  She had just managed to haul herself off the slippery ground when she sensed that she had company.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she said.

  ‘I thought you said you had my number.’

  She swallowed.

  ‘What I want to talk about may not be suited for discussing over the phone.’

  Seconds later she heard the barrier swing open. Alexander Strandell, better known as Tetrapak, emerged from the darkness, and beckoned her to follow him.

  The instant Rebecca Kowalczyk switched on the lights, William realised that resistance was futile.

  The space they had just entered wasn’t so much of a room, more of an auditorium. All along the far side were floor-to-ceiling windows, like a bowed, transparent wall, and to the left the scene was dominated by what looked like a small command and control centre. There was a plinth, raised two steps higher than the surrounding floor, above which a handful of office chairs faced a long, continuous desk, white and sterile like a worktop in a kitchen catalogue.

  The thing that really grabbed his attention though was the other half of the room.

  ‘Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.’

  ‘How would I know what you think it is?’ Rebecca said behind him. ‘That’s impossible, right?’

  She passed him and stepped up onto the bridge, steps that sounded hollow and that echoed as she climbed up onto the plinth and sat down at the desk, her back to William and facing the thing that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

  In the middle of the right-hand side of the room, three freestanding booths had been erected. They were separated from the rest of the room by huge glass blocks, decimetre-thick uneven panes that made the reality on the other side seem like indistinct ripples. The glass walls were decorated here and there with bright yellow Post-it notes, like a reluctant demonstration that there was actually some activity going on amidst all the sterility and high design.

  In the middle booth was something that could be best described as an office. There was a desk, chalky white and basically empty, save for a few bundles of paper at one end. On one side of it was a simple office chair and on the other a soft electric recliner–a contraption somewhere between a dentist’s chair and a business-class seat on a long-haul flight.

  The thing that had caught William’s eye though, was the light grey ribbed plastic tube hanging from the ceiling. He walked over towards it. A thick bundle of multicoloured wires emerged from the tube, fifty, maybe more, bound together like colourful nerves spilling from a grey plastic spinal cord. They were lying in neat bundles on each desk, and at the end of each cable was a shiny disc.

  ‘EEG,’ he said.

  ‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘But 2.0.’

  He turned towards her just as she put her hand onto the surface of the command desk. A weak purple glow lit her skin from underneath, sniffing its way along her palm for a second, then once more in the opposite direction before disappearing, leaving the surface as white and empty as before.

  It took a second, then the room sprang to life. From the control desk, a series of matt-black screens rose up in front of each of the chairs, the size of paperback books and integrated into the desk surface like minimalist white loft hatches in a minimalist white ceiling. Below each one the desk glowed with a weak, warm light, presumably projecting keyboards in front of the operators.

  But William’s eyes were fixed firmly on the wall in front of her. In a single, silent movement, it seemed to crack into diagonal lines, turning into triangular panels and slowly rotating out of view like the shutter in a camera lens, disappearing into the floor and up into the roof and revealing another bank of matt-black screens. He counted at least eighteen of them, all connected in sequence to an enormous screen that ran the entire length of the control desk, and for a second it reminded him of sitting in the military’s own command centre, but 2.0, as Rebecca put it.

  Her voice woke him out of his thoughts.

  ‘Two million euros, and you can’t even get Champions League on it.’

  She seemed almost to be whispering to herself, and he observed her from the corner of his eye, watching the screen being reflected in her eyes.

  ‘Twelve years. We worked here for twelve years, me and Michal. Not once did he start the system up without saying that.’

  Her fingers tapped away at the invisible keyboard in front of her, summoning two flashing commands onto the built-in monitor directly in front of her, and in the next second the huge wall of monitors above was filled with information. Diagrams and tables formed rows of well-defined, neatly laid out fields, all without content, white squared patterns on a black background. In the centre, the framed image showed a video, blue-grey but pin-sharp, a desk seen from above, and a number of cables and—

  William turned around. Sure enough, right above the workstation in the booth behind them was a ceiling-mounted camera, a shiny black dome whose picture was being relayed onto the screen in front of them.

  He lowered his head instinctively, an attempt to shield himself in case there were more. The pinhead-sized black circles on the command desk? Probably. The other glass domes in the room, above the entrance, by the booths, in the centre of the floor? Most likely. But were they in use? Were they recording right now? He held his breath, forcing himself to repeat the same mantra as on his way in: that no one could know that he was here. That as long as he made sure to cover his face then no one was going to find him. Unless, of course, she’s right.

  He hated himself for thinking it, but the thoughts refused to go away. What was all this? The brightly coloured cables on the desk. The EEG. Michal Piotrowski’s sophisticated nonsense.

  ‘Worked on what, exactly?’ he asked, as he climbed up onto the platform next to Rebecca.

  Over on the screen, one of the fields had caught his eye more clearly than everything else. It showed an array of oval diagrams, lined up in order alongside the video feed–schematic representations from various angles, picked out in white against the dark background. They were maps of the human brain.

  ‘What am I looking at here?’

  Her answer made him shiver.

  ‘We call it Project Rosetta.’

  Christina didn’t really know what she’d been expecting, but as she walked through the hall and into a living room, she realised that she hadn’t been expecting a home. There was a faint smell of a dinner he must have cooked very recently, onions fried in butter perhaps, a sweet, welcoming scent that mixed with fresh coffee and the smoke that leaked from the wood-burning stove. In the middle of the room was a three-piece suite in mottled, satchel-brown leather, and beyond that a desk of dark-stained wood, all straining under the weight of neat piles of books and periodicals or equally well-stacked electronic devices.

  The ceiling was low. The walls and ceiling panels were made of yellow pine, and the floor strewn with overlapping thick rugs bearing deep red patterns and giving the room a dry, calming quiet. The stacks of books and magazines spread out in all directions, on shelves, on the floor, on tables, on chairs, and try as she might, she could see no evidence of tinfoil around the windows, no chicken wire lining the walls to disrupt electronic bugging devices, nothing to suggest that this was the home of a paranoid lunatic terrified of wide-reaching, awful conspiracies.

  ‘Disappointed?’ she heard
Tetrapak ask behind her.

  She noticed his squinting smile, two warm eyes and something resembling a dimple that caused his beard to gather in a tuft on one cheek.

  ‘I’m not quite as mad as people expect. Sorry about that.’

  He gestured towards a stool in front of one of the bookcases, and she realised for the first time that it actually belonged to a grand piano that seemed to have retired from music some time ago, the flaking nut-brown varnish on its closed lid hidden under even more piles of books. She sat down, while he took a seat by the desk.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to get in touch,’ he said.

  ‘Neither did I,’ she replied. ‘First of all, you should know I’m not here as a journalist. I can’t promise you a single letter about you or what you tell me, not in my paper, nor anywhere else. All I can promise is that I’m going to listen.’

  ‘That’s a start.’

  ‘When you came to me yesterday,’ Christina said. ‘What was it you wanted to warn me about?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. That the power cut was just part of something much bigger. And that the authorities knew it was coming.’

  ‘And that’s based on the radio communications that you’ve come across. On frequencies that have been silent since the Cold War.’

  ‘Amongst other things.’ She gave him a quizzical look, and he explained himself. ‘I can show you small, insignificant articles from newspapers from around the world. I’m sure you can find even more in your archives.’

  ‘Articles about what?’

  ‘About power cuts, commonplace everyday events from around the world. A collapsed substation here, a faulty transformer there. But if you compare all the dates with those of the transmissions…’