One. Four. Zero. One. One. Nine.
Forester, meanwhile, saw the images in the cafeteria. She saw them on the television set behind the counter, beyond the glass shelves and the cling-filmed sandwiches and the juice that tasted more like a whizzed-up periodic table than any known fruit, and she stood there, motionless, until the queue behind her started mumbling with irritation.
There was really no need for sound to tell her what was going on. The scrolling news ticker told her more than enough. A fire in a coastal town on Long Island.
Those bastards, she thought to herself as she sprinted back through the building. Those bastards are covering their tracks.
Seven. Seven. Four. Eight. Six. Zero. Two.
When she got to the JOC the others were already there, eyes fixed on the screens. Only now did she realise the scale of it all, that Brookhaven was just one of an almost unimaginable number of places, and she stopped to watch the broadcasts, feeling the rage boil up inside her.
When Palmgren came towards her, with the shaven-headed Polish woman one step behind, Forester cleared her throat to make sure her voice would carry.
‘It’s them,’ she said. ‘They’re destroying the evidence that Floodgate existed.’
To her surprise, Palmgren shook his head. He searched for words, and when he couldn’t find them he turned towards Rebecca instead. You tell her. When she spoke, she too had to clear her throat.
‘I think they’re doing a lot more than that.’
Three. Nine. Five. Five. Three.
They just stood there, watching the screens, for several minutes. In city after city, the fire eliminated not only any trace of a project that should never have seen the light of day, but also, if Rebecca Kowalczyk was right, the consciousness that had been out there, that weird and perplexing sentient life that they had turned into an enemy. They were now busy truncating its neural pathways, shutting down the routes that made thought possible, the same irreversible procedure as it would be on a human brain. They were sacrificing a life for the sole purpose of avoiding detection.
As Forester approached Christina on the far side of the room she had already made her decision.
‘Christina?’ she whispered.
‘What is it?’ Christina said, turning to face her.
Before she responded, Forester lowered her voice another notch.
‘Confidentiality of sources is protected in Swedish law, is it not?’
William had almost fallen asleep in the white desk chair when he noticed a new text shining out at him from the dark screens. He opened his eyes, and blinked hard to make them focus on the letters, a single word bang in the middle of all the blackness.
>William?_
William straightened up in the chair. Outside, dawn was breaking, a thin stripe of golden pink stretching across the horizon, as though someone had torn a slit in a heavy black curtain.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m with you now.’
>I think it’s started.
‘What has?’
Instead of answering, the wall of screens changed its appearance once more. On screen after screen the black background was replaced by direct streams from various news channels, just like before, with graphics and news tickers and headlines in different languages. There were pictures from channels William had barely heard of, American and French and Portuguese, some from helicopters and some from cameras on the ground, all surrounded by cordoned-off buildings in various locations. They all had two things in common though: the lapping water in the background and the thick, black smoke.
Fire in Data Cable Station. Explosions disrupt Internet Coverage.
‘What’s happening?’ said William.
The answer came from all directions, from the few screens that weren’t streaming newsfeeds, and from the small built-in monitors on the control desk in front of him.
>I lost after all._
And then:
>They are destroying me._
William said nothing. He placed a hand on the monitor in front of him, realised that it was meaningless, but left it there anyway.
‘We don’t know that.’
>Yes. I can feel it._
William sat motionless for a long time, looking for something to say.
‘I think you were wrong,’ he said eventually. ‘What you said, earlier. I don’t think you need to know where you’re from for you to know who you are. I think you are a good person. And I think you know that too. We don’t know each other very well, but I would very much like to.’
The pause that followed was exactly the right length.
>If you’re trying to flirt with me I’m not your type._
That came as such a surprise that William could hear himself chuckle.
And all the while, news kept coming. The screens showed new towns, new fires, and the speculation was coming thick and fast. Once again, there was talk of coordinated attacks. Could this be the same perpetrator? Was this plan B when the power stations didn’t get results? Was it an attempt to destroy our electronic infrastructure? Experts expressed their opinions via subtitles and in various languages, and they were all agreed on one thing: that if the aim of the attacks was to wipe out the internet, it was not going to work.
The internet, they explained, was too big to be stopped.
That was true, and yet it wasn’t.
>I am scared.
‘I’m here.’
He sat for a long time, the screens on the desk in front of him, a companionship and an intimacy that was the best he could manage.
He thought about the morning that was about to arrive, about his own life that would go on after all, about Sara and the tiny toilet on the high-speed train bound for Gothenburg. And all the time he left his hand resting where it was.
No one should die alone.
The first revelation came in the early hours of the morning. The newspaper was Swedish, the source was anonymous, and the article arrived at the point in the day when the presses would normally be at their quietest. Despite this, the news spread like wildfire, and within half an hour every news site in every corner of the world was dominated by the same words.
Floodgate.
Surveillance.
Serious infringement of personal liberty.
Words like illegally and without parliamentary approval, and Defence Secretary and Anthony Higgs.
Higgs sat motionless behind his large, heavy desk, his head tipped forward, hands tightly grabbing his hair just above his forehead, two bunches that pushed through his fingers on either side of his centre parting. In front of him, standing between the two armchairs facing him from the other side of the desk, was Winslow.
‘What do we do now?’ Winslow asked, finally.
‘You’re young,’ Higgs said without looking up. ‘You can take your pick of any career.’
Moments later Mark Winslow passed the pillars, out towards the security checkpoint, towards the street, standing straighter and taller with each stride. Once he got outside, into the cold morning air, he decided to walk all the way home.
82
Nothing changed, yet as soon as it happened he knew. The silence was the same, the buzzing silence of a low-frequency hum, from screens and fans and electricity through cables and fluorescent tubes and bulbs. The darkness was unchanged too, just as the shine from the darkened screens, when backlight forced its way through empty spaces and made the pixels glow eerily black.
There was no hand to hold. No muscles to separate one moment from the next, struggling to stay around just one second more but losing the fight and disappearing. No grip that gently loosened, no gaze that went empty and made its peace behind eyelids.
Just silence, the same before and the same afterwards. Yet William Sandberg knew he was alone in the room.
To the world, the change was no greater than for William. Someone struggled to load a web page at the first attempt, some were logged out without warning, searches that should have given plenty of results drew blanks. But who cared abo
ut a few internet hiccups on a night like this?
All around the world people sitting at their computers checked their cables or restarted their modems or refreshed the page, and the next second everything was working again. And with that, the world had changed, and no one noticed a difference. No one, apart from those who knew.
Anthony Higgs had heard them trudging up the corridor, closer and closer, shouting at civil servants and advisers to drop whatever they were doing and move away from their computers. In room after room, his colleagues were ordered onto the floor to make sure they offered no resistance. Or, more to the point, to make sure no one started deleting evidence.
He heard boots stomping across the floor. Weapons jingling against their straps and hooks. And then, when the door behind him was forced open, he heard their surprise–safety catches being taken off and weapons raised, the hesitation in their silence that followed, the wind rushing in through the open window.
Over there, on the other side of the river, he could see Sedgwick’s office, and if the people in there had looked up at precisely that moment, they would have been able to see a Defence Secretary jump from his Whitehall window.
Outside Lars-Erik Palmgren’s villa in Saltsjöbaden, the only trace of everything that had happened was an unfamiliar moped.
As he stepped out of his car, he could feel the grief grow with every step, the same sense of loss you get from seeing an accident on the motorway, when you see the fire engines and the paramedics and the bowed heads. You don’t know who it is, but you still feel a pang.
He walked through the front door. Let his coat and his shirt fall to the floor as he went. And finally collapsed onto a bed that felt lonelier than ever before.
As Forester left the HQ, the woman from Poland was standing there, waiting by the entrance. She stopped at her side, both with freezing cold feet, hands in pockets, rocking gently to try and keep warm.
‘What are you going to do now?’ said Forester.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca. ‘Go home, I guess.’
That could have been that. It wasn’t until the first taxi arrived and Rebecca opened the door to get in that either of them spoke again.
‘We’re alive.’ That was Forester. ‘Let’s make the most of it.’
Rebecca nodded, closing the door.
She spent the length of the journey to Arlanda Airport asking herself where home really was.
When Christina climbed out of a taxi at the newspaper offices for the second time, the posters were once again shouting out headlines in black letters. This time though, it was relief and joy, and perhaps that was exactly what she should be feeling.
Yet she felt melancholy as she turned back to the taxi driver, just like last time, and asked him to carry on to Bromma on the newspaper’s account. The same Alexander Strandell in the back.
‘You’ve got my number,’ he said, for want of something better.
‘But we never call it,’ she said, with a smile.
‘I know. It’s terrible.’
As the taxi headed towards Drottningholmsvägen to carry on out to Bromma, she could have sworn that he turned around and looked at her.
William Sandberg stayed for a long, long time. He kept talking, softly and straight into thin air, calling and waiting and hoping for an answer. In the end though, he’d stopped. Accepted what he already knew. And he sat there, in a white chair next to the white control panels, in a room that was emptier than anyone could see.
It was there that William met the new day, and for a long time he sat looking out the window, watching the sky rise through a spectrum of colours, listening to the humming computers that had once identified a consciousness that should not have existed. One which, he knew, no longer did.
And, as always, where someone used to be, only emptiness remained. With that emptiness inside him, William Sandberg stood up and left.
Epilogue
That winter, they met time after time after time, but nothing got said. They met when she came to pick up the last of her things. They met to sign all the papers, to plan the funeral, and then when she finally signed the apartment over to him. Each time they wanted to say something, and each time they didn’t.
It wasn’t until autumn came that he visited the grave. He chose a shirt, put on his blazer and the trousers he only wore on special occasions. He looked at himself in the mirror for a long time, and hated himself for it. He was nervous, and there was no reason for that.
He waited in the car, in the car park. Then by the gates, the stone wall by the entrance. And he waited on the path, stopped along the way, waited and looked ahead as though he was thinking that maybe she would be standing there after all, smiling at him and saying hello. He waited and waited and in the end he’d waited all the way to her grave.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but no one heard.
And then he moved his lips and maybe, maybe he said that it sounded like a good idea at the time, but he was drowned out by the silence, by the raindrops hitting the leaves around him, hammering like restless fingernails on a table.
The stone was shiny and polished and bore her name. They had engraved two dates, which should have been further apart, but nothing was as it should have been. In front of the stone, someone had raked the gravel into soft lines, maybe her mother, maybe someone else, it didn’t make any difference. Sara had ceased to exist.
Like the numbers when a circuit board is switched off, like the sound of a bird when it has stopped singing. Replaced by silence.
A little life.
Acknowledgements
Oh yes. One more thing.
Six individuals have been crucial to the creation of this book.
At least three of them are human.
Sometimes I am not entirely sure which.
Bettina Bruun.
For everything. For reading and wisdom and support and encouragement. Without your patience I would need to get some of my own.
Wilhelm Behrman. Alexander Kantsjö.
For your wise thoughts.
Without them I would have had to grow some of my own.
Nevas. My. Skelle.
For, well, just in all kinds of ways.
Without your capacity for relaxing I would probably have forgotten how to.
And then the rest of you, who came in a close, close second:
My remarkable old friends at Partners in Stories and new ones at Nordins.
My remarkable friends at Wahlström & Widstrand.
And you, remarkable friends who are my publishers in other countries.
Thank you for believing in me.
Without all of you, this would have been a rather more limited adventure.
Last but not least.
You, for reading.
Who’ve managed to get all the way to this page.
Right down here, even though the story is already finished.
Thanks to you too.
Without you, this would be just a big pile of unread paper lying in a drawer.
Want more Fredrik T. Olsson?
Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.
Tap here to find your new favorite book.
About the Author
Born in 1969 outside Göteborg on the Swedish west coast, Fredrik T. Olsson spent most of his childhood writing, acting and producing plays. As he refuses to grow up, this is pretty much what he has kept doing since. A full-time screenwriter for film and television since 1995, Fredrik has written scripts in genres ranging from comedy to thrillers, as well as developing, showrunning and head-writing original material for various Swedish networks. He is also a stand-up comedian and makes occasional contributions as a director.
Also by Fredrik T. Olsson
Chain of Events
r>
Acts of Vanishing Page 47