Mattias Berg - The Carrier

So I let Sixten regain his composure, lead us further down, without my having the slightest idea where we were. He kept checking his watch. After another couple of control boxes we emerged into darkness: unprepared tunnels, without either light diodes or floors being covered with any sprayed concrete. Then he got his headlamp out of his backpack and led me over the raw bed-rock, holding me gently under my left elbow because I did not take my own lamp out of the hybrid. It was a way of showing confidence. Giving back something in the exchange game.

“Where are we now?” I said, not least to underscore his authority as pathfinder.

“In the furthest outer edge. The idea was to make the area impressive. In total, 215,000 square feet of ground, many miles of tunnels just to connect the living quarters with the different laboratories.”

“But it didn’t end up like that?”

“No.”

A short pause for effect.

“It ended up many times larger. An almost exponential growth in the original plan—and not at all how it was first intended. I should say that in the end it was only Ingrid and I who had an overview and could work out precisely where one thing began and the other ended. Over time at least half of Stockholm was burrowed out and tunneled through. A complex system in which inside and outside somehow began to swap places, like a logical paradox, an impossible picture by Escher. And even though we called it all the Inner Circle, nothing down here was really circular or symmetric.”

After a few minutes of watchful walking—even Sixten stumbling every now and then despite his headlamp—he stopped and bent forward, mumbling:

“S.T.33, S.L.143… just after the bend… I’m sure it was somewhere here…”

Then I saw it, maybe before he did. A red trap-door in the ground, blasted into the uneven bed-rock, with the same type of chrome capital letters as in the Plutonium Laboratory. I could read “F.E.” in the light of Sixten’s lamp.

“So what’s under there?”

“Haven’t got the faintest idea.”

“You haven’t looked? Seriously?”

“Dead serious, Erasmus.”

His tone darkened. I stood, waited for him to continue.

“Aina isn’t too happy about my digging in history—so I promised her never to find out. But eventually I came to think that you could do it, Erasmus. There isn’t anyone better suited.”

“And why don’t we just open the hatch now, Sixten?”

“Because we don’t have the key.”

Once again: there is a time for follow-up questions, just as there is for answers. I continued to let Sixten dictate the pace.

“Besides which, we’ve got to get back up now, pretty quickly—so we’ll have to take the shortest route. Don’t let me out of your sight.”

The time was 02.38, the depth 195. My whole body was aching as we moved steeply through the dark, raw tunnels with Sixten’s headlamp shining the way, our breath growing heavier. I was drained after the run and the sight-seeing tour. After Sixten’s story.

By 03.13 we had come up to level negative 18.4 feet. Then I recognized where I was: this was the last spiral staircase up to Sixten and Aina’s house. We must have taken some sort of dark short cut, one of a myriad alternatives through the tunnel system.

Sixten entered the code on the box in among the crevices in the rock wall—and the concealed trap-door hatch above the staircase slid aside. He crawled up first, then helped me through the hole with my enormous hybrid, and glanced at his watch.

“We’ll have to get a bit of a move on.”

He pushed the washing machine back over the trap-door and started to move the dryer, revealing what seemed like another ordinary but somewhat oversized drain. I thought it must be another way down into the tunnel system, possibly an emergency exit from the house in case the first one became blocked. He got this trap-door to open.

What this revealed was a metal panel with a muddle of tiny controls and abbreviations lying flat under the floor. Most of them began with “T”, from 1 to 191 in symmetrical rows from left to right. There were also longer abbreviations such as “T.R.C.1”, “T.R.F.C.6”, “N.I3”, “T.232” and “O.G.F.4”.

“So here it is,” he said with a satisfied little smile.

“Yes: the control panel from the Liaison Center up in the Office,” I said.

“Spot on, Erasmus. I took it with me when everything was to be removed: thought it might come in handy. And I’ve worked for a long time, I’d like you to know. Prepared for your arrival down to the tiniest detail, even though Ingrid kept me waiting so long for an exact date.

“The hardest part was the initial work. To connect our house—we were still able to choose this very one, since it didn’t have the best view but was perfect for my needs, logistically and geologically—to the system. I knew that the thickness of the surface layer out here varied between ten and fifty feet and that this part had the softest clay. Yet it took time to dig down the necessary thirty-six feet or more before striking one of our old tunnels. Then to break through into it, synchronizing with the construction company’s night-time work so that no-one would notice the racket, and at the same time avoiding tunneling through into their own network.

“But I got to know the developer out here, decent guy, who was happy to show me all of the plans. Then there was a rather extensive bit of electronic installation. New control boxes along the whole system, new code, new network down in the Test Rooms.”

While Sixten was telling me this, interesting as it was, I was studying the designations on the control panel. It offended the cryptologist in me that I did not understand. So in the end I had to ask for a clue.

“T.R.C.1, for example, Sixten? O.G.F.4? Or T.232? Just so I understand the idea.”

“Yes, yes. The first ones are quite easy. The lighting in Test Rooms Case 1, furthest in on the eastern short wall. The Office Ground Floor Switch 4. But then it gets less straightforward. The ‘T.’ designations stand for the L.E.D.s in the floors of the relevant tunnels. Counting from the surface downward, in a rather complex cross-section system referring to the relative level where the particular connection ends: T.232, in other words, is tunnel number 232 from above, seen in cross-section, within the Inner Circle.”

I just stared at him. All this elaboration. All these efforts to hide. Something.

“There is of course a lot more I could explain about this, but now’s not the time. Using this control panel, however, we were able to turn the lights on and off at pretty much every point in our vast system. And you can imagine how I was amazed when the entirety of this machinery—the diodes in the ground, the illumination in the laboratories, basically all of the hatches and doors except for the ones up in the Office—still functioned.”

“The display case furthest in along the short eastern wall—the one with the stuffed animals, the gorilla and the zebra?”

“Correct. I’m illuminating it there now: a bit of night lighting for you and Ingrid.”

He flipped up the switch marked T.R.C.1, gave a quick smile and looked at his watch. I did the same: almost 04.00.

“I don’t have time to explain more. Eventually I’ll tell you about it all, before our day of reckoning. But I can say that we needed to know more about the long-term effects of certain particular substances—so I managed to get hold of those animals and skeletons, which back then were in magnificent condition, and which would otherwise have ended up in some store room at the Natural History Museum. And when I returned to the Test Rooms after four decades, and was so shaken by their condition, my first intention was to get rid of them before your arrival. But then I thought they would be a kind of witness to all this horror, what the fight is actually all about. Hopefully be some kind of inspiration for your imminent mission.”