Mattias Berg - The Carrier

Even one part of the previously dotted blue connection from Esrange in Kiruna all the way down to what I now knew to be Niscemi in Sicily, a wide arc over a large part of the world, had become solid. But the other arc in the circle, from Niscemi back up to Kiruna, was still dotted and incomplete. This was no doubt what we had come to fill in. The end of the story.

Ingrid zoomed in on the black cross on Sicily—and a square popped up on the screen, emerging from the place itself. Exactly the same scene I had watched many times during the past year, ever since my fiftieth birthday in February, when I received the D.V.D. anonymously at my office at the university. The one in which Greta Garbo as Mata Hari tries to take the telephone receiver from Lionel Barrymore as General Shubin. The two enemies who Jesús María had later tried to change us into with her surgeries, either for fun or in deadly earnest.

Ingrid started to play the scene. A new code surfaced in my subconscious: itching, nagging, a feeling one cannot fully describe. Twenty-four digits and three letters swirled through my brain. Nine sequences of three each, like the nuclear weapons codes. 151 221 621 11R 211 612 21C 19D 216.

I deciphered the message. Once again used the strange key sentence from the darkest days of my childhood. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen .

And the clear text turned out to be simple, much more straightforward than I had been expecting, without any of Ingrid’s usual cryptographical refinement. “THESE ARE THE CODES” was all it said. No more, no less.

Yet I listened to Ingrid’s proud tones, like those of a child, without once looking at her. Just gazed straight ahead at the screen.

“Elegant, don’t you think, my treasure? Antiquity’s most secret art wrapped up in our most modern systems, a technological span of about 2,500 years. It took time to perfect it all. But you can’t get any more secure than this, with the R.S.A. cryptosystem likely to be cracked soon, when all our digital security will have crumbled.”

She clicked on the keyboard and the image dissolved into pixels. The code had been contained in one single frame. The sequences which had been implanted in me using subliminal techniques, in a split second, and furthermore hidden inside a classic old movie.

I was impressed, as always, but not convinced.

“You know that sooner or later even this type of advanced steganographic file will be opened up.”

“But of course, my treasure. I’ve therefore made some other arrangements. Belt and suspenders, as they say.”

Ingrid fast-forwarded, basically through the whole movie, all the way to the ending. In the very last scene, that strange feeling came back to me—as if something was itching in the furthest recesses of my mind: just as Mata Hari is being taken out to face the firing squad. Ingrid rewound, and then played the movie forward again, extremely slowly, frame by frame.

I noted yet again the strange fact that in the movie Greta Garbo never delivered the line “I am ready” to her guards. The perfect last words which the real life Mata Hari is said to have spoken when she was fetched for her execution in France on October 15, 1917, at the height of the First World War. Sentenced to death as a German spy even though she was in fact working for the French.

Then Ingrid froze the movie at the precise moment when Garbo steps out of her prison cell. I checked the figures on the single frame onto which they had been written against that same key sentence from my childhood—but got nowhere. However I tried to read the sequences, I could make no sense of them. Ingrid laid paper and pen before me on the floor and I wrote down the numbers and letters, exactly as they occurred to me in my unconscious. 111 319 172 015 151 65K 101 117 10C O31 018 412 P10 R24 151 2O1 24.

I felt the heat of her stare from beside me. My cheek began to glow, as if it were about to catch fire.

“Use your imagination, Erasmus. Your wonderful memory. Our common history. Because what was it that you wrote to me when you signed the dissertation? You must recall, surely? That sentence on the front cover which I tore out and immediately burned, just to be on the safe side, but will still remember for the rest of my long life.”

Reflexes are a funny thing, the way memory works. Suddenly I started simply to speak the sentence out loud, even though I had devoted hardly any conscious thought to it for more than a decade. To my dear supervisor and friend, who helped me enjoy the unrelenting hunt for Lise Meitner’s half-century-old secret—although I never managed to find it .

I did not even have to wait for Ingrid’s reaction, since I already knew the answer was right. I started to decrypt the code with the aid of the new key sentence. The first letter of the first or maybe eleventh of its words, in both cases a “T”. Then the first letter in the first or thirteenth word in the key sentence, again a “T” or an “H”. I scribbled down the letters and the words, rapidly found my way through to possible and less likely alternatives. What the clear text soon revealed was not actually a message on its own—it was just meant to be hooked onto the earlier one.

I read it out aloud for Ingrid, as if in class.

“THESE ARE THE CODES—THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”.

Ingrid nodded calmly. Then, in a gentle, matter-of-fact tone, almost hypnotically:

“An entirely new program, my treasure. The file size doesn’t alter when new information is added, which was of course otherwise the weak point in digital steganography, as you know.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?” I said.

“Oh, I think that will become obvious when the time comes.”

She closed the window showing the map of the world, as well as Greta Garbo surrounded by guards in the frozen “Mata Hari” scene. All the sequences of numbers hidden inside one single frame of the movie.

“So this is our insurance, yours and mine, in case neither of us can remember the code at the crucial moment. As we stand there with the weight of the world on our shoulders. Now you too have a chance to learn it. In one day, two, a week, maybe a month—until it’s time for the final combat. The battle for our souls. For the future of mankind. Before then you have to know it by heart, my treasure.”

Ingrid closed the lid of the portable command terminal, folded her body together softly. I still felt her gaze burning in from the side but I kept on staring straight ahead. Tried to control my nausea, the classic side-effect of subliminal tampering on my cerebral cortex, the very depths.

“Because man thinks that it’s he who controls the nuclear weapons system. But there’s probably no need for me to remind you about computers, Erasmus, the ‘war games’ phenomenon, the entire space program, nuclear power which did not come into the picture until more than twenty years after nuclear weapons. Everything which we originally created for the sake of that system and not for ourselves. So it’s not we who control the nuclear weapons. It’s still they who control us.”

Only then did I look at her, right into her eyes, perhaps because she took my arm and turned me carefully to face her.

“And yes, my treasure, I do doubt—that we will actually rise to the challenge, you and I. Every waking moment, all through the nights. That we really will be able to stand up to our own darkest sides. The entire Doomsday syndrome.”

After that, we bided our time.

I recorded Ingrid’s story in my notebook, detailed everything she had told me. I also continued my rock-hard training sessions on the mattress and took freezing showers, while Ingrid spread herself out more and more across the room with her yoga asanas , like a spider.