Mattias Berg - The Carrier

“ Ecco . What I amused myself with while the M.U.O.S. began to be built over our heads—since I had to be in the vicinity but invisible, as Alpha. I had help from more or less the same construction team who were working up there on the surface, but at odd times. And also a number of others who were ideologically committed. Activists, moles, daredevils. People who signed up for the military only to deconstruct it. The sort whose silence one never has to buy.”

In here too the lights were out, but Ingrid’s napalm candles were more than enough. She pulled out one of the two chairs in front of the control console for me and sat down in the other. I sank into my seat. Scrutinized every one of the controls, all the possible functions, repeated the exact sequences of this technological-occult ritual for myself while Ingrid continued.

“The only thing we really needed to communicate to the local commanders was the huge importance of the installations. That even if the sky were to fall, the project had to go on. No details beyond that—only that nothing was to be obstructed, that the M.U.O.S. protests had to be suppressed at all costs. So I never had to make myself known. Could just hover around down here like an underworld spirit, an Alpha who gave her oracular orders digitally, everywhere and nowhere.”

I laid the hybrid on the floor, unlocked the keyboard, made the whole apparatus operational. Shut my eyes and just listened to that melodic voice.

“Yet not one of our secret helpers understood what I was doing during all those years; they were just working on a single piece of the puzzle and sometimes hardly even that. So no-one other than I, not even Ed, knew that this installation represented something so much bigger than the completion of the M.U.O.S. system. That the key to the whole of our nuclear weapons system was to be found here, 138.13 feet below the upper command center.”

She took out her computer, the portable command terminal, opened up the lid, started to key in the access sequences. I did the same, following the rhythm exactly. The cold-blue light of the screen blended with the warm glow from her crown of candles. My own shadow quivered on the steel wall to my left, like a ghost, an unholy spirit.

“The thought was that nobody other than Sixten and I would need the codes down here. My thought during all the years—the thing that honestly kept me sane, just enough, kept the pot simmering—was that it would be him and me sitting here now. Reunited in just this moment.”

I said nothing, nor could I utter a sound, just kept clicking my way into the system. Completed the first complicated series. Just what was necessary for the screen to be revealed in the lid, the simulated fabric screen slowly sliding away to the right, Alpha’s increasingly mannered security rituals. The puzzle pieces in the map of the world softly slid together, step by step: the sign that every one of the sequences was correct.

Only once the whole map became visible did the yellow triangles appear, one after the other, each needing another correct sequence of at least twenty-one and up to twenty-nine symbols. First our nuclear bases in Europe, now joined together with solid red lines. Then the image zoomed out over the Atlantic, to the U.S., the home nuclear bases. The numbers flickered before my eyes. I heard Ingrid’s words as a part of this whole ritual, everything seeming to flow together.

“Because it was important for me to keep to our regular security routines, just in case one of us might not be able to resist the temptation, the Doomsday syndrome. So there has to be two of us, we two, even in here: No Lone Zone . But it had to be you instead of him, my treasure, my best stand-in. Sixten should instead be standing guard at the bottom of the spiral staircase outside this door. That is what he and I agreed when we spoke on Christmas Day.”

I hacked ever deeper into the system, heard the muted sound of her keyboard at the same pace as mine. Her portable command terminal and my nuclear football. The man with the briefcase, the Carrier, with his Alpha. It ended with the blue lines meeting all across the world—all the way from Esrange in Kiruna to the one here in Niscemi. The Nuclear Family was now complete, all these correspondences under and above ground. Man had at last gained control over his own Fall.

I watched in awe as Ingrid stood up and placed a U.S.B. stick into one of the ports on the desk. The control console came alive, all the different screens lit up in blue and green, the monitor started with the same image as was on her computer and the inside of the lid of my briefcase. The world map, the bases, the yellow triangles.

Then she moved her chair closer to mine. I looked across at her—and she glanced back, gave me that look, before she fixed her gaze on her keyboard. Waited for me like an old jazz pianist. Counted the rhythm for herself.

The scene from the movie, when Mata Hari begins to tug at General Shubin’s arm to stop him from revealing her beloved Rosanoff as a spy, flickered past in my subconscious. Then I saw the clear text in my mind’s eye, “THESE ARE THE CODES…” I keyed in the sequences following exactly the same rhythm as Ingrid: 151 221 621 11R 211 612 21C 19D 216.

On all the screens—both hers and mine, as well as on the large round monitor on the control console—the red circle above the globe, between all of our nuclear weapons bases, started to blink rhythmically. The text “RED ALERT” soon covered the world map.

My whole field of vision grew small, seemed to be sucked in toward my brain with a strange fizzing sound, soon vanished almost completely. My hands became heavy and stiff. However hard I tried, I could not move them an inch in any direction.

Through my tiny hole to the world I could see how Ingrid was now looking right into the innermost part of me, as if I had neither skin nor skeleton. Once again she waited out my own rhythm, the next step in our mission, the message which en clair read “THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”. The life-critical sequences, so that she could synchronize her own movements and do the same.

But since I sat there immobile, doing absolutely nothing, the alert status soon switched over to “FIRING MODE”. All of our warheads around the world were now linked and ready to be fired off.

The text which appeared next on the screen I had never seen before. Not during any of Edelweiss’ most unthinkable scenarios, our very worst simulations, had I been able to imagine that any conceptual possibility like this was indeed built into the system. “WARNING: EXTINCTION MODE,” it said.

Yet my hands still lay there, like pieces of dead meat. The circles above the world started to blink in a fuzzy lilac, almost fluorescent color. This was the beauty of the apocalypse. A gentle electronic chirping sounded around the room. It could have been a shrieking alarm, maybe at full volume—but if so then tempered by my enclosed being, receptive only through that little hole to and from the world.

The yellow triangles on the monitor penetrated in my eyes, luminous with all their inconceivable significance. Villages, remote areas, hardly even places as such, which for some reason had been chosen to host our nuclear weapons according to the strategy we called “sharing”. Who were allocated their predetermined roles in this classical tragedy.

I heard a ghostly voice in the room. It took a moment to realize that it was I myself who was rattling off the names, like a medieval incantation: “Incirlik, Araxos, Aviano, Ghedi Torre, Ramstein, Büchel, Volkel, Kleine Brogel, Lakenheath, Kings Bay, Whiteman, Barksdale, Minot, Warren, Malmstrom, Kitsap. And then Niscemi… Niscemi… Niscemi.” The key to the entire system. The secret of secrets.