Friday, June 19, 2009

The Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden


The Stockholm archipelago was one of the most beautiful places in Sweden. It wasn´t spectacular like Switzerland, or exciting like a photo safari in Africa, but just like Tuscany, even though entirely different as a landscape, it had a similar special and unique atmosphere of its own. Spreading as far as 60 kilometers away from Stockholm, the archipelago had some 24 000 islands and islets, all of them bedrock that had been scoured smooth by the retreating ice age, then risen from the sea during the last five thousand years as the land itself rose a few millimeters a year after shaking off the weight of mammoth glaciers. Trees and meadows had formed over the rock, turning the islands into lush havens for wildlife, and now the beautiful summer houses and cottages of the people of Stockholm had given the finishing touch to the landscape. This was my first ever visit to the place and the warm summer evening, the sun low in the sky but still hours away from sunset, was the perfect time of the day to sit on the top deck of a small ferryboat and enjoy the beauty of the islands. A huge red and white Viking Line ferry with thousands of holidaymakers en route from Finland or Estonia majestically passed us by in the narrow strait, and the wake rocked my boat, making me smile despite the tension in the pit of my stomach.

Four attack drones were flying in a formation around the boat, unbeknownst to my fellow passengers who were on their way to their island summer houses for the weekend and happily chatting amongst themselves. There would be one more boat returning to town tonight, and I had an hour to spare before I´d have to be back on board once I reached the island where I was going. In my destination, in addition to protecting me, the attack drones would search and destroy any Axiom contraptions that they might find, and even though the mere cessation of transmissions would indicate my presence I should have enough time to retreat and disappear before a deliverance team could catch me. The Axiom had discreetly been informed that after their latest botched operation I was no longer fair game and further attempts to deliver me would lead to a confrontation; however, it was unclear what exactly would happen if my drones and an Axiom team faced each other off. This was uncharted diplomatic territory that everyone wanted to avoid at all costs, and I suspected that the live feed observation team contained some very high-ranking individuals indeed in addition to Mauro who would contact me through my cell phone as usual if anything went wrong. There had been some talk of adding communications hardware into my body, but in the end the risk of being found out after a freak accident had been considered too high. Not even Mauro had anything more than the usual neural mesh which would go unnoticed in a regular unsuspecting autopsy.

It was time to get off the boat. The island was fairly large, with a loose congregation of traditional wooden houses that might be called a village clustered near the jetty, but my destination was beyond them, on the other side of a small forest. I walked along the narrow dirt road past the houses, knowing that two of the drones were systematically checking them out, while the front runner was scanning the area directly ahead and the fourth buzzed around the island looking for less obvious threats and observation gear. So far, so good; my cell phone hadn´t rung yet. I left the village behind, and after walking about one hundred and fifty meters I caught my first glimpse of the house, a portion of the windowless back wall that camouflaged surprisingly well among the trees. The drones would have congregated around the house by now, two of them creeping inside through any cracks, windows left ajar, or air ducts. I turned the corner and entered the front yard, and couldn´t help stopping for a moment to admire the view. The facade of the ultramodern one-storey house was an expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing unobstructed view to a rather ascetic yet perfectly balanced front garden that gradually descended towards the sea and turned into bare rock for the last few meters where winter storms hit the hardest. The sea was dotted with islands big and small, most of them with a traditional summer house half-hidden by trees, and the amount of motor yachts and sailboats in sight made it clear that this was not the kind of place that economic downturns could touch.

I followed a stone-paved walkway to the front door and hesitantly stood there for a moment. The evening sun reflected from the glass facade, making it impossible to see inside and discern if you were being observed. For all I knew, he was watching me right now as I stood in front of the entrance, rousing courage to ring the doorbell. I took a deep breath, but just as I started moving my hand towards the fateful button my phone rang.

“Stay where you are,” Mauro ordered me. “Two hostile drones have been detected and are being dealt with right now. Neither can get through to you.”

A few seconds passed, and then, without a warning, a huge window pane at the corner of the house let out a loud cracking sound and crashed down in a cascade of sharp-edged pieces. Startled by the ear-shattering noise, I almost dropped my cell phone and took a step back even though I was at safe distance. A second later the front door swung open and there he was, right in front of me, wearing just a pair of comfortable-looking baggy shorts and nothing else, his blond hair tousled and a little too long as always.

“I see you´re back,” he said wryly. “I suppose that wasn´t a bullet because you´re not ducking.”

“Right, it wasn´t,” I replied. “But let´s not move just for a moment.”

He shook his head. “Why does the world always turn into a weird place when you´re around?” Then he frowned, running his eyes over me. “And you´re kind of creeping me out, kid. You don´t look a month older that you used to.”

“I´ll come to that in a moment... OK, what happened over there was that two attack drones – they look like insects but they´re not – have been hiding in your house to see if I show up. My own drones are taking care of them right now.”

Deadpan. “They seem to be taking care of my house, too.”

All things considered, he was showing impressive sangue froid, and sarcasm, while his house was being devastated by some presumed invisible insect things he surely couldn´t be taking seriously.

Not a moment too late, Mauro informed me that the attack drones had been disposed of and while we´d lost one of mine in the process the remaining three would make sure that we were safe, for the time being.

“Your cell phone is back, too.”

“Please lay off the sarcasm and invite me in,” I said, exasperated. “The attack drones are dead.”

Their presence had been something of a surprise, as we´d only expected to run into observation drones. Hopefully, the Axiom were only scoring diplomatic points by sacrificing attack drones but there was no way to be sure, and to avoid a confrontation that didn´t involve mere proxies, once again there was no back-up extraction team for me. It would be another two years in the White Room if something went wrong.

Harry stepped aside and gestured me to enter the house. The first thing we did was to check the damage to the kitchen, and along the way I had a closer look at his home. It was a dream, I grudgingly admitted, Scandinavian design at its purest and most minimal. White surfaces, bent wood, everything light and simple, glorified by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Come to think of it, the house in Midby had been perfect in its own way even though I hadn´t been so crazy about the country style. Britta should have been warned. In the kitchen, we discovered that the window had been the only casualty.

“It´ll be taken care of,” I promised, but Harry didn´t seem very interested.

Instead, his eyes never left me, and he seemed more preoccupied by the second. “You´re pulling me into some really weird shit once again.”

I could only shrug, a little shamefaced.

“I bet you already know that I married Britta and she divorced me.”

“I was told, yes.”

“And it took you five months to show up?” he asked with a smile, trying to shift the mood to something more normal.

“Sorry it took me so long. I was dead.”

He saw that I wasn´t joking, and his smile faded. I could tell he was becoming seriously disturbed, probably thinking that I´d gone crazy, but then, what had happened with the window and why did I still look fifteen even though two years had passed?

“Listen, kid, this is really starting to freak me out.”

I asked him to follow me to the living room, where we sat down on the couch and I told him everything. Or almost. I didn´t tell him that we were cousins, what my job had been before moving to Midby, and who Alex was, among other things. I didn´t tell him the reason for my visit, either. But I didn´t tell a single lie. For the entire time, neither did he stop me nor did he ask one question, and once I was finished he still remained silent.

“You died that night,” he finally said, his voice shaken. “And this body... it´s a different one? I mean, completely?”

I nodded.

“Fucking hell.”

“Listen, Harry,” I said, feeling like a jerk. “It doesn´t look like it´s going to rain tonight, so the kitchen should be all right until some people will come and take care of it in the morning. You and I, we should go. Just for tonight. We have fifteen minutes to catch the last ferry to town.”

“Is someone going to be shooting at us if we don´t catch the boat?”

The evening really hadn´t gone the way I´d planned. “Probably not.”

Probably?” He stood up.

“Are you angry at me?” What a stupid question. I could have kicked myself for letting it slip out.

“About your Peeping Toms watching me fuck you?” he said, not looking particularly un-angry. I wasn´t very happy about his unsentimental choice of a word for our sex life either. “I haven´t figured that one out yet. I´ll let you know.”

He was back in two minutes, in a pair of jeans and an unzipped hooded sweatjacket over a t-shirt. Even close to midsummer, the night air would be cool. My heart started beating faster as soon as he reappeared, and I realized I hadn´t expressly told him that for me only few days had passed. He gave me an inscrutable glance and nodded at the direction of the door. We still hadn´t as much as shaken hands, and now we were already leaving the house. I walked into the hall, knowing what I´d find there.

“Just a second,” I said and pointed at the two dead dragonflies on the floor.

With a shudder, I brought the heel of my shoe down on each one, and Harry´s eyes went wide as he heard the unnatural crunch and saw the way the remains turned into two tiny piles of greasy ash, leaving an acrid tang in the air.

“Those were the-”

“Yes.”

Harry looked around with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity, but of course there was nothing to be seen. The ferry was already approaching the jetty when we reached the village, and as the few people going towards Stockholm were all sitting on the top deck he lead me to the deserted lower one where we could talk freely. I sat down next to him, aghast at how unaltered the need to touch him had remained during the two years of regeneration.

He glanced at me, puzzled.

“You know,” I said, keeping my eyes on the retreating island, “it´s been just a few days for me.”

It took him a couple of seconds to understand my meaning. He let out something like a sigh, but didn´t reach out to touch me. This was definitely not going the way I´d planned. And as if on cue, my cell phone rang. Harry rolled his eyes.

“Bad news,” Mauro said, his voice unexpectedly low. “Our contacts know nothing about the attack drones. That means they weren´t there for you.”

I knew I wasn´t the center of the world, but this was weird, to use Harry´s favorite new expression, and not just a little scary.

Having given me a few seconds to think about it, Mauro added, “The logical conclusion is that they were there for Harry. To protect him.” I heard Mauro draw a deep breath. “He could be an Axiom hybrid.”

I must have tensed up or let out a small sound as Harry turned to me, with a deep frown. “Is everything OK?”

Keep the drones away. Do not touch him.

After just a second of delay Mauro responded, “We´re on standby.”

I turned to Harry and struggled to form a smile. “Just some diplomatic squabble, nothing to do with us.” I focused back on the phone. If this is a hybrid, where´s Harry? “Keep me updated, though,” I said aloud.

“I will.” There was a pause. “I´m sorry. If that´s not him, Harry is probably dead. Get to the upper deck, now.”

I ended the call and stared out of the window, not ready to face Harry, or the thing pretending to be him. I felt his eyes on me and felt a wave of panic rise inside, not because of the personal danger I was in but for Harry.

I couldn´t stop myself. If this one here killed Harry, I want you to rip him to shreds.

“What´s wrong?” Harry asked, and this time his large hand came down on my shoulder. “That wasn´t about just some diplomatic squabble. Talk to me.”

“I´ll let you know as soon as they tell me. I promise.”

He didn´t pull back his hand. All kinds of nasty things could be passing through to my skin from his fingertips touching the base of my neck. I racked my brain, trying to come up with at least one smart question to figure out who the man sitting next to me was, but my efforts were hindered by my dick which was instantly reacting to Harry´s touch. It was reassuring, in a way; it seemed that my subconscious was receiving just the right subliminal messages and considered him the real thing. Or he could be injecting my skin with pheromones with the exact same effect.

“You look like you´re going to start hyperventilating any second now,” Harry said. “Something´s seriously wrong.”

I shifted my position a little, just enough for him to see the massive erection bulging in my pants, and he pulled his hand back.

“Um... I see.” His eyes lingered on my bulge, and his face grew flustered.

“Why did Britta divorce you?” I asked, head on.

“She said there was a ghost in our house.” Harry leaned his head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “And the ghost wasn´t leaving, so she had to.”

“Why are you shunning me, then?”

“You´re drawing me into things I want nothing to do with,” he answered, looking me in the eyes. “And you´re lying to me.”

“Fuck...” I closed my eyes for a second. I might be seconds away from the White Room. “Mauro thinks you´re an Axiom hybrid.”

Harry looked at me, incredulous at first, then disgusted. “I knew there was a good reason why I hated the guy.”

Predictably, my phone rang, somehow sounding louder than usual.

“Are you out of your mind,” Mauro yelled at me. “We can´t protect you if pull stunts like that.” He cursed. “Stay on hold, we should be getting new information any moment now.”

Harry interrupted, more puzzled than angry. “Why would he think I´m a hybrid?”

“The attack drones weren´t there for me. Something weird is going on.”

“You can say that again.”

We stared at each other, and my heartbeat began to slow down. Either this was Harry, or the hybrid was trying to learn as much as possible before doing whatever it was planning to do. He ran his fingers into my hair, gripping a fistful, and pulled me closer.

“Can you tell your team to shut down the connection?” he murmured into my ear.

“They won´t until they´re sure you´re not a hybrid.”

“Bastards.”

His soft, full lips came down on mine, and at first I half expected something awful to happen. Nothing did, however, and I very soon I was thinking, for a weird scary mutant he sure kisses well.

Mauro´s voice was back on the phone, interrupting us. “Stop bragging... and ask him about his job.”

“My job?” Harry said with a frown when I relayed the question. “I have a degree in agronomy, and a few months after you left a head hunter contacted me about a job. I said no as I had no intention of leaving Midby, but once the divorce came through and I moved down here, after selling everything, I thought what the hell and called him. It turned out they had another vacancy and I took the job.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“It´s a company that´s trying to engineer a bacteria that will feed on useless minerals in the soil, turning it more productive without the help of chemical fertilizers that eutrophicate rivers and lakes. My job is to design field trials.”

It sounded great, but after I thought about it for a moment I grew somewhat alarmed. “What if it runs amok? Won´t it turn planetary crust into mush in a couple of centuries? What if it gobbles up my teeth after I´ve eaten the produce?”

“The bacteria can be tailored for specific minerals,” Harry said, imperturbed. “And several sets of suicide genes are built in. A thing like that could work wonders in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of transporting truckloads of prohibitively expensive fertilizer, you just sprinkle a spoonful of the stuff on your fields and that´s that until the next year.”

I was impressed, but I couldn´t figure out how this could be relevant to the attack drones. Mauro was hard at work digging up details, though, and my phone rang after just a few more minutes.

“Our financial search programs haven´t been able to trace back to the owner of the company, which can mean only one thing. It´s them.”

I was flabbergasted. “Why? Is the bacteria some kind of a Trojan horse?”

“No, actually it´s not,” Mauro replied. “Listen, you know we can only tell you things you need to know. What we haven´t told you until now is that the Axiom like to nudge things along just as much as we do, and just as inconspicuously. The bacteria in question was actually created rather a long time ago, but only now biotechnologies have gotten advanced enough to make it a plausible invention.”

“I see... so that´s why you tiptoe around them, no matter what some of them get hung up about.”

“Exactly.”

So the Axiom were philanthropists. That is, when they weren´t liberating people like me. It made some kind of twisted sense.

“They can´t let anyone realize what´s really going on, so they keep close tabs on the workers,” Mauro added. “And I´d guess it´s no coincidence that he´s your ex. Two pigeons with one stone.”

Harry was watching me attentively, waiting for an explanation. I ended the conversation with Mauro and turned to him.

“Bad news,” I said. “You´re working for the Axiom.”

He stared at me, and then shook his head. “So, wrecking my house and marriage wasn´t enough. Now you have to wreck my career, too.”

Put like that, it sounded quite bad, and try as I might I couldn´t fault his reasoning. I hadn´t been prepared to tell him the real reason for my visit, but this was the moment to do it. He watched me incredulously as I explained everything to him.

“So you want to put those Peeping Toms into my head, too?” he said crossly when I had finished.

“But the benefits...”

He checked his temper. “Are very good indeed. But I can´t have people in my head, watching and listening to everything I do. I just can´t.”

“Please think about it,” I begged. “I have this one chance to recruit someone-”

“Why are you telling me this now?” he interrupted. “Why not back at the house?”

“Because you don´t care for me any more,” I said heatedly. “I don´t think you even like me any more.”

He looked at me, taken aback. “That´s not true.” After having looked for words for a moment, he continued, “it´s just that every time I see you it´s like this huge wrecking ball smashes right through my life-”

“That´s because you keep fighting it! Just be who you are,” I said.

He looked at me, eyes narrowed. “And you think you know who I am?” He stood up. “You´re the most fucking arrogant person I´ve ever met.”

I watched after him as he walked out of the room and climbed to the upper deck. Mauro if you call me now with some smart piece of advice I swear I´ll string you up by the balls tomorrow.

While I was trying to decide whether to follow Harry to the upper deck or wallow in my misery below, a little old lady peeked into the lower deck. She was wearing a cheap jacket and skirt, but her gray hair was perfect as if she´d just pulled out the rollers and her silver glasses were matched by a rather conspicuous brooch and several rings in her fingers.

“Hello,” she said, stepping down the steep stairs into the room. “I´m sorry but couldn´t help overhearing that you were having a quarrel with that handsome boyfriend of yours. Now don´t you worry, it´ll be all right.”

I was a little surprised by her words. Not that an old lady was supportive of two boyfriends, there was nothing strange about that in Sweden, but it was unusual for a stranger to meddle even benignly into private affairs. She was sweet, though. And she looked quite agile for an old lady, with no sign whatsoever of artirithis or any other age-related ailment as she took the stairs and moved across the room towards me. Her head was cocked and she had the most sincere smile, and suddenly the hair on my neck was standing up. I discovered that I´d gotten on my feet even though I was still smiling back at her.

“Yes, I think I should go and talk to him,” I said, taking a step towards an aisle away from her.

“Oh, don´t be in such a hurry,” she pleaded, with a little wave of her ringed hand.

Then we both stood very still. Between us, there was a thin transparent sheet of something, shimmering like air above a black patch of asphalt in the summer. The old lady´s smile had turned into a near grimace and was quickly fading as her eyes searched for the source of the field and found two of my drones, looking like coal-black horseflies that had attached themselves to the ceiling. Her posture stiffened as she stared at me.

Keep Harry out of this. Don´t call him.

I knew my phone wasn´t going to ring and distract me until the situation had been resolved one way or another. The old lady was about to say something when Harry walked down the stairs – he had been watching over me, after all – and came to a halt when he saw the shimmering wall between us. For a moment, none of us moved or spoke.

“Harry, would you please step aside,” I said then, with as much calm as I could muster. “I think she was about to leave.”

Reluctantly he obeyed, acknowledging my presumably superior experience on this type of matters. The road clear, the old lady retreated with alarming speed, and for a second Harry was left staring after her with his eyes wide before he turned and strode over to me to see if I was all right.

“I´m OK,” I said, a little shakily, but Harry ran his hands all over me just the same to make sure I was unharmed.

He had barely finished when a dark shadow flitted in front of the windows and almost immediately there was a loud scream on the upper deck.

“She jumped,” a female voice was screaming. “That... that old woman... she just climbed the railing! She jumped!”

Instantly the captain went to work to reverse the engines, and we were almost thrown off our feet as the boat forcefully slowed down and started turning around. As soon as we´d regained our footing there was another unexpected sideways move, accompanied by the deepening roar of the engines, and Harry had to slam his arm around my chest and pull me back before I crashed on a table.

“What a bitch...” I said as soon as Harry had lifted me up. “I don´t think these drones can follow her underwater, and she can probably dive for two or maybe three hundred meters before she has to come up for air. If she has to come up at all.”

“Will they even try to follow her?” Harry asked. “I mean, if their job is to watch over you and try to avoid trouble.”

I nodded. “Right.”

Harry had his arm around me and didn´t let go even when Mauro called and told me that they were sending more drones to the boat, ETA fifteen minutes. With such a short time of arrival the new ones either had to be real fiends or the base happened to be orbiting nearly overhead.

“These look like blackbirds, and they´re pretty heavily armed,” Mauro reassured me. “Just so that you know, one of them could easily take out not only Stockholm but the entire archipelago.”

“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” I asked.

“It´s a bit of an overkill when it comes to firepower, but they´ve got much better sensors,” Mauro told me. “I think we´ll have to permanently upgrade your drones to these unless we lock you into some bunker.”

The boat came to a standstill. We sat down, and with Harry´s big protective arm around my shoulders I couldn´t deny that the hybrid had done me an unexpected favor. Luckily, no one came down to ask us what had happened. Old ladies like her were invisible to other people, and nobody had paid her any attention until she jumped. An hour passed before the captain and the emergency personnel decided that the boat could continue to the harbor, while divers remained on the site looking for her. We were five minutes from the harbor when Mauro called and told us to take a taxi to the main railway station. Tickets to a private cabin in a sleeping car would be waiting for us, destination Copenhagen.

“Are you crazy?” Harry said. “My house is-”

“It will be taken care of,” I said firmly. “As long as you´re with me you don´t have to worry about a single practical thing. Your house will be fixed and looked after until you´ve decided what to do about it. Money is no problem. A security sweep is under way in the railway station and my new drones will take down anything hostile.”

Similar sweep was taking place in every transport hub of the city to throw any followers off the track, but this was not the time to get boggled down by details. Harry regarded me with suspicion, trying to come up with a reason not to go to Copenhagen but couldn´t. It was Friday night, and he couldn´t go back to work on Monday anyway.

“You have no idea how much I want to spank you right now,” he finally said, relenting.

We reached the station and collected our tickets with fifteen minutes to spare. There was a restaurant car in the train, so we didn´t have to rush to a kiosk to get provisions for the night and we could proceed directly to the train. Ours was a two-person cabin, and once we had entered and shut the door we just stood there looking at each other, in the narrow room with its two bunk beds opened and ready.

“You said something about spanking...” I quipped, trying to lighten the mood.

“Just wait until they´ve checked our tickets and the door is locked,” he said darkly.








2 comments:

  1. what happened in copenhagen?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Copenhagen was just a getaway route - as you can see in the archive list, the next chapter moves directly to Galveston

    ReplyDelete