Tales From the Loop

By Simon Stalenhag

A friend had watched the tv series, so I had checked it out, and saw it was a graphic novel of sorts and so, now I’m going to have a look at the differing story. It’s been quite awhile since I’d seen the show so perhaps the book will refresh my memory.

Introduction has the Loop being underground and was a large, round particle accelerator and research facility for experimental physics, which spanned northern Malaroarna, from Hilleshog and elsewhere. It was felt everywhere in Malaroarna, and the narrator’s parents worked there. Service vehicles patrolled roads and skies, and machines roamed in the woods, meadows, and glades. 

Whatever was below ground vibrated through bedrock and into homes. The landscape was full of machine and scrap connected to the facility in different ways, and on the horizon were massive cooling towers with green obstacle lights. When putting one’s ear to the ground, it’s possible to hear the heartbeat of the Loop: the Gravitron, which is the central piece of the Loop’s experiments, and it was said its forces could curve space-time.

History of the Loop Project

The project was called the Facility for Research in High-Energy Physics, but often called the Malaro facility or the Loop. Construction started in 1961 and completed in 8 years. It included research teams with 129 scientists and science students, along with several thousand employees. It was inaugurated in 1969, and the 1st experiment conduced in 1970. 

The Loop remained the world’s most powerful excelerator until its decommissioning in ’94. The illustrations within this book focuses on the Narrator’s generation of Malaro children and the environment they grew up in, but also include research documentation from vendors and subcontractors. The following stories focus on the narrator and mostly his childhood friend Ola, who has a near-eidetic memory and the Narrator, Simon Stalenhag is grateful for his help with the content of this book.

The Hulk at Bastlagno

(Due to how clinically scientific much of the narration is, it makes sense to be drawn in by the photographs and almost paint-acrylic quality of illustrations.) One boy is climbing on what looks like a enormous lamp with the head looking like a flying saucer as the other boy watches underneath its stem.

The Axle at Stavsborg

One day Olof got a black eye at recess, and so wanted to run away from school, and Simon joined him. They ran across the fields and hid in the groves to avoid beings seen by teachers. Olof was known for these type of adventures and seemed to not want to stop playing. 

Darkness fell as they arrived at Stavsborg, and a strange piece of junk stuck out from the earth in the field, the two running over to it. Olaf wanted to start climbing it but Simon was still and tired. He watched as Olof pretended to keep their area safe as they’re attacked by teacher-cyborgs. 

Then the two got into a disagreement about Simon wanting to go to Olaf’s to watch a movie, but Olof not agreeing. He wanted to build an igloo and spend the night in the field, this escalating into fistfight. After they tire themselves out, in the snow, bruised, Simon helps Olof get something out of his eye, which is when he confesses his pop was depressed. So they go to Simon’s to play Sonic the Hedgehog and he taught Olof the cheat codes.

The Bona Plant and Ossian

The 3 cooling towers at Bona’s main function was to release heat from the Gravitron, the core of the Loop which provided the facility with the massive amount of energy it needed. The middle tower was tallest and it was a characteristic landmark visible all over Malardalen.

The signal sounds at 6 every day, and it starts like a  deep vibration in the ground which slowly rises to 3 horn-like bursts, and followed by a drawn out echo reverberating through the landscape. The sound was result of the daily reset of the towers’ fifteen large demister valves. 

To the families, the sound was similar to church bells ringing, kids knew it was time to head home and for dinner when the Signal sounded. Simon heard the Signal up close Aug 1991, and it was the only time. Simon was ‘lured’ by ‘The Bona boy Ossian’ from the youth center by promising to play with his Incredible Crash Dummies, but their new friendship quickly dissolved at Ossian’s house. 

Ossian played with his best toys himself and when his brother Oliver came home, Simon was ignored. The Signal sounded when Ossian’s mother was preparing their meal and the floor vibrated, scaring Simon. The brothers told Simon it was the Signal warning of an upcoming meltdown in the Gravitron, so push him into a closet and telling him to remain there in case the Earth was sucked into a black hole. 

The two go downstairs and eat their fill of blood pudding, and Simon was shamefully relieved when his father came to bring him home. While they were driving back home Simon’s father had to reassure him the earth wouldn’t be sucked into a black hole, but he remained anxious for weeks after, his anxiety peaking esp. around dinner time.

The Arch Towers at Klovsjo

Simon’s family went skiing in Harjedalen during Easter break in 1991 and on the way, his pop told them about the arch towers they’d see when they got there. He spoke reverentially about the monuments to Swedish engineering, and how they were constructed to transform the force of downdrafts into electricity and enhance the effect a thousand times using the magnetic charge of bedrock. 

They saw the peaks of the towers an hour before they arrived, and Simon’s stomach got fluttery like he was on a rollercoaster as they drove up a hill due to anticipating how much bigger the towers would be on the other side of the mountain. One night when the family was sleeping in the caravan, Simon was awoken in the middle of the night by a distant howl-like scream, and seeing small flares of light around the tower. 

It scared Simon to wake his father who explained the flares were ball lightning leaping between the steel of the tower which was created by a static charge of electricity and was safe at this distance. Simon didn’t comprehend what he meant but it was comforting enough to go back to sleep.

The Remote Glove

A robot chugs toward a police van across a rye field and Simon realizes a line had been crossed many hours earlier in the day. It may have occurred when he and Olof had broke into a warehouse in Satuna, when Olof brought out an odd backpack. 

Oddly enough, Simon hadn’t noticed at the time, Olof puts his hand in a big glove and the Thing under a tarp comes alive. Although it could’ve happened earlier when they’d run away from home during the summer, which had been an intense sequence of events, Simon unsure of all the connections now.

The Echo Sphere

Uppsala Ridge once ran along the east side of Munso. It was an esker, which had billions of tons of gravel and sand which had been deposited by ancient ice sheets. After centuries of gravel extraction drained the esker and by the end of the first part of the 20th century, Munso’s east side had transformed into a desert. 

The ‘60s brought the construction of the loop and the gravel pits became an assembly site and access for the large machines used, which many of them and the buildings were left there after the construction was done. Simon has a vague memory of his grandpa taking him to Munso once, when he was four. He remembers the large hollow steel sphere and they’d walked into it, his voice echoing. 

They saw the scrap metal left there sticking up over the ridge on the other side of the water in Svartsjolandet. Simon then recollects a girl called Jenny with a ‘dim-witted’ brother called Percy, who as soon as the ridge on Munso was visible, went crazy. Jenny and Simon would take Percy on walks, and when they didn’t expect it, he’d blurt out a shriek, ‘KISCHWOOOIIING’, which sounded to Simon like he was trying to imitate a buzz saw.

This was their sign Percy’d seen Munso for a second behind the trees. The sound he made was known by many, and sometimes when Jenny was about to read out loud in class, someone would make the sound, one in particular being the class clown.

Later in the year, Olof and Simon’s fathers during summer break said they weren’t kids anymore and real life would start, so they celebrated by taking Olof’s father’s boat without asking and rowed to Nordic Gobi on Munso. 

Simon and his friend were 9 years old as they went to test the echo sphere in the gravel pit, this day being the first time Simon believed he experienced nostalgia when he remembered the memory with his grandpa. 

After shouting in the echo sphere they went swimming in the emerald green ponds, Olof using heavy round stones to weigh himself down and walking on the bottom of the pond like an astronaut. As they swam, Olof shouts of finding a car wreck, Simon swimming back to see.

The Magnetrine Discs at Spanviken

Sometime in the mid-’90s the outlines of magnetrine discs rose out of the water in the center of Spanviken. The largest disc supposedly being 30 meters and constructed to carry 10k ton Gauss freighters on the tundra route. 

The discs were remains from an era the Malaro kids of Simon’s generation hadn’t experienced, and until 1979 there was a factory on Davenso which built and repaired the discs. After the Ural Crisis in the 70s, the demand for magnetrine tech declined, and the Davenso plant closed. The plant was abandoned and reclaimed by nature.

Magnetrine flight - How it works: (I won’t be going into the details since it’s too scientific for my ability, but it does explain Gauss - The strength of the magnetic field is measured in a unit called ‘Gauss’)

A Day in the Life of Service Engineer Mikael Wirsen 13 March 1988

Mikael lives in Senhamra and worked as a service engineer for 11 years since ’77. He states the best part of the job is the freedom to plan his own schedule and being out in nature most of the time. He doesn’t view much research in the facility but thinks it’s great to be a part of something groundbreaking. Below is his schedule of a normal working day at the end of February.

8am

Mikael arrives at the garage in Tappstrom. He plans his route and today is Thursday so he’ll perform a routine maintenance on the cooling modules or ‘field hats’. Mikael signs out for his service vehicle and heads out.

9am-1145am

He starts with routine maintenance on the south side of Faringso. First replacing all cooling rods which is the main heat absorbing component in the module and gets extremely hot. They’re removed and the coolant has to be replaced. Since they’re in nature the cooling modules must be protected by the elements. The timers are then reset, which Mikael services all 9 modules on the south side before lunch.

1145am

Mikael eats lunch at a pizzeria in  Stenhamra where he’s a popular regular. 

1230pm

Mikael drives towards Farentuna and listens to music, he being a big music lover.

1245pm

At the service station in the woods, Mikael leaves the old cooling rods and fills up on spare parts then taking a smoke break.

1300-1500pm routine maintenance of the cooling modules on the north side.

The same procedure above.

1500-1700pm replacing magnetrines in a flux well

Micke receives a call on his radio about the flux well in Ringnas is sending error messages about high boson levels. Before going to service them Mikael must return to Satuna to get the right equipment. Mikael must wear protective gear to service the flux well. After fixing it, Mikael is almost done for the day and so they head back toward Tappstrom.

Invasive Species

There’d been talk of prehistoric monsters in the woods, and a bridge was made to allow creatures from another time to travel to our world. Someone found an empty lot covered in desert sand, and trilobites were twitching on the roof of the school gym. 

There was rumors of a boy living with his mother down by Lennartsvagen and having a pet dinosaur in the hen house.

Simon has a memory of Olof and Kalle walking across the schoolyard on a hot Sept day, carrying ice cream boxes. The ice cream was melting and staining their clothes as they talked. Kalle woke up in the middle of the night by a sound he recognized. It was of an ice cream truck on an unusually warm Sept night. 

It was odd he’d hear the ice cream truck in the middle of the night and it felt wrong. Kalle called Olof and they went in search of the truck, following the sound to the gravel pit. They soon found it stuck between two tree trunks, the cabin ripped open and the speaker dangling from the remains of the roof, but the two saw tons of ice cream starting to melt.

Kalle declared the only explanation was two giant carnivorous Gorgosaurus libratus had been drawn by the ice cream truck song and attacked it.

Robot Transport

Balanced machines had a major breakthrough in the ’60s when Iwasaki presented the first functioning artificial nervous system. Wheeled vehicles were still superior on roads and civilian communities, but in forestry, mining, warfare and planetary exploration, and all fields of operations where there weren’t roads, robots were revolutionary. In large part to the Loop, Malaroarna became a robot paradise and they all knew the makes and models.

There was a rumor amongst several secret projects, the facility in Munso were trying to create machines which were able to feel and reason, and they’d made progress but unable to stop prototypes from escaping multiple times.

The Escapee

It took under an oak tree in the yard, a sad tin-can looking thing, its head somewhat entangled in a type of canvas cover. It discovered Simon and stood still its head fixed in his direction. As Simon approaches it rocks nervously back and forth where it stood, and flinched, rustling its wires each time snow crunched under Simon’s boots. 

Simon gets close enough so he can yank the canvas off, and the optics quickly focused, he seeing it was marked FOA on the side, which meant it’d escaped from Munso. Then the front door rattled and with 3 quick leaps the robot vanished as his father opened the door and stood on the steps.

The Tower House

It was an enigmatic house and Simon’s father used to say it was only a regular house a giant had lifted and flipped over on its side. The rooms in the Tower House smelled of oil, coffee, and a German shepherd owned by his uncle, Alf, with a radio always playing. 

In the basement there was a room connected to the extensive tunnel systems of the Loop. Many of buildings out on Malaroarna had a connection chamber in the basement, usually found in houses built when the Loop was constructed, and were filled with coveralls, protective gear, first aid kits, and a direct line to emergency services.

Jens and Hakan Switch Bodies

I remember the tv show version of this but it was changed from twins to two boys who were friends near a tunnel.

Simons smiles when thinking about the twins, Jens and Hakan. They moved in from Skate and almost identical physically but acted very differently from each other. Hakan was a menace who ended up in trouble a lot whilst Jens was a daydreamer, with his shoes untied. They came to town when they were in the 3rd grade and told the kids a funny story.

Hakan claims they’d found a giant steel pod at a rest stop on the way from Shane to Stockholm and when he’d gone to pee below the freeway, the pod had a hatch which was open, and he entered. In the same moment he set foot inside the pod he was back in the family car again.

He sat in the back seat in shock, and his mother wondered why Hakan was taking so long when he’d only gone to pee. Hakan didn’t understand how he’d gotten to the car so quickly. He answered his mother by replying he was right there, and his mother turns around and stares at him mad, looking at his clothes and tells Jens to stop messing around. 

Then Hakan looks at his reflection in the rear view and his breath caught in his throat. He had Jens face and clothes, he then running out of the car to the pod again. There he found his confused and scared brother in the pod. 

The two were in awe having switched bodies, so Hakan leads his brother back up to the rest stop and explains how things are now, Hakan being Jens and vice versa. According to Hakan, their parents didn’t notice.

Postcards from America

A project as large as the Loop couldn’t have been realized without international teaming up. The amount of tech expertise was developed mostly with U.S. help. The experience and tech from similar projects in the Nevada desert was paramount in the construction of the Loop. 

Some say the project was only completed because of the desire to have tech presence in the Baltic Sea area. There was much theorizing as to what part the Loop played in the Cold War, which answers may never be forthcoming. There was speculation as to a connection between the echo spheres and the USA, literally. 

This idea came from a boy called Magnus, who told stories specifically to get attention. Magnus spent winters practicing penalty shots for soccer behind his house, which had an old echo sphere there. He opened the hatch and used it as a target. 

In Feb, he was so good, he’d make almost every shot and the sphere would ring like a gong at every hit. At one point, to challenge himself, he walked about 40 meters and made a perfect kick into the echo sphere, but this time there was no ring, but total silence. 

Magnus goes into the sphere to reclaim the ball, and this is where his story gets into a fantastical heroic tale where he’d walked through a portal in the echo sphere to a small town in the desert in America. 

He’d wandered around for days until he was caught by the sheriff and was put in holding in a factory where they attempted to grind him into tissue to be used for constructing cyborgs. He managed to escape with the help of a four-legged war machine called Rosanna, freeing the town from a corrupt mayor and breaking the hearts of all the cheerleaders in town.

The Spectre from Siberia

When Simon was 9, he’d become obsessed with an all-terrain vehicle, even making a model of it, and following tracks in the snow for hours hoping to see one. He’d walk around with a camera wanting to see a Vectra Lynx, and had a poster where the Lynx was in a dramatic scene of combat with a snow flurry, with Chinese war robots being blasted apart.

The Satuna Spiders

A type of security vehicle meant to repair in hazardous environments like the Gravitron chamber in the Loop. The floor of the chamber was incredibly hot and had a strange design, sectioned into small quadrants where each quadrant was a different size and depth, making the floor nearly impossible to traverse. A farmer bought some spider vehicles for his farm work, but couldn’t use them for how slow they traveled so merely stayed in his old field behind his farm.

The Daven Monster

The factory on Davenso was almost completely reintegrated into nature by the late ‘80s. At the back of the factory complex, a large concrete building had a large hall where the roof was caved in. At one time the construction of the enormous magnetrine discs were made there, beneath the waters of the huge reservoir. 

The ruins of the hall had been a favorite spot for local kids to sneak into. There were large schools of perch swimming under the surface, and larger fish could be seen as well. Stories were shared of something huge and terrible living under the water, like a water spider or some amphibian, nesting in one of the reservoirs many dark crevices and giving birth to something deformed, it changing because of the heavy metals and chemicals having leaked into the water. 

Perhaps it’d arrived through a dimension rip in space-time, caused by the experiments of the Loop. There could be something in the waters, but the only thing to float to surface was the body of Ragnar Jonsson, a local thug. It was assumed he’d fallen in when drunk and drowned.

The Moomin

90 vane turbines followed fluctuating temperatures of the wind with silence and precision in the water outside Lagno. These were known as the Moomin, due to looking like small old men, and had the important task of the pumps in Lagno needing minutely-detailed data to adjust pressure and empty deuterium, steadily flowing without dangerous fluctuations from outer tunnels of the Loop. 

A minor interference could send shock waves through the entire structure of the Loop, including to the Gravitron chamber. No one truly understood the Gravitron, the over a thousand pages of safety manuals having an anxiousness in the text, which permeated all activities of the Loop.

When swimming by the guest pier at the boat club in summers, diving under the surface with masks to explore the old junk down below, Simon could hear the vane turbines, like whale song.

The Scrappers

30 years of Loop operations had filled the Malaro landscape with strange objects, which two brothers who had an affinity for all things mechanical slowly allow their garden to be filled by the scrap. The two brothers were highly skilled mechanics who fixed people’s cars for a living, but there was a sense of hidden tragedy in their house. 

Their business fell apart when a new shop came in and they worked in their garage until one day in ’93 they vanished. Some said the brothers committed suicide and some said they were preparing something crazy. Some kids said the brothers had found a warehouse where they entered a gateway to another dimension, which was wrapped in police tape.

The Spontaneous Combustion of Connie Friske

When standing by the bus stop at Loftet in quiet nights, the low buzz can be heard from Goran Friske’s focal towers. These towers calibrated to the moon’s position in the sky, and a soft whine from their servo engines drifted over the fields. These days it’s quiet near Loftet's bus stop and the impressive arches are gone, leaving only the barns.

Until Goran Friske’s daughter’s death, he’d grown plants he called lunar root. As the towers focused the light of the moon, the flower box was placed in the focal point. A root vegetable grew in it, and it was said the root had amazing properties, like easing rheumatism, migraines, back pains, headaches and all kinds of ailments. Friske also claimed it can cure cancer and other deadly diseases. 

Friske’s daughter’s body had been very badly burnt which the cause of death was difficult to determine, but speculation had been an odd spontaneous combustion was the cause. Constance Friske had high levels of acetone, which is highly flammable in high concentrations in her body. 

The medical examiner said the acetone was a side effect of a so-called ketotic state, possibly caused by a one-recipe diet. Her father’s reputation had been completely ruined when it was suspected Connie had been living strictly off the lunar root, nearly exclusively since a young age.

The House of the Savages

A rumor of a small boy living in a run down house at the end of a forgotten dirt track in Karlskar with his obese mother, didn’t go to school and couldn’t read or write. It was doubted he could speak and his father was in prison which may have been for the better due to being an infamous dirty old man. 

The boy’s mother was always on the couch in front of the TV, being so fat she couldn’t move, and didn’t bother taking care of her son anymore. The boy had to fend for himself and prowled the neighborhood’s garbage bins for scraps of food. He would whoop loudly when he speared a boar or deer, and had supposedly speared social services a few times and possibly looted a pizza delivery truck a couple times. 

The boys lurked around the boy’s home because they’d heard he had hidden a raptor in the hen house, found in the fields behind the school and was still a baby, but it’d grown and someone had snuck down by Satuna, seeing it with the boy on its back. The lower parts of a body was discovered not far from the house one day, still wearing a pair of jeans. 

The upper half was believed to be hidden in various fox dens in the area, but no one knew how the person had been killed, it speculated it could’ve been a hit-and-run or suicide. What they had learned was the body belonged to the boy’s father, the pants containing his ID in the back pocket.

The Cybernetic Bison Boar

In the winter of ’90, a rumor had started of animals escaping labs at the FOA facility on Munso. Some big, dark animals were sighted in the woods around Satuno on Faringso, across from Munso, and everyone was gossiping about the escaped abominations. 

One day Little Tomas stated he’d seen the animals, in the stubble fields on the way to Kvarnbacken. Everyone stood around him during lunch break asking him questions like did they look like boars, but they’d been the size of bulls with glowing green eyes and weird antenna on their heads. 

Little Tomas wasn’t scared since he was good with animals and pitied them a little. No more sightings were noted but excitement was common for seeing many tracks they couldn’t explain, up until flowers bloomed in the meadows.

Hotel Akerfeldt

Goholmen is a small island off the northern part of Svartsjolandet. A Swedish company attempted to create a stable and economically friendly transmission of electricity from the Bona reactor to the station on Goholmen, of which the results weren’t much by the end of the ’80s, but operational costs were fairly low so the grant continued. 

The caretaker and only permanent resident living on the island was Axel Akerfeldt, a malformed, old scarecrow looking man who lived in a 28-sq-meter shed next to the station. Simon and friends would make their way out there across the ice in winter and getting there was difficult but Axel’s hot chocolate and cookies were worth the effort. 

Axel referred to the station as Hotel Akerfeldt, and it was open until winter of ’94 when an exploding vacuum tube ended Axel’s life and shortly after the station was torn down.

The Disappearance of Goran Friske

The Friske Wheel looked funny squeezed between a Volvo and Saab on the road in town. Goran began acting oddly after the tragedy of his daughter Connie. Simon remembered the uncomfortable mood when he went on stage at Folkets park in the summer evening of ’93, a year after Connie died. He was wasted drunk and shouted old prog rock songs, and when they tried to remove him from stage he shrieked of killing his daughter and Ragnar. 

This was Simon’s first memory of someone drunk, and a few months after this, Goran vanished. Soon after this the Friske Wheel was found crashed in a ditch down by Ilanda. The door was left open and an empty whiskey bottle in the cockpit. 

Betty Friske never heard from her husband after this, and everyone assumed he’d left the country or drowned himself in Vasterholmsviken. Betty soon after married Lennart Ek, who with she’d been having an affair with for a long while anyways. A few years after this Simon dated Cindy Friske, the youngest daughter of Goran, when they were in high school. 

One day she shows him under her bed she kept a package which had been delivered a year after her father disappeared. She removes a glass jar from the box which contained a brain and a note on the outside reading “G. Friske To scientists of the future. NOT TO BE WOKEN UP BY BETTY!”

Pontus’s Kata

A hole in the fence in the back of the factories in Lunda led to a place where reeds grew out of the asphalt and the air smelled of nettles. The kids used to sneak in there and look for old furniture, or a computer, etc. They found more exotic things like magnetrine discs, echo spheres, and hydraulic arms. 

The most interesting was a pit filled with discarded androids, which had remnant of electricity in their circuits since their eyes would still focus whenever someone passed and held something up to their faces. One time they take Pontus there and he went wild when they showed him the androids.

 He dragged one out of the pit with difficulty and propped it against a wall and started using karate on it, but when landing kicks looked like he was mostly hurting himself. Simon wasn’t certain if the kicks had hit a switch but when Pontus was making fun and thrusting his hips at it, the android locked its arms and legs around Pontus and had him shout out with pain. 

Olof and Simon had to pull and kick at the android for several minutes before they could detach Pontus and he gave the two his Golden Axe game so they didn’t mention it at school.

The Metal Detector

The Godel pulses was the disturbances which occur as a side effect of experiments in the Loop. Usually people only notice a kitchen lamp or tv screen flicker briefly, but sometimes the effects were more obvious. Fuses have blown, cars won’t start and light bulbs shatter or the ground would vibrate and Simon’s ears would pop. 

Regarding the Extinction of Dinosaurs 

Simon had an uncomfortable weekend in the mountains with his father knowing he’d soon be a child of divorce, and he’d found himself drawn to other kids who dealt with divorce. They began to talk like adults and glance at playgrounds with shame.

Final Words

The Loop was decommissioned Nov. ’94 and society had changed, the yellow cars from the Loop vanished from the roads and government-owned companies were privately owned and changed their names. 

No one was sad of these changes, playtime taken over by computers and everyone spending their time indoors until an aggravated mother would chuck the teens outside, almost all the fathers having remarried and moved out of town. 

The boys would return to the playground like zombies and sat on the swings outside the school or in someone’s treehouse and smoke stolen cigarettes.

This was one eclectic group of stories based very little in reality but still taken from parts of the author’s life. It was intriguing and I enjoyed it, but the tv show was much more cohesive if not the same amount of being disjointed since none of the stories were related to each other.