The Complete Game Trilogy: Game, Buzz, Bubble

‘Global conspiracy, my ass,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Yeah, right!’

He’d never even been close to falling for that.

Relieved, he leaned back in the kitchen sofa and turned on his laptop. There was nothing like a bit of television to make you forget your problems. You could always find some poor bastard out there who was in a worse state, and made you feel better about things. Once everything had calmed down a bit, he’d think about what to do next.

Even before he heard the voice coming out of the speaker he realized what had happened. The local television news pictures were enough on their own for him to get it – the burning house, flashing blue lights and fire-engines parked among the nettles.

‘… fire-fighters were called to an isolated property just west of Sigtuna. It is not currently known if anyone was in the building when the fire broke out. The property is listed as uninhabited since the death of its last occupant, but according to witnesses someone has been living in the house in recent months. The police would like to contact a man in his thirties who was involved in a minor collision with a local bus at a nearby bus stop earlier in the day …’

Half-digested baked beans all over auntie’s sink. HP was vomiting like a champion.

It had taken him several days to recover. He must have picked up some sort of virus or some other crap, he had a fever and the projectile vomiting didn’t let up until there was nothing left but bile.

As usual, it was Manga who came to his rescue, when he turned up to see why he hadn’t been in touch and found him flaked out on auntie’s rib-backed sofa. Totally fucking embarrassing, but Manga had shown he was a true friend. He’d taken him off to the Eriksdal pool so he could get cleaned up, then conjured up some clean clothes and rosehip soup, and he hadn’t even minded cleaning up the disgusting kitchen.

Yep, Manga was a true friend, a BFF actually. And from now on HP would actually treat him like one. To start with, he’d call him Farook. If the name was important for Manga, then he’d use it from now on and stop taking the piss.

He’d had loads of dreams while he was sick, fevered dreams about all sorts of things. He was pretty used to weirdo dreams anyway, they almost came as standard a few days or a week after a decent trip. He’d read that the THC in grass got stored up in the fatty tissues of the brain and could make its presence felt some time afterwards, a bit like a bomb on a timed detonator. Often his dreams were spaced-out Lord of the Rings affairs with giant butterflies and talking trees, which was pretty cool.

But these dreams were different, far darker and less pleasant than his Miss Mary Jane fantasies.

He remembered one particularly vivid dream that involved him running naked through the Klara Tunnel. Erman’s charred, blackened corpse was chasing him on the flatbed moped, at the head of hundreds of stampeding, riderless horses.

The tunnel exit on Sveavägen was getting closer and closer, but his pursuers were gaining on him. His steps were getting heavier and heavier as the slope got steeper and steeper, and he realized that he wasn’t going to make it. The moped’s engine rose to a rattling falsetto, along with the clatter of hooves.

They’re everywhere!! It’s all a fucking Game!! The corpse’s charred mouth howled, but the last word was distorted and bounced around him like an echo off the walls of the tunnel.

Geim

Geim

Geim

He woke up with his heart pounding in his chest just as the moped was about to smash into the back of his knees.

But now he felt better.

No fever, clean again, and he’d eaten his fill. Maybe his legs felt a bit stiff, but that would pass.

The question was: what was he going to do now?

He wouldn’t be able to move back into his flat for another week or so, evidently there was some sort of delay with the new door. In a way he was almost glad. There was no point denying it really, he wasn’t looking forward to moving back home. The fact was that after what had happened out near Sigtuna he was … frightened.

Yes, he’d admitted it. Henrik HP Pettersson, the man, the myth, the legend – was scared.

So the Game wasn’t just some sort of low-level anarchist pay-per-view YouTube rip-off like he’d originally thought, but something completely different, something considerably more unpleasant. The whole betting aspect was worse than he’d thought at first, he realized that now. Systematically pushing people to shift their limits of what was okay, consciously seeking out people who were easily manipulated, and then pushing them just to see how far they were prepared to go.

And all that, just because it was cool!

But the second part still seemed too incredible to be true. That the assignments weren’t just thought up at random but consciously designed to satisfy some anonymous customers? If that was true, and he emphasized the word if, then it meant that he and all the other players were being fucked over twice. They weren’t just jack-asses on speed, or internet tarts whoring themselves out for a few comments and virtual thumbs-up. They were also total fucking puppets!

Unconscious hitmen who knew nothing and were therefore easy to dispose of if the shit hit the fan. A load of patsies, stooges that no-one gave a fuck about, even if they tried to tell the truth. Because who was going to believe them?

The thought made him both angry and more than a little shaky.

The implications of a scenario like that were so massive he could hardly imagine them. Wasn’t it more likely to be Erman’s paranoid brain finally crossing the line between quaint rural eccentric and total fucking lunatic?

Right up until he had seen Erman’s cottage going up in flames, and doubtless Erman along with it, he had been prepared to believe that, but now he was seeing it in a very different light …

There was really only one way to find out for certain, so he decided to start with a bit of research.

One of the many Unemployment Service training courses he’d done his best to forget had been in the very subject that he needed to remember now. With a decent search engine you could take the world by surprise, he remembered that much at least …

Farook had helped him to set up the laptop, routing it through a number of anonymized servers that had popped up in the days before the IP-RED law came into force. From now on he’d be invisible on the net, a ghost-rider.

He opened one of the search engines and got to work. Erman’s note left him none the wiser.

Torshamnsgatan 142 was all it said, apart from a few nerdy passwords that just might, or might not, work if he ever managed to get in. The poor flame-grilled fucker could have added a bit more information, like what the company was called, or what floor it was on? Was that really too much to ask?

The address certainly matched a street in Kista, but didn’t really give him much more than that. It was a perfectly ordinary office building close to the E4 motorway, but that was all the satellite pictures had to offer. He found a list of small telecoms companies that either had been or were still based in the building, but none of them seemed to have the slightest thing to do with games or computers.

He didn’t really know what he had been expecting. Some sort of walled fortress maybe, or a secret address that couldn’t be found on any map? A bit like the National Defence Radio Establishment out on Lovön? But this seemed completely halal, with not the slightest hint of a mysterious organization or a secret server-farm. So either Erman had decided to give him a dud address for some reason, or, more likely, the Game had upped sticks and moved somewhere else.

Disappointed and without any great expectations, he decided to carry on looking into the rest of Erman’s theories anyway.

He tried typing in a few search words, like ‘inexplicable’, ‘failed investigation’, ‘unknown’ and got a few thousand hits immediately. He filtered out anything to do with UFOs, which reduced the number to about three hundred, then added ‘perpetrator’ as an option, which brought the total down to a more manageable quantity. A bit more clever clicking and he had a decent collection of incidents listed on the screen in front of him.

He scrolled quickly through them.

It turned out to be a right mixture of stuff, and for a few seconds he felt almost relieved. But then he started looking more carefully. And gradually things began to pop up which were, to put it mildly, disconcerting …

To start with he found a number of minor occurrences which he had never heard about but which still had the right vibe: cars whose brakes had stopped working, computer systems which had packed up in the middle of the payroll, inexplicable power cuts, and politicians getting shit through their letterboxes.

But there were a number of other, considerably more familiar events which had been picked up by the search.

He read them through once, then again, and slowly a very uncomfortable feeling began to settle over him.

The first item was pretty much in his own backyard:

On the night of 17 May 1990 Katarina Church on Södermalm in Stockholm was destroyed by fire.

The church tower collapsed into the nave, leaving just the external walls standing. However a number of valuable textiles and the church silver were rescued. In spite of a major inquiry, no explanation for the fire was ever established, which has led to speculation that it was caused by everything from an electrical fault to arson.

If arson was indeed the cause, no motive has ever been identified.

He also remembered the second one very well:

On Sunday 3 September, 2006, at 20:41:51, the National Police Unit in Stockholm received a report from the Security Police that the internal computer network of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP-net, had been hacked. The perpetrator was at that point still unknown. Late that same evening the Social Democrats called a press conference to announce that they had reported members of the Folk Party to the police for hacking. The report maintained that computers, which to judge by their IP-addresses belonged to the Folk Party, had been used to gain illegal access to the most sensitive areas of the SDP-network to which only 26 senior party officials had access. This access was supposed to have been gained with the help of log-in details which had inexplicably leaked and had given their political opponents unlimited access to the most confidential information in the Social Democrats’ internal computer network.

This was major-league stuff! Both of these on their own were exotic enough for some serious betting.

Could you persuade someone to set light to a church, a sacred place? What were the odds on that?

Of course you could, no question. But what about the next step, if you were to believe Erman’s theories?

Who would have commissioned a job like that?

Someone who would dearly have loved to have the honour of rebuilding a famous Stockholm landmark? A politician, a company or a wealthy businessman with a dodgy reputation to clean up?

A quick look at the foundation that was responsible for the restoration listed a whole load of heavyweights who had opened their wallets. They’d even persuaded parliament to cough up some money, although this was strictly a local Stockholm issue. Anyway, didn’t the Swedish Church have more than enough money stashed away to pay for the whole thing themselves?

A conspiracy?

Well, you couldn’t exactly rule it out. Plausible, in other words. A bit of a long shot, but certainly possible if you had a bit of imagination and dared to think outside the box. A bit like the Da Vinci Code, basically.

But what about the Social Democrats’ and Folk Party’s own little Watergate, then?

That took a bit more thought.

A well-placed Ant inside the Social Democrats could easily fix the log-in details. Most people were stupid enough to scribble them down on a post-it note stuck under their desk so they could get back into the system after their summer holiday.

But who would have wanted it to happen?

Who benefited?

Short-term, obviously the Folk Party, so they were potential customers.

But surely the whole thing favoured the Social Democrats in the long term?

A bit more clicking seemed to support that angle. The Folk Party was reduced almost by half in the parliamentary election a few weeks later, and their collapse almost reversed the entire shift of power from left to right. So there were at least two possible conspiracy options here.

Someone on the blue side wanted to get at confidential information, and someone on the red wanted to catch the blues red-handed, so to speak.

The result?

Plausible, certainly, and ultimately less far-fetched than the first. Christ, what a story this was turning into!

Worst of all was the very last item he stumbled upon. He read it a couple of times before it sank in properly. Once it had, he came close to shitting himself.

The description of the perpetrator that was presented in the 1994 inquiry concluded that the murder was carried out by a person acting alone, an individual with a personality disorder, driven by hatred or anger. He had probably had problems with relationships throughout his life, and particularly with any form of authority. He was introverted, isolated and narcissistic, but not psychotic, and probably lacked close family and friends. His condition was connected with a feeling of having ‘failed’ in life, the perception of being ‘an outsider’ whose abilities had never been appreciated or allowed to reach their full potential.

The profile could perfectly easily have been written to describe him!

Okay, it wasn’t exactly easy to admit, and navel-gazing wasn’t one of his favourite pastimes. But after everything that had happened, his near-death experience in the flat and the whole business out in the sticks, he had started to look at himself in the mirror in a new way.

And what he found wasn’t exactly an attractive sight …

If he was honest, his life wasn’t really much to write home about. In general terms, he was a pretty good match for that description. Acting alone, outsider, few close relationships, egocentric, it all fitted pretty well.

A bit too well, really …

But it wasn’t actually his fault that everything had gone to hell. He had had opportunities, prospects, the same as anyone. He could have been someone, someone important!

A fucking contender!

He had done one genuinely unselfish thing in his life, and what had he got for it? How had the world thanked him, rewarded him for his heroism? Yep, ten months in prison, straight to jail without passing go, thank you very fucking much! Because in the land of semi-skimmed milk, obviously no good deed must go unpunished.

And, after his stretch inside, that was it, all the opportunities were gone. The doors were all closed and the future royally fucked. Low-level hustling or some shitty McJob were pretty much the only options. So maybe it wasn’t so weird that you didn’t give a damn after that sort of let-down, and just focused on number one. And according to Erman, people like him were exactly the sort that the Game sent the Ants out to look for. Chancers who fitted the list of prerequisites. Or, to be more accurate, the profile …

‘They’ve been playing for years, long before the internet,’ Erman had said.

What if they were already playing back in February ’86, when a certain prime minister was assassinated? Conjured up a three-five-seven, stashed it somewhere suitable, then sent someone out. A Player, a nobody like him, who’d already had his boundaries shifted so far they were no longer anywhere in sight. An innocent-sounding call from a well-placed Ant would be enough.

The nine o’clock screening, Grand Cinema!

Then: lights, camera, action!

The hairs on the back of HP’s neck stood up. The cottage suddenly felt too small, the ceiling was too low, threatening to suffocate him. He needed air. He had to get out!

It’s all a fucking game! the charred corpse in his head was screaming as he chucked up over the flowerbed.

Okay, she was seriously worried now. After several days of foolishly thinking that he would get in touch, she had finally gone round to his flat. But the door was covered in plywood and under the smell of paint she could still detect a faint smell of smoke.

The next-door neighbour – dreadlocks, a goatee beard, obviously doped-up – had told her about the fire, that someone had poured lighter-fluid through Henke’s letterbox and set light to it.

But clearly Henke had survived, a day in hospital then he was okay.

That at least was a relief.

So where was he now?

The rasta couldn’t enlighten her, and at this point in the conversation his addled brain seemed to have finally picked up the cop vibe and he quickly slammed the door on her.

After a bit of thought she had at least managed to work out who was likely to know more. Manga Sandström, of course, Henke’s best friend since primary school.

Didn’t he have a computer shop somewhere near Skanstull?

A quick call to the Regional Communication Centre and she had the address and was on her way.

Outside the shop she realized that things weren’t right. A blue and white strip of police cordon tape was dangling from a lamppost, and the window beside the door was broken, the hole patched, somewhat inadequately, by a security company’s tape. There was no mistaking the smell of smoke here either, as she opened the door and the Star Wars theme started to play. To judge by the chaos inside, they still had a lot of tidying up to do after the fire. She almost stumbled over a bucket full of filthy water that was standing beside the door. There were boxes everywhere and half of the shelves and racks towards the front of the shop were empty.

The second suspicious complete mess in half an hour, hardly a coincidence, at least not if Henke was involved. The question was, what had he got himself mixed up in this time?

Maybe Manga would be able to give her an answer?

‘Hello Rebecca!’ he said in a surprised tone of voice from behind some shelves.

‘Hi Manga, it’s been a while. Have you had visitors, or are you moving out?’

They exchanged a clumsy hug. A nightshirt and an embroidered waistcoat, his taste in clothes, at least, had changed dramatically since they last met.

‘Just some kids,’ he muttered, and she could tell at once that he was lying. ‘Powder from the extinguisher all over everything, so the insurance company are making a fuss …’

But it wasn’t just his feeble explanation that was making him blush.

Manga had always had a bit of a crush on her, which was hardly a disadvantage given the reason for her visit today.

‘My name’s Farook Al-Hassan these days,’ he added, cheering up a bit. ‘I converted when I got married two years ago.’

‘Oh, you’re married? And there was me thinking we’d end up together,’ she laughed, and watched as he turned a fetching shade of bright red.

So that explained the slightly odd clothes. Manga had gone and converted.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange when she thought about it, he’d always seemed to be searching for something.

The last time she saw him he’d been a militant vegan, and before that a local politician, unless it was the other way round …?

Manga was a smart lad, but there’d always been something lost about him. She just hoped he’d found something that worked for him now.

‘Have you got children too?’ she asked, mainly out of politeness.

‘A boy, eight months, Mohammed.’

He pulled out his wallet and she admired the miracle for the ten seconds that form demanded.

‘He looks like you, Ma … I mean, Farook,’ she said, with what she hoped was her friendliest smile. Get to the point, now, Normén!

‘Listen, I wanted to ask if you have any idea where Henke is?’

‘Er … what do you mean?’ Another feeble lie.

‘Well, I’ve been trying to call him but none of the numbers I’ve got seem to work, so I thought maybe you might know where he is?’

He shook his head and did his best not to meet her gaze.

‘Sorry, I haven’t seen him for a while …’

She frowned. Two fires, Henke missing and now thoroughly decent Manga lying to her face. Something was going on, and it was time that she found out what.

But just as she was about to open her mouth, Manga interrupted her.

‘Listen, Rebecca, now that you’re here there’s something I’ve been wanting to say for ages.’

‘Okay,’ she said warily.

She really didn’t have time for any latterday declarations of love, but on the other hand she needed his help now. Patience, Normén!

‘Well, Rebecca … I’ve always … I mean … oh, bugger …’

He took a deep breath and seemed to pull himself together.

‘You and Dag, all that business that happened with HP … well, you know?’

‘Mmm,’ she replied neutrally.

‘Well … I’ve sort of always … wanted to apologize to you. Dag and I were cousins, of course, and, well, you met him through me, and …’

He looked down at the counter. She suddenly felt sick. Probably the heat.

‘I mean,’ he sighed, making a last attempt, ‘I-I’ve always felt a b-bit guilty about it all,’ he stammered. ‘That it was sort of my fault, if you know what I mean?’

He shot her a pleading look and she had absolutely no idea how to respond.

‘Dag was older than me, of course, and we weren’t exactly close, b-but I knew perfectly well what sort of person he was. There were rumours about him, that he could be violent and … that his dad left because Dag beat him up. I mean, there was a lot of talk, but I never dared say anything … to you, I mean.’

He was looking down at the counter again.

Rebecca took a deep breath.

What did he expect her to say?

The feeling of nausea was getting worse. The air in the shop was stuffy and her top was starting to stick to her. She needed to put a stop to this discussion and get the conversation back on track, and fast.

‘Listen, Manga,’ she said, as calmly as she could. ‘We all make our own decisions, you, me, Henke and Dag. Right or wrong, we made our choices and in the end we each have to take the consequences. I was the one who fell in love with Dag, it was my decision to move in with him, and I was the one who didn’t report him when things started to go wrong. It was my responsibility.’

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the bastard painful truth, she thought bitterly. Okay, enough of that!

‘Getting back to Henke, I was wondering …’

‘But you don’t get it!’ he interrupted in a shaky voice. ‘HP told me he was thinking of killing him. That he was thinking of killing Dag! He told me what the bastard had done to you and how much he hated him. And I, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t try to stop him, I didn’t tell anyone, and then it all went to hell. Dag dead, HP in prison, and you …’

He stopped and looked at her sadly.

‘You didn’t get away scot-free either, Rebecca.’

He fell silent and she gave him a few seconds to pull himself together. Mind you, she needed the pause just as much herself. Waves of nausea were washing over her with full force now and she had to close her eyes for a few seconds to get her gag-reflex under control.

‘The only person who got out in one piece was me,’ he went on. ‘For me life just carried on almost as if nothing had happened. If I’d just opened my mouth, told s-someone what HP was going on about, then maybe everything would have been different? I could at least have told him to cool it. But I didn’t. I don’t really know why I didn’t. All I know is that I could have done more to stop it happening. Much more!’