Simon Stålenhag

"Somewhere out there beyond the cordons, beyond the fields and marshes, abandoned machines roamed like stray dogs. They wandered about impatiently, restless in the new wind sweeping through the country. They smelled something in the air, something unfamiliar.
Perhaps, if we had listened closely, we would also have heard it. We may have heard the sound rising from the forgotten and sealed caverns in the depths: the muffled pounding from something trying to get out."

"In everyday life, our surroundings only shifted slowly and subtly, such as altered designs of door handles and alarm switches, a soft color change in the glow of streetlights and lightbulbs, or a new font on the signs in the subway... Each is a minor change, but often, when looking back at them all together, they are as glaringly obvious as a sudden industrial collapse."

"Change is the dynamo that slowly but inevitably drives our society forward, while past days are clouded more and more in mystery and myth. The dynamo only spins one way - there are no return tickets to the land disappearing in the mists behind us."

"In the twilight hours, it is hard to discern the details marking the passage of two decades. It is hard to separate memory from reality; my mind fills out all the blurry sections. At dusk, the field looks like an ice-covered lake. You could almost believe that the flood is back."

"They were called vagabonds. They were an odd group, and were fascinated by colorful fabric, complex patterns, fur, and feathers. Anything organic and soft was exotic and highly valuable to them, and they seemed to have developed some form of religious worship of biology and nature."

"I happened to glance out at the landscape outside the window and was struck by a brief sensation. It was a sense of something having been lost, but also a sense that I was already forgetting what it was. I shook the feeling off, turned up the volume on my stereo, and returned to more important things - in thirty minutes I was supposed to be at Martin Hagegard's party and my hair had to be just so."

"Somewhere deep within the bedrock, where the nation kept its radioactive waste and where only machines labored, there were now endless rows of echo spheres filled with concrete. If we had been able to linger there without being incinerated by the radiation, and if we had been able to put our ear to the spheres, we might have heard it - the nervous heartbeats of something in there, slumbering restlessly."

"Small flares of light swarmed above the mounting around the tower. They danced in the cold air, emitting soft siren calls that echoed in the valley."

"Some days are like jittery, malicious clockwork -- sometimes things freeze mid-movement and we age several years in a few seconds."

"Suddenly, our machines were bestowed balance and grace previously reserved for biological organisms."

"I remember at the end of August, when the vacationers started to migrate back into the city and the guest pier was deserted, you could hear the distant breaths of the vane turbines rise and fall under the water, like monotonous whale songs in the chilly water."

"A moist mass of cardboard boxes, pillows, and mattresses had erupted from the front door, like the house was vomiting forth its stomach contents."

"If I look at my memories from the side, that weekend is a black line, like the dark boundary in the rock layers left by the disaster that killed all the dinosaurs."

"A new and dark inner landscape had opened up, and we wanted nothing more than to talk about it. We abdicated from childhood, tried to learn how to talk as adults, and shamefully glanced back at our playgrounds."

"... and then we returned to our old playgrounds like zombies around a mall. We sat wedged into the swings outside the school, or crouched in someone's old treehouse, smoking stolen cigarettes."

"We walked in long lines through winter nights, and you could see little points of light go on and off in the darkness - cigarettes smoked by teenagers who had gathered around their wrecked memories, like a requiem.
We made our nights our days, squinted at the horizon, and sighed. Way over there, the morning dawned."

(1) Virtual reality as an escape from everyday life - Reminds me of the consistency principle from Robert Cialdini's Influence, of which one branch states that people are often wired to keep going on autopilot rather than face difficult problem-solving situations; as a result, they are automatically pushed towards poor life choices. It's a growing epidemic in the digital age, with people taking more and more to virtual/fictional settings as a safe haven, stunting their intellectual growth to satisfy momentary impulses. And we rarely stop and think about the fact that pretty much every aspect of our lives is already directed in some way by a few big companies. In the same way that so many people are marketed unhealthy food and recreational practices (alcohol, cigarettes, etc.) without ever being fully conscious that this is what's killing them - the Sentre consumers are so hooked on their neurocasters that they never even realize they're drowning, or being eaten alive. Thus Stalenhag's dark vision of so-called advancements taking over our lives reads much like a well-timed warning.

(2) "The Intercerebral Divinity" / "oily god" - I found it interesting that such an alien creature was compared to a god, in the same vein as the ultimate supercomputer in Fredric Brown's "Answer". To me, this all goes back to the fact that since the beginning of time, humans have always been searching for that something more to believe in - whether it's a single god or many, or unnamed invisible forces directing our every move, like the red thread of fate. Because life is harsh and either has so many or so few choices as to make us feel powerless, as a species we look for solace in a higher being to guide our actions and distinguish right and wrong. But what if such a being truly and irreversibly appeared before us? What would it look like, what would it do, and would we ever be free or would we be slaves to its higher authority/intelligence? While it seems that Stalenhag's hive mind was an accidental byproduct of many people connected to the same network, this one passage says a lot about the entire dynamic:

"And in its wake, the citizens of Point Linden, hundreds of people linked together, their neurocasters connected to the oily god in the mist, floated across the ground in front of the car, and they looked almost happy."

Perhaps, despite never consciously asking for it, these people are happy because they finally have something to follow, because driving change as leaders and revolutionaries is hard, because life is so much more simple when judge, jury and executioner are all provided for you. And that's a scary thought, but history provides the proof.

(3) Actions of the hive mind / the air force pilots as "termites" - This line really struck me, as it called to mind the uncanny similarities between eusocial insect behavior and that of the interconnected neurocaster users. I have to wonder how much direct inspiration Stalenhag drew from nature, as these are some of the common elements:

(i) A "queen" around whom all the activities of the hive/colony are centered - the role played by the Intercerebral Divinity.
(ii) Drones (often male) whose purpose is to reproduce, and can sometimes break off from the main group to start their own colonies - the various hulking cobbled-together robots who started roaming the land after the hive mind arose. And, either coincidentally or not, they are also called drones.
(iii) Workers who build and maintain colony structures, and are also infertile - calling to mind the air force pilots with their stillborns, who built the giant robotic creature that allowed the Intercerebral Divinity to take physical form.
(iv) Satellite nests - several eusocial insect species build interconnected nests, which remind me of the way enormous neurograph towers stretch across cities and are constantly being expanded by cable-roller robots.
(v) Another name for these insect societies is "superorganisms" because they operate as a coherently functioning whole.

"The drone technology was praised because it spared us meaningless loss of life. The collateral damage was of two kinds: the civilians unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire, and the children of the federal pilots, who, as a concession to the godheads of defense technology, were all stillborn."

"May is the time of dust. Gusts of wind rise and ebb through the haze, carrying huge sheets of dun-colored dust that seethe and rustle across the landscape. They slither across the ground, hissing among the creosote bushes and on until piling up in billowing dunes and waves that wander unseen and grow in the constant static."

"Lighthouse keepers were once warned they shouldn't listen to the sea for too long; likewise, you could hear voices in the static and lose your mind."

"It was as if there were a code in there - a code that could, as soon as your mind detected it, irrevocably conjure demons from the depths."

"Do you know how the brain works? Do you have any idea of what we know about how the brain and consciousness work? Us humans, I mean. And I'm not talking about some new-age hocus-pocus, I'm talking about the sum of the knowledge compiled by disciplined scientists over three hundred years through arduous experiments and skeptical vetting of theories. I'm talking about the insights you gain by actually poking around inside people's heads, studying human behavior, and conducting experiments to figure out the truth, and separating that from all the bullshit about the brain and consciousness that has no basis in reality whatsoever. I'm talking about the understanding of the brain that has resulted in things like neuronic warfare, the neurographic network, and Sentre Stimulus TLEs. How much do you really know about that?"

"I suppose you still have the typical twentieth-century view of the whole thing. The self is situated in the brain somehow, like a small pilot in a cockpit behind your eyes. You believe that it is a mix of memories and emotions and things that make you cry, and all that is probably also inside your brain, because it would be strange if that were inside your heart, which you've been taught is a muscle. But at the same time you're having trouble reconciling with the fact that all that is you, all your thoughts and experiences and knowledge and taste and opinions, should exist inside your cranium. So you tend not to dwell on such questions, thinking 'There's probably more to it' and being satisfied with a fuzzy image of gaseous, transparent Something floating around in an undefined void."

"Maybe you don't even put it into words, but we both know that you're thinking about an archetypical soul. You believe in an invisible ghost."

"When we fell asleep, the car was engulfed by howling darkness. It rocked in the wind, and I dreamed I slept inside the belly of a giant."

"The car moved through the pitch-black desert night like a submarine in a deep-sea trench."

"I looked around. We were all alone.
'Where are your mom and dad?'
'Everywhere,' the boy replied."

"Afterward, I was curled up on the ground and saw the pink chunks spread across the flagstones around me, and before Fort Hull's alarm system started blaring I had the time to think: That's it, right there! The recipe for bechamel sauce. But even if I did my utmost to scoop up the pieces and put them back in the pit that used to be Max's skull, his recipe would still be lost. Max's lasagna existed in the intricate way those pink chunks had been assembled, just like love and hate and anxiety and creativity and art and law and order. Everything that makes us humans something more than elongated chimpanzees. There it was, spilled across the flagstones, and no technology known to man could ever put it back together. It was incredible."

"That was my materialistic revelation. What I'm trying to say is that what we call lasagna is simply a phenomenon that arises somewhere between the physical parts of the brain and in the way they're put together, and anyone claiming lasagna is something more has underestimated how complicated the brain is and in how many ways its parts can be assembled. Or they have overestimated the phenomenon of lasagna."

"The view outside the window made me uneasy. After three weeks in the Blackwelt badlands, where visibility never went beyond a few hundred yards, we were suddenly distinct in the great void, the car crawling like a black bug across a vast sheet of white paper."

"Hey, girl, I said, and the horse pricked up its ears and turned its head toward me, and where her eyes should have been there were only two dark pits."

"On the side of the building there was a Sentre ad, and I assumed the whole installation must have been theirs. I guess there must have been millions of minds bouncing around inside that thing, and the power required to please them melted the snow."

"Someone should really heave those installations from their foundations and let them roll down the mountains into the suburbs, where they could crush whatever was left of all the gardens, houses, and responsible mothers and fathers and their SUVs and finally lay themselves to rest in the abandoned city centers as memorials to humankind."

"In the beginning, God created the neuron, and when electricity flowed through the three-dimensional nerve cell matrix in the brain, there was consciousness."

"There was something going on with her mouth. It moved like the mouth of someone dreaming, and it didn't stop moving until later, when Ted took the neurocaster off and she finally died."

"Once upon a time, these kinds of ships had been the pride of the federal army... Now, here they were, plucked out of the sky, hollowed out and chewed up by the sea, and finally back in service as cliffs for birds to roost on. Behold the Amphion, the pride of the air force: ten million tons of rust and bird shit."

"I have to say: they were fantastic. Something inside me wanted to stop the car and get out, to walk up to them and touch them and closely examine every single one of these strange growths. In another reality I would have loved this. I would have calmly walked these streets, fascinated - certainly with a degree of disgust, but rapturous, pleasant disgust. In the real world, everything was backward now. We were the fascinating growth, the insane - the only sick souls in a healthy world. There was no safe everyday life behind us, no normal zone to return to, and the only way out was forward."