11 The Dawn of the Vikings (1/2)

The number of cubes that had appeared simultaneously in every corner of the world was later estimated at around a hundred thousand.

The vast majority were discovered very soon after they'd appeared. The vast majority appeared in areas governed by some sort of authority. The vast majority of the authorities concerned immediately cordoned off the cubes with police and soldiers, preventing people from getting too close.

The police and the soldiers were mostly unhappy about that. The police force and the military suspected the cubes were very bad news: a new, deadly kind of explosive, a radiation device, a pod full of microbes designed to decimate the population.

Only a few felt proud of the fact that they now had a chance to die for their country.

But thousands of cubes were left unattended. They appeared in places that weren't populated, or where people were few and far between. Some would be discovered only months later.

To make things worse, some authorities adopted a regrettably lax attitude towards the cubes, and that caused many complications later on.

Max Dahl, the police chief in Jokkmokk in Sweden, thought he had everything under control. On the morning of January 3rd, 2035, he arrived at work twenty minutes late, and spent at least half an hour drinking coffee and congratulating himself and his colleagues about their performance over the past couple of days.

The New Year celebrations in Jokkmokk had concluded with just 19 arrests, with most of the people arrested being conditionally released within a few hours. There had been no deaths, and only two serious cases of assault that required an ambulance.

True, Jokkmokk wasn't a big town. However, this year it had special guests. Sven Holm, president of the Viking Motorcycle Club, owned a defunct farm a couple of kilometers away. Over a dozen Vikings had assembled there to greet the New Year. Max Dahl anticipated trouble when the bikers paid a visit to his town.

But they didn't. And Max Dahl had issued specific instructions to his patrolmen: they were to keep away from Holm's farm.

”Stay well away,” he told them. ”They are sure to be all drunk and high on drugs. I don't want any shooting matches developing because a hopped-up paranoid biker saw a police car. If there's an emergency call, then of course we'll all do what's necessary. Once again: Happy New Year!”

And they all grinned and raised their coffee mugs in a toast. In more than half the mugs, the coffee was spiked with brandy, rum, aquavit - whatever had been handy. Surviving a winter so far north required special measures.

At Holm's farm, a vote was being held on special measures. There were nearly twenty Vikings present and participating. They all agreed special measures were needed. The incredible opportunity they had been presented with had to be fully exploited.

The opportunity came in the shape of a glowing cube that had appeared in the snow next to the tumbledown barn on Holm's farm. The big room in Holm's house was almost full of the items taken from the cube. It seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

Timon implant kits were the favored choice: they looked expensive. And there was something fascinating, something very promising about that glowing blue dot in the base.

Sven Holm tried to get everything done in the proper order. But before he could finish reading the text on the scroll, two of the chicks present - Lena and Ingrid - stabbed each other with the implant kits. Whoever had written the text on the scroll should have put implant instructions at the very end. People were impatient by nature, and all the more so when drunk and high on drugs.

Lena and Ingrid immediately went into a kind of trance. This confirmed what most of the Vikings had suspected from the start: timon was some sort of a new kickass drug that was implanted for slow, gradual release. Everyone started stabbing themselves with the cones. A few very drunk Vikings stabbed themselves in arms and legs, but the implants didn't take: the blue light failed to appear on their skin.

Sven Holm didn't treat himself to an implant. He watched coldly as the implanted Vikings went through varied manifestations of what did indeed seem, to Sven, like a drug-induced euphoria. He had thought timon might be some sort of drug too, but he had dismissed that notion very quickly. This was something far, far more important than drugs.

Drugs ranked very high on Sven Holm's order of importance. Anything that ranked even higher consumed all his attention. He kept on reading, ignoring the babbling Vikings who were now all complaining about the cold. It was nonsense, it was very warm inside the house.

When he'd finished reading, he picked up the implant kit that had been lying in his lap. He got up and approached Olaf Berg, his deputy, who was rolling around the floor holding his balls and moaning that it was so freezing they were about to drop off.