The inner structure of The Loop was a closely guarded secret. It was easy to imagine labyrinthine tunnels, closed-off laboratories, and countless, magnetically charged devices lying underneath your every step in northern Munsö. Tours were sometimes given to the public, but only on certain occasions, and with a careful hand on what is shown. Even those who worked in The Loop were often sequestered to their own division, oblivious to the structures beyond where they worked.
This was the first reason they told us they hadn't yet found Joel Fridlund. There was any number of forgotten entrances he could have snuck into, any number of corridors he could be hiding behind, any number of stations inside The Loop that could be causing the broadcast. With only one-way communication, it was impossible to determine any details of where Joel had lost himself.
Every Thursday, usually around 22:30, televisions across The Loop's accelerator prim-2 radius would light up. We'd see Joel, shuffling around some odd corridor filled with pipes, wires, and discarded electronics. At first, it seemed he was entirely unaware the broadcast was happening at all. We'd see him cry out, wander back and forth looking for any exits, and thankfully find the odd scrap of food or water left discarded in the labyrinth. About twenty minutes later, the broadcast would cut off, and we wouldn't see him again until the next week.
Joel's broadcast would dominate conversations at school on Fridays. We would theorize what happened to him, question if the adults would be able to find him, sometimes form our own half-baked attempts at a rescue. Nothing came from these, of course.
Every broadcast was different. Sometimes he'd try to talk to us, other times he would just sit there. It wasn't always clear if he knew that he was broadcasting at all. Especially when he was asleep. Sometimes, we would watch him eat something. It was somewhat comforting, to know he, at least, wasn't too hungry.
In later broadcasts, he was able to realize he had a method of communication with the outside world. If he found something interesting in The Loop, he would bring it forward and present it as a new prize. Once, he found a cassette filled with Swedish folk songs. He always had an affinity for the ballad of Cecilia Lind, a song about love and the loss of innocence. The shows where he sang were always my favorites. Slowly, the backdrop of Joel's broadcasting room filled with gorgeous, unknown detritus of The Loop's countless projects.
SVT, the national broadcasting station, was one of the strongest forms of pressure put on those at The Loop to find Joel. They saw the broadcasts as further reason why The Loop was a terrible project, and the case study of Joel provided national pressure to shut it down. Sometimes, I wonder, if without that pressure, The Loop could have lasted just a few more years.
As the months of broadcasts went on, Joel started to lose his enthusiasm. Sometimes he would mutter at the microphone unintelligibly, and the school conversations would center around our own half-hearted theories of what he could have been trying to say. Some broadcasts didn't feature Joel in them at all. Other times, he would seem like an entirely different person, speaking in English about names of people we had never heard of.
There came a time when each person lost interest in Joel's broadcasts. Being infrequent, often uneventful, and always knowing they could just watch next week, conversations on Fridays began to turn to other topics. We worried about our classes, our futures, and ourselves. Joel, despite his weekly cries, was already becoming a memory.
They never found him before shutting down The Loop. He was declared dead, his family compensated, and the project abandoned entirely. We never saw another broadcast. Joel became a ghost story, a collective childhood hallucination.