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, 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.
In later broadcasts, he was able to realize he had a method of communication with the outside world. He would tell us about all he had found in the last week, what he had for dinner the day before, what he would eat for breakfast the next day. If he found something interesting in the loop, he would bring it forward and present it as a new prize. Once, he was able to construct a makeshift instrument, and would play the occasional folk song. 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.
Years later, an intern at SVT found the recorded broadcasts of Joel, and posted them on filmtavlan.se, a popular television discussion forum. They hadn't managed to collect all the broadcasts, and many of the earlier ones had been lost to time entirely-but this was still the first we all had seen of Joel since his last public broadcast. Many of us discussed how we told ourselves it hadn't happened in the first place-but seeing the irrefutable proof, and feeling those childhood memories again, brought back all the same energy as those schoolyard Friday discussions.
The public forum also allowed for many others to pitch in their theories. Some swore they had heard him while working in the loop, but were told they couldn't go to find him. Others theorized that he had been brought to a different loop entirely. Some even thought that, between different broadcasts, we were seeing a selection of different Joels. Differences in the backdrop, his demeanour, and his language all seemed to support this.
It didn't take much time for Joel to become an internet folktale. For everyone who had actually seen the broadcasts in childhood, there were a dozen more who claimed they had, and were too eager to add their own false memories. Joel reached a small occult status on filmtavlan. Edits of the recovered broadcasts, distorted edits of Joel from school photos, and written accounts of seeing Joel that were entirely fabricated dominated the forums. Some tried to find connections with the songs he occasionally played, posing some thematic significance. After some time, our own memories of Joel became distorted and muddied. He was no longer himself-just a childhood schoolyard myth, an internet scary story, a cocktail of truth and fiction centered around a person that, perhaps, never was.
We never got any real closure. Still, discussing Joel with others on filmtavlan was a way to connect to our own childhood. I reconnected with friends I hadn't seen since graduating high school, even more who had moved from Munsö or Sweden entirely. Remembering Joel couldn't have ever brought him back, but I think he would have liked knowing he had his friends together, again.