Phantom Frost

by Alfred Wurr

  I walked north from there, toward a distant rise in the earth a few miles off.

  That must be Easy Chair, I thought, thinking of the crater formed out of a two-million-year-old cinder cone volcano. From where I stood, it looked like any other hill. The crater and the sloping arms that had led to its name must have lain on the other side, beyond my view.

  I thanked Scott in my thoughts for supplying me with satellite photos of the region. Although my visions and inner sense pointed me in the direction of my goal like a compass knows magnetic north, I still needed to navigate the difficult topography and wouldn’t have known what to expect without them. Going in a straight line was fine for crows, but not for terrestrial beings.

  My mind wandered again after a while, returning to my earliest memories, just before I’d first encountered the Bodhi Group, just before they’d taken me.

  Sometime a day or two before that fateful meeting, I remembered waking up from a deep sleep, surrounded by ice and fog. Clusters of crystals glimmered and gleamed, illuminating the haze, reflecting in a kaleidoscope of colours off the clear ice walls of a massive cavern.

  I’d awakened with a sense of urgency, alarmed by some threat I could no longer remember. I had the vague sense that I needed to protect something that had been taken from me or that was threatened.

  To do that, I remembered leaving the ice cave, in a vortex of blues and whites, and arriving in a large cavern, surrounded by alien people and equipment. It was the Bodhi Group, a secret US-led multinational collaboration of Western countries, corporations, universities, and other organizations established with the primary mission of researching and developing tools and technologies capable of quelling any threats to democracy, freedom, and peace.

  I didn’t know that then as I stood before their representatives and researchers within a large circular structure. The building’s high ceiling towered over my head, supported by thick stone columns, squatting within another large cavern as big as the one from which I’d just travelled. This one was lit by strings of lightbulbs arrayed on temporary metal stands, rather than whatever magical light had illuminated the previous one, but with most of it lost in deep shadow.

  A blinking audience stared at me from the steps leading up to the platform on which I stood. I took a few steps forward and spoke. They looked at each other, then at me, with wrinkled brows and shaking heads. One of them shouted orders—gibberish to me—and a man in a yellow hard hat ran off. The one who had shouted approached me like I was a bomb ready to go off, speaking soft-toned words that I didn’t understand. From that, everything else followed.

  The next few weeks were a lot of gesticulation, drawing patterns in the dust, and fruitless vocalization, working out a basic vocabulary for communication. After several days of shouting and more than a little swearing, I finally succeeded in communicating my fears and they agreed to help, inviting me to go with them to what I later came to know as the Bodhi Institute: a secret underground facility that housed research and development laboratories focused on the development of weapons to combat those threats I mentioned earlier—chief among them the Soviet threat. There, they told me, I could live in cold comfort, drinking more of the wondrous libations of dark sugar water they offered as gifts during our initial meetings. They were happy to help, they said, but they needed my help too: just a bit of research to help in the fight against the Red Menace, then we’ll help with your problem.

  The liars…

  Chapter 2

  I Was Detained

  I got my own supercooled room to live in, which was sweet. A few days in, technicians brought in a TV, I guess to help me learn English; hand signs and arm waving only get you so far. They didn’t seem interested in learning my language, but I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the shows, especially the action ones. They X-rayed and poked and prodded me for the first while, trying to figure out my physiology, while I watched Sesame Street and cartoons. They gave me video games too, testing my reaction time and hand-eye coordination, I suppose, or just keeping me distracted. I’m a quick study; within a month I knew enough to convey simple concepts in the heavily accented, stilted speech of a recent immigrant to a new country.

  It took years for them to gain a rudimentary understanding of my biology and abilities. Even today, they don’t really know how or why I can do the things I can do. My friend Scott says what I can do, even that I am alive at all, defies everything currently understood about biology, physics and the relationship between energy and mass.

  “It’s like you can draw energy, literally, from nothing,” Scott said. “Like there’s a field of energy beyond our ability, or that of our best instrumentation, to perceive. Best they can tell, it’s pervasive and effectively limitless. Not only can you perceive what we can’t, Shivurr, you seem to be able to draw on this at will and shape it, consciously. It sustains you somehow.”

  The eggheads said that I’m quantumly linked in some way with another dimension. This relationship, they postulated, allows me to touch and manipulate that other space to manifest effects in this reality. Effects like warping and shaping the relationship between realities to create temporary, targeted temperature alterations, bending the energy to my will and desires. Sort of like Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” but across dimensions.

  No duh, I thought at the time. I’ve always called it the Underfrost: a place of infinite ice, cold, and snow that lies just under everything. It took a while for me to believe that they couldn’t see it—like trying to fathom colour-blindness when you can see the full spectrum. By the time they’d figured out that much, I spoke like a native but no longer trusted them, so I kept the other things that I knew about the Underfrost to myself. Things like sometimes when the air is cold enough here, the boundary between the two vanishes spontaneously. Other times, areas of the Underfrost itself become cold enough to affect this reality, causing temperature drops in this one, even making it snow and storm. The opposite is also true, to a much lesser extent; if it gets too hot here, it gets warmer in the Underfrost.

  Practically speaking, the Underfrost gives me the power to make it snow, cool the air around me, or conjure balls of frost energy, just by thinking about it. I can even make snow rise out of the earth or, with a lot more effort, appear out of thin air. I can’t really explain how I do it. It’s like walking or breathing or throwing a baseball; I just know how to do it without thinking about it. As Scott put it, it’s sub-symbolic.

  Working the Underfrost gets harder to do the warmer and drier the air, requiring deeper concentration and tiring me out much faster, if I succeed at all. Under my current circumstances, trying to do that would be like a mountain climber trying to sprint up a hillside near thirty thousand feet; in reality, the sprint would be a fast walk and the climber would soon be flat on his face, gasping for air. The opposite is also true; the colder and wetter it is, the easier accessing the Underfrost becomes.

  While my captors figured out a lot of this during my stay, I managed to keep some of the stuff I can do to myself. I was counting on those secrets keeping me a step or two ahead of them in my quest. I had an inkling there were more things I’d forgotten or lost because of the mistreatment I’d suffered at the Bodhi Group’s hands. I’d see flashes of them in my dreams, then wake up sometimes unable to recall what they were, or other times unable to imagine how to do them, like someone who’s never done a cartwheel dreaming of doing backflips.

  Things turned nasty several months in. It’s fuzzy, but I guess I got impatient with the excuses and delays and left. They picked me up as I staggered back to the facility, dehydrated suffering from exposure. I went on strike after that and they stopped playing nice. After that, my participation stopped being voluntary, if it ever was. From then on, many of the experiments were cruel, torture really. The more sociopathic among them finally got their wish, and they subjected me to stress tests involving exposure to varying levels of heat, cold, and water. Under some of these adverse conditions, I reacted instinctively, attempting to e
scape, exhibiting powers that fired their curiosity. While the scientists were initially interested in me as a phenomenon—a living, sentient being of ice and snow—their primary goal became to study the limits of my abilities and search for new ones, all the while monitoring me with instrumentation that they hoped would unlock the mysteries of the Underfrost.

  Those experiments taught me a lot about my limitations. As you might expect, melting is a big issue for me. Losing too much water reduces my body’s ability to cool itself. As my core temperature rises, I lose water faster, and then I get warmer faster, and so on in a vicious cycle. Eventually my entire system collapses—based on experiments that took me close to that point. If they’d taken it any further, I’d just be a residue of crystalline powder dusting the floor of a Bodhi Institute laboratory.

  It was during those times that I started to forget things. I’d go to sleep and wake up feeling normal, then realize I’d forgotten stuff like where I’d lived before, where I’d come from. It was like I was dying in slow motion. It was terrifying and demoralizing. Eventually I stopped eating and drinking entirely, falling into a deep depression. Better dead than a slave, I thought.

  I guess they were pretty freaked out, since the experiments stopped abruptly. Delirious, incoherent, I was beyond caring and barely noticed. A few days later, they brought in a head shrink, Dr. Emmett Feldman, to get me back on my feet. It turned out that he was a cool old guy—for a shrink—about sixty, balding, with tufts of grey-and-white hair above big ears with hair growing out of them like moss and a ready smile. It took weeks for him to break through the protective shell that I’d drawn about myself, to build enough trust that I’d speak to him. Eventually, he did, and we’d chat for an hour or two every day about all sorts of things. Well, our early conversations were limited, but they got more interesting as my vocabulary improved. I’d listen raptly as he shared stories of his family, life, and travels, indulging my curiosity before returning to me. I’d catch him staring at me with curious eyes now and then, hanging on my every word.

  “You’re weirding me out, Emmett,” I said once. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

  His face reddened then. “Forgive my rudeness. Even after all this time, I’m still overwhelmed to be sitting here talking to you. In all the history of the planet there’s never been any living creature like you, as far as we know. No trace exists in the fossil record either. This begs so many questions. Where did you come from? Where did you all go?”

  I wished that I had those answers.

  Emmett figured my memory loss was my mind protecting itself, somehow. Maybe, he’d suggest, the memories were being locked away for safekeeping and we just had to find the combination to the safe where’d they’d been secured. It sounded like a lot of shrink mumbo-jumbo to me; my gut told me the Bodhi Group had stolen them and they weren’t coming back. I started to feel better anyway thanks to having a friend. Plus, my memories before the Institute had vanished so thoroughly by then that it became hard to miss them. I knew, intellectually, that I’d lost something, but not knowing what it was made me care a little less, for a while. Even the problem for which I’d sought their help faded out of mind for a time.

  At Emmett’s suggestion, in exchange for my full cooperation, I bargained for better living conditions and perquisites. I don’t need to sleep much unless I’m injured or heavily drained. With lots of time to kill, I insisted that they supply me with more of the books, movies, games, and VHS tapes of the TV shows that I’d clung to in my early days at the Institute. Relieved, I suppose, to have me back on my feet, they eagerly acquiesced. From then on, I lived comfortably, learning English, participating in experiments that tested my abilities but no longer exceeded them. When I wasn’t doing that, I watched TV, read fantasy and sci-fi books, played video games on full-scale arcade machines and home game consoles, and drank soda pop. If TV is awesome, video games are the best. And the books. I read like a starving man eats hot dogs, escaping into new worlds from the comfort of my ice-cold room. I might be wrong, but something told me my people, whoever and wherever they were, weren’t readers or writers. Then there were the snacks, of course. I’ve got a sweet tooth, and the soda pop was free and limitless.

  Things were good, but I still felt like a pariah for a long time. Most of the scientists and security kept their distance—literally—hugging the walls when I’d pass by. In retrospect, I suppose biologists don’t get too chummy with their lab rats, but their fearful expressions implied more than just clinical detachment. The food service personnel flatly refused to enter my room to stock the fridge when I was there.

  “Try not to take it personally,” Emmett said, seeing my face. “They’re simply scared. There’s a rumour you’re a god…or demon, making its way through the kitchen staff.”

  I snorted. “Right, an amnesic god with a tendency to melt at temperatures above zero.” I looked at the can in my hand. “As for demon, does caffeine fiend count?”

  In 1978—five years before my current journey across the desert—things changed when I met Scott, while hunting Klingons. Installed a few weeks earlier, a mainframe terminal gave me access to research material, books, and text-based computer games. Super Star Trek was one of the latter. It was fun, even with no graphics.

  I’d been playing just a few minutes when the screen went black. Text characters appeared on the screen one by one, as they were typed.

  ‘Hey, man, how’s it going?’

  “What the heck?” I said, squinting at the white characters on the black screen. After several seconds, I typed a reply.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Scott.’

  Scott? Who do I know named Scott? None of the scientists or security guards, as far as I knew, had that name.

  ‘Who?’ I typed after several seconds.

  ‘A friend.’

  Over the next few hours, Scott revealed himself to be a part of the team responsible for maintaining the Bodhi Institute’s computer systems. A few weeks earlier, while I was in another part of the base, he’d installed the terminal that I’d requested. As a Bodhi Group computer systems administrator and programmer, Scott routinely set up and networked computers as a part of his job. His interest was piqued by my ice-cold home, game systems and books. Unable to contain his curiosity, he began a mission to uncover who or what was living there.

  Much of the data on me was on microfilm and in paper files in the restricted archives, but there was enough information in the mainframe computer to send him reeling. His mind was blown—his words—when he finally gained access to the camera feeds. He quickly decided that he had to meet me, or at least talk to me. As a science fiction fan, he’d always dreamed of and hoped for confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrials. While he wasn’t sure if I was an alien, I was close enough as far as he was concerned. I guess alien is better than demon, I thought when he told me that. To him, meeting me was like meeting Elvis or Bigfoot, and a small thing like going to prison for espionage, or whatever, wasn’t standing in the way. He always was a bit of a rebel. Besides, he was sure that he wouldn’t be caught, being confident in his ability to cover his tracks.

  There was no way he could just walk in with security guards watching the cameras around the clock, so he reached out via computer, and our friendship was born. With his root admin access and deep computer systems knowledge, it wasn’t long before he set up secure network communication channels that allowed us to converse regularly with no one the wiser. For endless hours, we discussed comics, movies, books, and computer games. With his guidance, I soon had an extensive list of must-see, must-read, and must-play items, which I requested of Bodhi Institute Executive Director Jeffrey Wallace, PhD, in payment for my ongoing cooperation. I just told him that I’d seen, heard, or read about whatever I was asking him for in the content that they’d already given to me. I don’t think that he cared all that much anyway as long as I was cooperative.

  Once a promising scientist himself, Wallace had traded that in for a caree
r as an administrator, and for the past thirty years he had managed numerous researchers in innumerable highly classified research and development projects. In his early sixties now, he was nearing retirement. Five foot two, grey-haired and balding, he, and by association those around him, suffered from a serious Napoleon complex. If I was cooperative, he denied me nothing, providing Security Director Harland Dixon had no concerns.

  Dixon, as far as I could tell, managed a team of fifty to sixty well-trained security officers. Many of the members of his team, Scott told me, were ex-military; others were poached from the CIA, the FBI, and other covert US government organizations. Harland was in his early fifties, five foot nine and fit, and he still had all his hair, which, once deep brown judging by the photographs that decorated his office, had turned mostly grey. He was a former CIA spook who had served in that capacity during the early years of the Vietnam War before joining the Bodhi Group several years before the war’s official end. He kept his hair cut short and his face always clean-shaven. Scott figured this was Dixon’s way of ensuring he was never confused for one of the hippie bums that the security chief blamed for the war’s outcome.

  As luck would have it, or more likely Scott arranged, they sent my friend shopping for a lot of my requests. They even let him hand deliver them. As a result, my room was soon cluttered with VHS tapes, books, game consoles, a film projector, and other paraphernalia. After repeated appeals, film reels for Star Wars and similar movies were, somehow, located. I watched them for weeks, memorizing every scene, and for a while almost forgot I was being held against my will. With all the reading and movies, my grasp of English, my second language, got better too. Scott got himself assigned to the night shift and would sneak in to hang out and watch movies, replacing the security camera video feed that recorded my every move with pre-recorded footage of me sleeping.