The ice sat in the mud, completely ignoring the thirty-degree heat and the basic laws of physics.
My phone screen was cracked right down the middle, which meant the number fourteen looked a lot like the number seventy-four if I squinted. I preferred squinting. Fourteen was the number of unique listeners who had tuned in to the latest episode of my investigative paranormal podcast, Truth Static. Four of those listeners were my mother refreshing the page. The other ten were likely bots crawling the web for email addresses to spam. My shirt stuck to my back. It was thirty-four degrees Celsius. The air felt like hot soup. Summer in the city was a specific kind of punishment, the kind that made you sweat through your deodorant before you even reached the bus stop.
I wiped a bead of sweat from my eye and stared at the anonymous email I had received at 3:00 AM.
Subject: Ice in Kildonan. Not melting. Get here.
That was it. No photos. No context. Just a desperate plea from someone who probably had too much screen time. But when you have fourteen listeners, you do not ignore tips. You chase them down, even if it means dragging your audio gear through a public park in the middle of a heatwave. I adjusted the strap of my canvas bag. The metal buckles dug into my shoulder. I needed a viral hit. I needed something that would make the algorithm finally notice me. I needed rent money.
Kildonan Park was usually a quiet place on Tuesday afternoons. Mostly retired people walking dogs that cost more than my car, or bored teenagers smoking in the bushes. Today, it sounded like a crowded cafeteria. I pushed through a line of overgrown cedar trees, the dry branches scratching at my forearms. The smell of hot pine needles mixed with the sharp, metallic scent of ozone.
I stepped into the clearing and stopped. My stomach did a weird, slow roll.
Sitting in the middle of a massive, muddy crater was a block of ice.
It was not a small block. It was the size of a delivery van. It was a perfect, sharp-edged rectangle, glowing with a faint, ridiculous blue light. The sun was beating down on it directly. The ambient temperature was enough to fry an egg on the pavement. But the ice was not melting. There were no puddles of water pooling at its base. It just sat there, dry and cold, completely defying thermodynamics.
I pulled my digital audio recorder from my bag. My hands were actually shaking. This was it. This was the anomaly. I hit the record button.
"Testing, testing. This is Steven for Truth Static. I am currently standing in Kildonan Park. The temperature is roughly thirty-four degrees. Before me is a solid obelisk of ice. It is not melting. The air around it is freezing. I can see my breath."
I stepped closer. The mud sucked at my boots. It was thick, brown sludge. I reached out a hand. The cold radiating from the block was intense. It felt like standing in front of an open industrial freezer.
"The texture is completely smooth," I said into the microphone, my voice dropping into my serious broadcaster register. "There are no tool marks. It appears to be..."
"Move your stupid body!"
A heavy shoulder slammed into my ribs. I stumbled sideways, my boots slipping in the slick mud. I went down hard on one knee, dropping the recorder. The wet dirt instantly soaked through my jeans.
"Hey!" I yelled.
A kid sprinted past me. He looked about fifteen, wearing a neon green tank top and cargo shorts. He did not even look at me. His eyes were glued to his phone screen. He was panting heavily, his thumbs moving in a blur.
"Got the spawn point!" the kid screamed to nobody. "It is a Tier Five! Drop the lures! Drop the lures now!"
Before I could stand up, another kid ran past. Then two more. Then a girl with pink hair who almost stepped on my hand. Then five more kids. It was a stampede. They were all holding phones, all swiping frantically, all yelling completely incomprehensible nonsense.
"Healers to the back!" a boy shouted, his voice cracking violently. "Spam the water attacks! It is weak to water!"
I scrambled to my feet and grabbed my recorder. It was caked in mud. I wiped it off on my already ruined shirt. The clearing was now swarming with at least thirty teenagers. They were slipping in the mud, bumping into each other, entirely ignoring the giant, impossible ice block in the center of the crater.
"What is wrong with you people?" I asked loudly.
"Shut up, NPC," a voice snapped.
I turned. Standing next to me was a girl. She looked about sixteen. She wore a black oversized hoodie despite the heat, ripped black jeans, and boots that were covered in wet clay. She held a phone wrapped in a battered metal case. She was glaring at me with a level of hostility usually reserved for war criminals.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"You are blocking my line of sight to the node," she said. She did not look up from her screen. "Move your head. Your skull is interfering with the AR overlay."
"Are you blind?" I asked, gesturing wildly at the massive frozen structure. "There is a literal glacier sitting in the middle of a summer park. It is not melting. It is a scientific impossibility. And you are playing a mobile game?"
She finally looked up. Her eyes were dark and tired. She looked at the ice block, then back at me.
"It is a signal booster," she said flatly.
"It is a what?"
"A signal booster. For Crypto-Beast Go. The game. The developers dropped a localized server node here to handle the traffic for the summer event. The cold output is a hardware bug. Now move. You are making me miss the raid."
"A hardware bug?" I repeated, my brain struggling to process the words. "It is solid ice. In July. It is glowing."
"Look, microphone guy," she said, stepping around me. "My name is Tracey. I have been grinding for a shiny Aqua-Dog for six weeks. I am not going to let some hipster with a fake radio show ruin my drop rates. Either help me defend this node from the Red Faction, or get out of the mud."
I stared at her. My viral hit. My paranormal discovery. It was a video game server.
"This makes no sense," I said.
"Nothing makes sense," Tracey replied, swiping her screen aggressively. "Welcome to the beta patch."
I stood in the mud, watching the chaos unfold. The teenagers were completely unbothered by the cold radiating from the ice. In fact, they seemed to prefer it. A few of them had practically pressed their backs against the glowing blue surface to cool down while they frantically tapped their screens.
I looked down at my digital recorder. The red recording light was flickering rapidly.
"Testing," I said into the mic.
Playback sounded like a garbage disposal chewing on tin foil. The audio was entirely corrupted. It was a wall of harsh, jagged static. I hit the side of the device against my palm. Nothing changed.
"Your digital gear is going to fry," Tracey said. She was currently crouching behind a garbage can, using it as cover. I had no idea what she was hiding from. "The block throws out a massive electromagnetic field. My phone battery has dropped forty percent in ten minutes."
"How do you know that?" I asked, wading through the mud to join her behind the garbage can.
"Because I read the datamine leaks on the forums," she said, rolling her eyes. "The tech company that makes the game, Omni-Corp, they rushed these physical server nodes out for the summer event. They used some experimental quantum-cooling tech to keep the processors from melting under the load. Obviously, somebody messed up the math, because instead of just staying cool, it is freezing the moisture in the air and building a literal ice shell."
I stared at her. She was sixteen and explaining quantum cooling to me while playing a game about cartoon dogs.
"So it is not alien," I said. My voice sounded hollow.
"It is corporate negligence," Tracey said. "Which is way more common."
Suddenly, the screech of tires cut through the shouting. A white panel van jumped the curb at the edge of the park and slammed to a halt on the grass. The side doors slid open. Four people stepped out.
They were wearing full, bright yellow hazmat suits. The suits were bulky, with thick plastic visors and heavy rubber boots. They looked like they were walking on the moon. One of them was holding a device that looked like a cross between a radar gun and a metal detector.
"Oh, great," Tracey muttered. "The fun police."
The hazmat team trudged into the mud. They immediately began slipping. The first guy took two steps, lost his footing, and went down hard on his back. The wet mud covered his pristine yellow suit. The teenagers barely noticed.
"Clear the area!" one of the hazmat workers yelled through a muffled external speaker on his collar. "This is a restricted quarantine zone! Please vacate the perimeter immediately!"
A kid in a bucket hat looked up from his phone. "Shut up, nerd! We are in the middle of a raid!"
"There is a hazardous thermal anomaly!" the hazmat worker shouted back, waving his arms. He sounded panicked. "You are in danger of frostbite!"
"Your mom is a thermal anomaly!" another kid yelled.
The hazmat team ignored the insults and focused on the ice block. They huddled around it, holding up their scanners. I realized this was my chance. If I could not get a ghost story, I would get a government conspiracy story. Bureaucrats covering up experimental tech in a public park. That was just as good for the algorithm.
But my digital recorder was dead.
I dug into the bottom of my canvas bag. My fingers brushed against hard plastic. I pulled out my backup. It was a bulky, ancient cassette tape recorder I had bought at a thrift store for five dollars. It was purely mechanical. It recorded straight to magnetic tape. No digital circuits to fry. I pressed the clunky play and record buttons simultaneously. The tape hissed to life.
I stepped out from behind the garbage can and walked toward the hazmat team. The mud squelched loudly under my boots.
"Excuse me!" I said, holding the bulky tape recorder up like a microphone. "Steven, Truth Static podcast. Can you explain why Omni-Corp is deploying experimental quantum-cooling hardware in a public recreation area?"
The lead scientist turned his bulky yellow helmet toward me. He looked down at the tape recorder, then back up at my face.
"Who are you?" his muffled voice crackled. "You need to leave. This is a level four quantum frost anomaly."
"Quantum frost anomaly?" I asked. "Is that the official corporate term for a server that got too cold? Are you guys from Omni-Corp?"
"We are from the Department of Environmental Regulation," he said, taking a step back. He slipped slightly in the mud but caught his balance. "And this object is emitting unregistered sub-zero frequencies. It is extremely dangerous."
"It is a game server," I said.
"It is an anomaly," he insisted.
Before I could ask another question, a teenager sprinted directly between us, entirely focused on his screen. "Take the shot! Take the shot!" the kid screamed, throwing an imaginary ball in the air.
The hazmat scientist flinched, tripping backward. He landed directly in a deep puddle of brown water.
"Get these children out of here!" the scientist screamed from the mud.
"We are trying!" another yellow suit yelled, frantically tapping a tablet. "But the localized temperature drop is messing with the touchscreen!"
I held my tape recorder close to the fallen scientist. "Would you say the Department of Environmental Regulation is currently losing a turf war to a group of gamers playing Crypto-Beast Go?"
"Stop recording me!" he yelled, flailing his thick rubber arms.
I smiled. This was definitely going to be good audio.
A loud, synchronized war cry echoed across the park.
I turned my head. Emerging from the tree line on the opposite side of the crater was another group of teenagers. They were all wearing red t-shirts. There were at least forty of them.
"The Red Faction," Tracey whispered. She had crawled through the mud to stand right behind me. "They heard about the Tier Five spawn."
"Is that bad?" I asked.
"It means war," she said grimly.
The red shirts charged down the hill. The blue shirts in the crater turned to face them. For a brief, terrifying second, I thought they were actually going to engage in physical combat. Instead, they all stopped about ten feet apart, raised their phones like weapons, and started tapping furiously.
It was a completely silent battle in the physical world, aside from the heavy breathing and the squelching of mud. But in the digital space, I imagined it was a bloodbath.
"Push them back!" a red shirt yelled.
"Defend the node!" a blue shirt countered.
The crater turned into a chaotic mosh pit of kids walking backward, walking forward, slipping, sliding, and yelling attack commands. The hazmat scientists were caught directly in the middle. They were getting bumped, shoved, and knocked over like brightly colored bowling pins.
"This is a disaster," one of the scientists wept through his speaker. He was curled in a fetal position near the base of the ice block.
Tracey grabbed the sleeve of my wet shirt. She pulled me hard to the side, out of the main path of the charging gamers.
"Listen to me," she said, her voice low and intense. "The Red Faction has too many high-level players. They are going to take the node. If they take the node, I lose my drop. I need to get right up to the ice block. I need physical proximity to interface with the admin port."
"The ice block has an admin port?" I asked.
"It is under the ice layer," she said. "I can use my phone's thermal override to melt a small hole and plug in. I can hack the server and crash the instance. If nobody gets the spawn, the Red Faction loses. But I cannot get close. The hazmat guys are blocking the panel, and the crowd is too thick."
She looked at my chest. I was wearing a laminated press badge. It was entirely fake. I had printed it at a library three years ago. It said TRUTH STATIC PRESS in bold letters.
"You have a badge," Tracey said. "You look official. Distract the scientists. Clear a path for me."
"Why would I do that?" I asked. "I am a journalist. I observe."
"You are a guy with a tape recorder standing in a mud puddle," she corrected. "If you help me, I will pull the server logs when I hack the block. I will give you the raw data proving Omni-Corp dumped untested, dangerous hardware in a public park. Hard evidence for your little podcast."
I looked at her. She was dead serious. I looked at the tape recorder in my hand. Hard evidence. An actual scoop. Not a ghost story, but a massive tech scandal.
"What kind of distraction do you need?" I asked.
"Something loud. Something stupid. Use your imagination."
Tracey crouched down low, preparing to sprint. I took a deep breath. The air tasted like dirt and cold copper. I turned my tape recorder on, making sure the reels were spinning. Then, I ran directly into the center of the crowd, right toward the hazmat team.
I threw myself into the mud. I slid three feet on my stomach, stopping right next to the scientist who was still curled in a ball.
"Help me!" I screamed. I made my voice crack. I grabbed the scientist's thick rubber leg. "The spores! The frost spores! They are in my lungs!"
The scientist shrieked. He tried to kick me away, but the heavy suit made him clumsy.
"Contamination!" he yelled into his mic. "We have a civilian contamination!"
"I can feel the ice in my veins!" I wailed, rolling onto my back and thrashing in the sludge. I coughed violently, spraying brown water everywhere. "The quantum frost is taking over! Tell my mother I love her! Tell my fourteen listeners to subscribe!"
The other three hazmat workers abandoned the ice block and rushed toward me. They were completely panicking.
"Do not touch him!" one of them yelled.
"Get the thermal blanket!" another screamed.
"He is turning blue!" the first one said, pointing at my face. I was not turning blue. I was covered in dirt.
Over the shoulder of a panicking scientist, I saw Tracey make her move. She darted through the gap they had left, sliding across the ice at the base of the block. She pressed herself against the frozen surface. She pulled a small black cable from her pocket and jammed her phone hard against the ice.
"Hold on, civilian!" a scientist yelled, kneeling beside me with a silver foil blanket. "Breathe! Just breathe!"
"It is too late!" I yelled, throwing my arms out dramatically. "The crypto-beasts are real! They are in the walls!"
The teenagers around us briefly stopped playing to stare at me.
"Look at this boomer," a kid in a red shirt said. "He cannot even handle the temperature drop."
I kept thrashing, keeping the scientists focused on me. I watched Tracey out of the corner of my eye. She was tapping her screen with furious speed. The blue light from the ice block suddenly flickered.
The low hum that had been vibrating in my teeth suddenly stopped.
The air went dead silent.
Then, the ice block screamed.
It was a high-pitched, digital shriek. It sounded like a dial-up modem being fed through a distortion pedal.
The hazmat scientists covered their helmeted ears. The teenagers dropped their phones. I sat up in the mud, holding my tape recorder out to capture the noise.
The blue light inside the ice block flared blindingly bright. And then, the temperature in the crater plummeted. It did not just get cold. It dropped by thirty degrees in two seconds. My breath plumed into thick white clouds. The mud around me instantly hardened, freezing solid.
A sudden, violent gust of wind erupted from the obelisk. It carried a thick flurry of heavy snow. In the middle of July, in a public park, a localized blizzard tore through the crater.
"My screen!" a kid yelled. "My screen froze!"
"The server crashed!" another screamed.
Mass panic set in. The kids were not running from the supernatural weather event. They were running around in circles because their game had disconnected. They held their phones up to the sky, desperately searching for a cell signal that the anomaly was actively blocking.
Tracey sprinted away from the ice block, sliding across the newly frozen mud. She grabbed my collar and yanked me up.
"Move!" she yelled over the wind.
We scrambled out of the crater, slipping on the frost-covered grass. The hazmat scientists were struggling to stand, their rubber boots completely lacking traction on the ice. They looked like bright yellow penguins falling over each other.
We reached the tree line and hid behind a large oak. The snow squall was contained entirely within the crater. Outside the tree line, the sun was still blazing, and the heat was oppressive. The contrast made my brain hurt.
"Did you get it?" I asked, my teeth chattering uncontrollably.
Tracey held up her phone. The screen was cracked, but a long string of green code was scrolling down the display.
"I got everything," she said, breathing hard. "I crashed the instance. The server is dead. And I pulled the system diagnostic logs. This thing is not just a server. It is a repurposed industrial cooling unit from a failed startup called Frost-Tech. Omni-Corp bought their junk at an auction to save money on the summer event hardware."
I held my tape recorder close to her face. "Say that again. Into the mic."
She looked at the clunky tape deck, rolled her eyes, and leaned in.
"Omni-Corp is using unregulated, defective industrial hardware as toys to manipulate children into walking around public parks," she said clearly. "They knew the cooling units were unstable. The logs show three previous thermal warnings. They ignored them because the active user count was too high."
I clicked the tape recorder off. My hands were freezing, but my chest felt warm. This was not a ghost story. This was better.
A loud CRACK echoed from the crater.
We looked out from behind the tree. The massive block of ice was fracturing. Deep, jagged lines spiderwebbed across its surface. The digital shriek reached a deafening pitch, and then, the entire structure shattered.
Chunks of heavy ice exploded outward, raining down on the frozen mud. The teenagers screamed and scattered, throwing their arms over their heads. The hazmat team hit the deck, covering their helmets.
When the ice dust cleared, the glowing blue light was gone. Sitting in the center of the crater was a perfectly ordinary, incredibly ugly gray metal box. It had a large fan on the side that was currently smoking. A faded sticker on the front read: FROST-TECH.
The anomaly was dead. The magic was gone. It was just garbage in a park.
"Well," Tracey said, shoving her phone into her pocket. "That is going to be a nightmare for the parks department to clean up."
"Are you mad about the game?" I asked.
"A little," she admitted. "But crashing a corporate server feels way better than catching a digital dog."
Three days later, I uploaded the episode of Truth Static. I did not edit out the sounds of the kids screaming about drop rates. I did not edit out my fake contamination performance. I played the raw tape of the hazmat scientists panicking, followed by Tracey reading the corporate logs.
I titled it: Mud And Bad Code.
I went to sleep with fourteen listeners. I woke up with four hundred thousand. The episode was everywhere. Gaming forums linked it. Tech blogs transcribed it. Omni-Corp issued a massive public apology and paid a massive fine to the city. The hazmat team became a popular meme.
I sat in my apartment, staring at the analytics screen. The number kept ticking up. I was drinking iced coffee, perfectly comfortable in the air conditioning.
My phone vibrated on the desk.
My inbox chimed with a new message from Tracey, the subject line reading simply: We have a real one this time.
“My inbox chimed with a new message from Tracey, the subject line reading simply: We have a real one this time.”
