The Permafrost Papers

The data drive felt like a block of ice in my palm. Outside, the blizzard wasn't weather anymore; it was the story, and it was trying to kill me.

The door was a fight. A solid slab of oak and glass against a hundred-mile-an-hour argument. I put my shoulder into it, felt the cold soak through the sleeve of my coat, and stumbled inside. The bell above the door didn't jingle. It gave a choked, dead clank. Then the door slammed shut behind me, sealing off the scream of the wind with a heavy, final *thump*. The silence that followed wasn't quiet. It was a pressurized ringing in my ears.

For a moment, I just stood there, dripping. My glasses were useless, completely fogged. I took them off, fumbling with frozen fingers, and tried to wipe them on my scarf, which was also wet. The result was a greasy smear. I hooked them on the collar of my shirt and let my eyes adjust. The Cafe on Portage. It smelled like burnt coffee and damp wool. Fluorescent lights, a sickly yellow-white, hummed overhead. A handful of tables, most empty. A long counter with a glass case showing a few sad-looking muffins. Behind it, a woman, maybe mid-twenties, methodically wiping a cup with a rag. She didn't look up.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A low-battery warning. 15%. I ignored it. I was looking for a ghost. My editor, Miller, had been clear. “Carter, this guy is toxic. A career crank. He lost his tenure, his funding, everything. Don’t get your hopes up.” But his last message had been different. *It's happening now. The Portage cafe. Come alone.* So here I was.

I scanned the booths. A couple huddled in the far corner, not talking. A lone man staring into a laptop, the blue light of the screen painting his face. No Peterson. My jaw was tight from the cold, and I could feel a headache starting behind my right eye. I picked a booth by the window. The vinyl was cracked and cold, even through my jeans. I slid in, my wet coat squeaking against the seat. Outside, there was nothing to see. Just a swirling wall of white. The snow wasn't falling; it was moving sideways, a horizontal river of ice particles that erased the street, the buildings across the way, everything.

The waitress, Cathy according to her name tag, came over. She moved without making much sound. “Coffee?” Her voice was flat.

“Please. Black.”

She nodded and walked away. I watched her. The methodical way she moved, the worn look of her shoes. Did she know she was serving coffee at the end of the world? Probably just worried about how she was getting home. My own car was two blocks away, probably already a featureless lump under a snowdrift. I thought about the price of a tow. I thought about my rent, due Friday. My focus was shot.

The wind hit the big plate-glass window with a sudden, violent *whump*, like a body being thrown against it. The entire frame shuddered. I flinched. The man with the laptop looked up, annoyed, and then went back to his screen. Cathy didn't react at all, just placed the thick ceramic mug on my table. The coffee was thin and tasted burnt, but it was hot. I wrapped my hands around it, trying to coax some feeling back into my fingers. The heat was a dull ache. My knuckles were red and raw.

That’s when the door opened again. Another fight with the wind, another dead clank of the bell. This had to be him. He was a scarecrow of winter gear. A huge, puffy coat that had once been blue, a gray toque pulled down low, a scarf wrapped over the bottom half of his face. He unwound the scarf as he stomped snow onto the welcome mat, and I saw him. Dr. Arnold Peterson. He looked older than his pictures. His face was gaunt, the skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. His eyes, though, were what you noticed. They were wide, constantly moving, scanning every corner of the room before they landed on me. He saw me, and a flicker of something—recognition, fear—passed over his face. He hesitated, one hand on the back of a chair, then moved toward my booth with a stiff, unnatural gait.

He didn't greet me as he slid into the opposite seat. He just started shedding layers. The coat came off, then a fleece vest. Underneath he wore a frayed tweed jacket over a stained button-down shirt. He was thin, a man made of wire and nerve endings. He kept his toque on.

“You’re Carter,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Dr. Peterson.”

He ignored my title, his eyes darting to the window, then to the couple in the corner, then to Cathy, who was now behind the counter, staring into space. His paranoia was a physical thing, a static charge in the air around our table.

“They listen,” he whispered, leaning forward. His breath smelled like old paper. “They have ears everywhere. Phones. Laptops.” He gestured with his chin at the man with the computer. “Anything connected.”

“We can go somewhere else,” I offered, my voice low.

“No. This is the only place. No public Wi-Fi. Old building. Too much interference.” He tapped a long, bony finger on the formica tabletop, a nervous, unsteady rhythm. Cathy appeared with a mug and poured him coffee without being asked. He waited until she was gone.

“Thank you for meeting me,” I began, trying to sound like a journalist, like I was in control of this situation. “My editor said you had something…”

“Something?” He let out a dry, rasping sound that might have been a laugh. “Something. Yes. I have ‘something’.” He took a sip of his coffee, his hand shaking so badly the mug rattled against his teeth. “Look out that window, Mr. Carter. What do you see?”

I glanced at the wall of white. “A blizzard. A bad one.”

“Incorrect.” He said the word with absolute, damning finality. “You see a symptom. You see a planetary fever made manifest. You are looking at the beginning of the end, and you call it a ‘blizzard’.” He leaned back, a strange, theatrical calm settling over him. It was a performance. I was his audience. “For ten years, I told them. I published the models. I showed them the core samples, the methane readings, the accelerating melt rates. I told them the North Atlantic Current was faltering. I told them the Siberian permafrost was no longer permanent. It was a bomb, I said. A methane bomb with a trillion-ton payload.”

He paused, taking another shaky sip of coffee. His eyes were locked on mine. I felt pinned.

“They called me an alarmist. They stripped my funding. My university, the one I had given thirty years of my life to, issued a public statement disavowing my work. My colleagues, men I had mentored, would cross the street to avoid me. I was a crank. A disgrace.”

The wind howled, a low, guttural moan that vibrated through the floor. I could feel it in my teeth. The lights flickered once, twice, then held steady.

“And all the while,” he continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “Arctic Energy Solutions was up there, drilling. Raking in subsidies to ‘develop’ the north. But they weren't just drilling for oil. They knew what was down there. They knew about the methane hydrates. Trapped for millennia. A bubble of prehistoric atmosphere, waiting.”

I took out my notepad, but my pen wasn't working. The ink was frozen. I scribbled, but it just left a faint, useless indentation on the page. I put it down.

“They didn’t care about the risk,” Peterson said, his gaze turning inward, as if watching a film in his own mind. “They saw an opportunity. They developed a new technique. Subsurface thermal injection. Pumping superheated waste fluid deep into the permafrost layer. It thaws the ground, makes the oil flow easier. A side effect. But they knew the *other* side effect. The real one. They modeled it. I’ve seen their internal projections, Carter. They knew it would trigger a cascade. A feedback loop.”

He leaned forward again, his intensity sucking the air from the space between us. “A little methane released warms the atmosphere. The warmer atmosphere melts more permafrost, which releases more methane. A serpent eating its own tail. It becomes self-sustaining. Unstoppable. Their models showed that once it reached a certain threshold, the process would become exponential. It would destabilize the polar jet stream. It would rewrite weather patterns on a global scale. Storms like this… this will be Tuesday. This will be a fond memory.”

He stopped. He just stared at me. My own breath was shallow. The bad coffee sat like a stone in my stomach.

“They crossed the threshold six weeks ago,” he said, his voice barely audible. “And they covered it up. This storm isn't a freak of nature. It's an industrial accident. It’s the first domino falling.”

My journalistic skepticism was gone. Evaporated. The raw, terrifying certainty in his eyes was more convincing than any peer-reviewed paper. I believed him. And that belief was cold. Colder than the wind outside.

He reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled out a small, black object. A simple USB data drive. The kind you can buy for ten dollars at a gas station. It was scuffed, the plastic casing scratched. He placed it on the table between us. He didn't push it toward me. He just left it there.

“Everything,” he said. “Their internal memos. The climate models they buried. The real-time seismic data from their injection sites. Everything you need to prove it. It’s all there.”

I stared at the drive. It looked so small. So mundane. A piece of plastic and silicon that held the end of the world. My hand trembled as I reached for it. My fingers closed around it. It felt cold, heavy.

And as I picked it up, Peterson’s eyes flicked up, over my shoulder, to the window. To the street. He went perfectly still. The theatricality vanished, replaced by the rigid terror of a cornered animal.

“What is it?” I asked.

He didn't answer. He just gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head. I turned slowly, my muscles tight. I looked out the window. The storm was a churning vortex of white, but the snow had thinned for a second, a momentary lapse in the fury. And in that second, I saw it. Across the street. A dark sedan, parked where no car should be, its engine almost certainly running to keep from freezing. It was just a shape, a dark block against the chaos. But there were two figures inside. I couldn't see their faces, just the silhouettes of two heads. They weren't moving. They were just sitting there. Watching us.

The snow swirled again, thicker this time, and the car disappeared. But it was still there. We both knew it.

My heart was a frantic drum against my ribs. The low hum of the cafe lights suddenly seemed deafening. The scrape of a chair from the other side of the room made me jump.

Peterson slid his gaze back to me. All the fear in his face had collapsed into a kind of grim resolve.

“They followed me,” he said. It was a statement of fact. No panic. Just the finality of a diagnosis.

He pushed his chair back. “You have to go. Now.”

“What about you?” My voice was a croak.

“I am the decoy.” He gave me a thin, bloodless smile. “They think I still have the original. They’ll wait for me to leave. It will buy you time. Not much. But some.”

He pulled a worn leather wallet from his back pocket and dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table.

“For the coffee,” he said. “Walk. Don’t run. Act normal. Like you just finished a boring interview with a crazy old man. Get to your car. Get out of the city. Get it to Miller.”

I couldn't move. My legs felt disconnected from my brain.

“Go,” he hissed, his voice like cracking ice. “Now, Mr. Carter.”

I fumbled the data drive into my jeans pocket. The hard plastic corner dug into my thigh. I stood up, my legs unsteady. I pulled on my coat, my fingers clumsy with the zipper. I looked at him one last time. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring into his coffee cup, a tired, defeated old man in a worn-out jacket. A ghost in a failing cafe.

I turned and walked toward the door. Every step was a conscious effort. Don’t look back. Don’t look out the window. I passed the counter. Cathy was there, polishing the same glass, her expression unchanged. She knew. I felt it. She knew something was wrong. But she did nothing. She just watched me go.

I reached the door. My hand was on the cold metal handle. I took a breath, the air thick with the smell of stale coffee and impending violence. Then I pulled. The door fought me, the wind screamed in my face, and I stepped out into the white. The cold was a physical blow, a punch to the chest that stole my breath. The story was in my pocket. And I wasn't a reporter anymore. I was just the package.