Ghosts in the Ice Machine

A Short Story

“If no one’s alive to remember something,” Chelsea asked me as I threw my shoulder against the front door, “do you think it ever actually happened?”

Icicles fell to the ground, but the door stayed shut. I even tried stepping back to kick my boot into the handle. Wood splintered around the frame while Chelsea said, “I used to tell my daughter that that’s why ghosts exist—to remember everything for us.”

I told her she was an idiot. “If ghost’s exist, then they’re asymptotic,” I said. “They don’t want to be found.”

I backed up to the edge of the porch. Leaning forward, I sprinted at this door, throwing my whole body against it until the thing shot open. It shot open like a knocked out tooth, and I fell into the house. 

From the floor, I told Chelsea, “This is comfier than the shelter.”

She wiped off some snow that had landed on her shaved head and glided past me into the house. The bright skin on her skull reflected my flashlight beam against the cobwebbed ceiling, and I wondered how she had been able to reach back there. How had she cut it so short? No one at the homeless center was sober enough to hold a flask steady, let alone a razor.

I got up, taking my flashlight and waving it over broken picture frames and furniture covered in snow drifts. It had been a decade since the Endotherm—ten whole years since the lab upstate got its wires crossed. Ten whole years since I had a job. 

Chelsea picked something up off the ground. “Who do you think lived here?” she asked, tossing me the object. “Demons? Poltergeists?”

It sparkled through my flashlight beam, this tiny crystal sphere, and I managed to catch it against my chest. The thing was frozen solid, holding onto a trio of polyethylene figures—some mom, dad, and daughter type—just an ugly, plastic family trapped in a snowglobe.

Before the Endotherm, the lab upstate had spent billions of dollars promising families, just like the one in my hand, eternal life. If they had the money, they could plug their home into the lab’s infrastructure. A series of pipes and wires that didn’t deliver water or electricity. They delivered time. 

A thermostat to control how fast people aged.

It wasn’t the cure for cancer, but it wasn’t not the cure for cancer. Someone could just turn their dial down enough and those rapidly mutating cells could slow to a crawl. It even worked in reverse. People could turn their dial up and completely heal any cuts or bruises overnight. 

No need for ice packs. No more picking at scabs. 

The truth was, I had worked there, at that lab upstate. I had developed those pipes and wires that carried the condensed, plasmic soup used to speed up or slow down people’s organic molecules. I helped connect these houses and neighborhoods together into one giant computer network.

But this was all before the Endotherm. 

I slipped the snowglobe into my coat pocket and shone my flashlight around the rest of the house. There were holes hammered into the wall, and the coffee table was littered with notebooks, pens, and pencils. The place was trashed. Someone had been here. 

Chelsea said, “Do you think the reason ghosts destroy things when they’re angry is because they’re looking for a way out?”

And I wanted to tell her, couldn’t ghosts just appear and disappear whenever they felt like it, but I just kept pointing my flashlight around at the holes in the walls looking for the glint of wire—looking for something we could sell. 

That’s when it landed on the recorder. One of those old-school devices with the buttons running up the side. It was just like the ones we had back at the lab. So I picked it up and pressed the button labeled ‘play’ and a voice said, “Whoever hears this, it’s important you know the truth.”

The truth was, there must have been an open window somewhere that we missed, because no sooner than I started the tape, did a gust of wind shoot through the house. It barreled out from the dark hallway next to us, throwing snow off the furniture and into the air, and the front door wouldn’t stop banging itself against its broken frame. 

Instead of going to close it, all Chelsea had to say was, “Do you think it’s possible that some memories want to be forgotten?”

So I did it myself. I went and jammed the door shut while the recorder competed with Chelsea for air time, saying something like, “I used to believe everything tended towards chaos. Ice turned to water. Water turned to vapor. The second law of thermodynamics.”

It was saying all these things Chelsea wouldn’t understand like, “This is what Ludwig Boltzman spent his entire life trying to figure out. He developed a statistical model, a whole new branch of mathematics, just to understand why icicles melt.” 

Back in the living room, I stuck my flashlight into the half-demolished wall, and there it was. The gold-copper glint from all those wires and pipes that had been installed half a generation ago. Free for the taking.

Sheetrock crumbled as I shoved my arm further up into the wall, and I wondered why whoever had been here before didn’t strip it for themselves. As the wall tore further open, gray clumps of ash fell against my boots, and when the recorder said, “Bolzmann asked himself, why do we have to live in a world where things fall apart?” I froze. 

I froze because I had heard that voice before, but before I could press the speaker to my ear and listen closer, something slammed from the street outside.

I ripped my arm out of the wall and dropped to the ground, clicking off my flashlight. In the dark, through the frost coated, living room window, something red blinked outside. A steady pulse like a ticking timer, and it was here in the dark when I remembered where I was during the Endotherm. 

I was working. I was working with the chief scientist in front of the lab’s terminal when whole neighborhoods just started going offline. The lights went from green to pulsing red, and the chief scientist, he had froze. He had froze in a way that no manager should freeze when the lights turn red. 

Even all this time later, he hasn’t done anything. No one has done anything. No government official or labcoated-scientist has set foot in one of these offline neighborhoods. The surviving families petition year after year, but the only people stupid enough to actually step foot into these places are the junkies and scrappers. 

The people who could actually do something? They’re just waiting out the clock. Because once we’re all dead, no one has to remember. 

From the living room floor, the recorder hissed in my hand, still on.

“Shit,” I muttered, shaking it and jamming its buttons to try and get it to stop but all it did was speed up. A high pitched whine that the boots crunching outside had to have heard. 

Chelsea was against the wall rubbing her fingers into her hairless skull and telling herself, “Don’t worry,” she said. “When you’re scared of something, it means you’re on the right track.”

The truth was, this was not what I signed up for.

The boots stopped right outside the front door, and I shoved the recorder into my coat to at least muffle the sound. My breath curled in the cold air. It twisted around itself, tugged towards the wall and down the dark hallway by whatever expired chemical soup was still in those pipes. 

A thick stream of cold air dissipating exponentially into nothingness. Reaching for infinity.

The door didn’t open.

It stayed shut, and the boots crunched back across the ice on the porch, back the way they came, and Chelsea was so pale I could see through her. 

She said, “I used to tell my daughter that when she was scared of something, it was actually her brain telling her to pay attention. Wouldn’t it make sense,” Chelsea said, “that all these times we’ve been running away from ghosts we should have been running towards them?”

As she yapped, I crawled towards the frost covered window. I had to scratch the ice off like a gas-station lottery ticket to see whoever was out there. But even with it all scratched off, all there was was a shadow walking towards the blinking red light, some car’s alarm system. A door squeaked open and the blinking stopped.

“We should sneak out the back,” I told Chelsea.

But all she had to say to that was, “Do you think some ghosts are actually scared for us?”

I finally got her to follow me, and we crept over torn books and shattered family pictures, down into that long dark hallway, when I heard the boots again. They thumped loud, running towards the front door. Chelsea almost floated over me as we slipped into that last room, where I shut us in just as the front door burst open.

And I must have hit it, because in my coat, the recorder buzzed back awake. It said, “For example, Georg Cantor. He created the first fractal before Mandalbrot ever did. To make one, what you do is: you take a line, and remove the middle chunk.”

I pulled my jacket tight together to try and suffocate the noise while I peeked under the door, but it didn’t even matter because Chelsea wouldn’t shut up.

She was behind my shoulder saying, “You should see this,” while the recorder said, “Now you’re left with two smaller lines. For each of these two lines, repeat the process. Take out the middles. One becomes two becomes four becomes eight.”

“Really,” Chelsea said, “You really need to see this.” 

So I turned around, finger to my lips, but as soon as I did, everything went numb. Steam rose off my fingertip like a warm gun, towards the unmade bed I was looking at. A giant stuffed animal laid tangled in the sheets, holding something in its hands.

“Now apply that pattern in two dimensions,” the recorder said.

Scissors. Paper. That was what the stuffed animal was holding. Small flat, white diamonds dotted its chest. Shapes cut from the paper. One of these squares hung from the tip of the scissors. Frozen in time.

The recorder said, “Fold. Cut. Fold. Repeat. What Georg Cantor did was spend his entire life figuring out how snowflakes dissolve.” 

The truth was, this wasn’t a giant stuffed animal I was looking at.

Chelsea whispered, “Do you remember yet?”

Another gust of wind tore through the house.

It tore through the house because whoever was looking for us had finally flung the bedroom door open. Standing over me, with a coat that hung like a dress and a beanie that slid down over its forehead, was a skeleton. 

He looked down at me, this emaciated man, pushing his hat up over his eyes with the back of his hand. A hand holding onto a bright orange gun.

“You’re alive?” he asked, water dripping from his untrimmed beard and against my face. “It’s been ten years.”

The voice that came out of his mouth was the same voice coming out of the recorder, and I could almost remember how I knew him. I looked over for Chelsea, but she was gone. Wind whipped through the open window as if she had evaporated through it.

“Just…” the skeleton man said as he pushed his beanie back up with his gun. “Just…stay right there.”

He fumbled back down the long dark hallway, and I considered following Chelsea out the open window, but that would’ve meant crawling over the bed of this not-stuffed-animal. This liquid-nitrogened child. 

She smiled at her paper snowflake. She had to have been smiling at that snowflake ever since the green lights had turned to red lights. In that same amount of time, I had lived in more homeless shelters than she probably had baby teeth. I had lost my job and more money than I’ll probably ever see again.

I crawled over to her bed, taking off my coat to wrap it around her as if it could dissolve away the last decade, and from the living room the skeleton man shouted, “Remember what you told me about Alan Turning?”

He said, “You told me that he was the one who gave computers memory. You told me that he modeled hard drives after cold storage, so that information could be preserved forever.”

I tucked my coat tighter around this tiny girl covered in her lattice of tiny square crystals, and the snowglobe rolled out from the pocket, against my stomach. 

“Memories can be forgotten but they can never disappear,” the man yelled. “That’s what you taught me.”

I picked up the snowglobe, and the wires in my brain must have come uncrossed because I saw myself in it. Not just my reflection. My actual self. One of those three polyethylene figures, carved from wax and standing watch over the other two.

Chelsea and my daughter. My wife and this freezer-burned child laying in front of me.

An ugly family trapped in ice. 

“You taught me,” the skeleton man said, “that all it takes is one instruction from the processor, one little nudge, and boom! You’re right back where you left off.”

On that day, the day of the Endotherm, when the lights had turned from green to red, my student had asked me, “What did I do wrong?” 

He said. “I studied Boltzmann, I studied Cantor, and Turning. I did everything you said. What could I have done wrong?”

And on that day, in that lab, the fat in his cheeks had already started to burn away. Instead of running logs, instead of capturing crash reports or mitigating the system failure. I left. I was the chief scientist, and I left him there to drive straight home.

“They said you went mad,” the skeleton man said as he stepped back into my daughter’s room. “They said you lost your mind, but I wouldn’t believe it.”

“I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Until I found this.”

He shook one of the notebooks from the coffee table at me, and I wanted to throw the snowglobe in my hand against him like I was one of Chelsea’s angry spirits. I wanted to destroy this house all over again like when I came home the day of the Endotherm and found my daughter frozen to her bed. 

“Do you even remember?” the skeleton man asked. 

He said, “You told me, Alan wasted his entire life trying to understand how memories thaw because you could create a world where nothing changed.”

“But what you really did was waste my life.” The skeleton man—my old student—he slammed my notebook on the bed. “You let me believe that your mistake was mine.”

The notebook was flipped open to the middle. Tucked in that page like a bookmark—between drawings of Carnot engines and binomial equations—was Chelsea’s obituary. She smiled from the black and white picture the same way my daughter smiled at her snowflake. 

It was the last picture we had taken before the chemo. It was the last picture we had taken before Chelsea lost all her hair. 

“You never told me that Alan Turning died of cyanide poisoning,” the skeleton man said, waving his bright orange gun around. “You never told me that Georg Cantor was committed to a sanitarium, or that Ludwig Boltzman hung himself in front of his wife and daughter.”

He pulled back the hammer on his weapon, “You never told me that when you try to control everything, it tears you apart.”

It was a flare gun, the thing he had pointed at my face. The barrel shook all around, drawing invisible lines together in front of me, and I said, “I’m sorry.”

I said, “If you put the gun down, we can still figure it out. We can fix all this.”

He hesitated, biting his cracked lip. The barrel kept bouncing between my eyes, and I told him, “It’s okay to be scared.”

And that did it. His arm shook as he slowly lowered the gun. He lowered it from my head to my chest until it was pointing at the floor. And that was the moment I jumped. I jumped up and smashed the snowglobe into his face. 

The weapon flashed, something cracked, and then there was nothing. 

The truth was, I had wasted everyone’s time. 

Before the Endotherm, while Chelsea was dying of cancer, I had siphoned time away from everyone else. All those wires, all those pipes, all those plugged in houses, I never turned them on. I diverted every Joule of energy meant for everyone else to my own house.

But even all that condensed atomic soup pumping through our vents and radiating over our WiFi it hadn’t been enough to completely stop entropy. We had discovered Chelsea’s cancer too late, and it was too far along. By the time I had rigged the system, her cells were already too much for her to hold. 

They were exploding inside her like a Petri dish. Asymptotic. Reaching for infinity. 

It was a week after her funeral when I went back to work to try to fix the system. But it was too late for everyone. As soon as I switched everything over, as soon as I flooded those dormant pipes and wires with all that energy, the system couldn’t handle the stress. 

None of us could.

It was the crackling that woke me up. A popping that sounded like what happens after you’ve walked too far out onto a frozen lake. Sharp splinterings that forced my eyes open.

My skeletonized student lay on top of me. Black blood oozed from his nose, which shone like oil off the orange-heat clawing up at the walls around us. A fire that was trying to get at the pipes inside—whatever was left of that expired molecular soup. 

I pushed him off to get to my daughter. Flames raged around her bed and licked away the fuzz on my face as I rushed over.

But she was stuck. The criss-cross fabric from my coat had fused into her bare skin, and that paper white drop of snowflake hanging from her scissors evaporated into a puff of black smoke. We were all melting together, caught in the fight between both ends of a thermometer. 

So I left.

I climbed over my daughter and jumped out that open window into a blanket of ash and snow. Wires sizzled and pipes exploded sending shockwaves of energy into the air around me. I rolled through the yard and ran out into the street to escape along with them. And as I did something in that house wailed. The howling sent a current through me, forcing my hair on end.  

And the truth was, if I didn’t know any better, if I wasn’t absolutely sure, I’d have said it was a ghost.

The End.