Frost
It's time I reveal one of the things I've been working on most recently. I've been preparing the Indigo Engine to create my newest game, Frost. I'll go over the gameplay when it's more clear, but until then, here's a story that takes place in the setting of Frost.
They say that after the frost, the only way people die is to a bullet or to cancer. Neither is a pleasant death, but Heet would always rather die from a shot. It’s cleaner that way, and a bit quicker. The idea of his genes mutating and growing wildly just makes him shiver. There’s no cure for cancer, either. That must be why they did away with doctors - there’s no point to them anymore. People shoot to kill nowadays, anyway. They need fuel. For their lives to go on a little longer, ‘till they die of cancer. Not like there’s much in their lives, other than just getting more fuel, and maybe some snacks on whatever dead meat they can find.
Heet tries to stay away from other people, they’re too dangerous. Besides, he’s fairly young, and never really got strong. That’s all kids learn nowadays: how to survive. Heet always got along by scavenging; it’s a bit nicer. Yeah, he’s killed his fair share of people, but always from a distance with his nice sniper rifle he found in another garbage pit. Old style, shoots real pieces of lead. He likes the feel better, anyway. But he more just uses it for killing the few animals he does see. Garbage food’s no good, and he’s gotta eat. It seems the others think they’re above scavenging, think it’s not civilized, like it’s some sort of insult to the culture of the people.
Of course, the vendors never killed anyone. They’ve got enough fuel to last themselves a lifetime, and enough to sell for food. Hell, they run this place. What they say goes, because they control the fuel, and people can’t run their engines or their lights or their furnaces or their stoves or their water supplies, or whatever the heck they want without fuel. They say a lot of things, too. They want this to be allowed, and this not, and the smoke’s not that bad. No trespassing on their mountains. That’s where they get the coal, the little there is, and that’s where they’ve got plenty of guards to screw up a trespasser.
Water used to be found in ponds, and rivers, says a science book Heet found in some cracks. You could see something ten feet in front of you. And the ground used to be whole, no cracks to speak of. Course, they needed to burn, how else were they gonna run all their fancy machinery? So out came the smoke. You can still see smoke if you look closely, all around you, coming out of a smokestack from some vendor over here or over there. Fracking gets more gas out, according to the Heet’s book. But it makes the cracks, and it kills the dirt. That’s why there’s no plants anymore, and that’s why there’s only light one hour out of the day, and why there’s no water. No fresh water anywhere, anymore. That’s why you gotta desalinate the ocean. Cities with no ocean near them all moved to the coast. Heet can’t imagine what that migration was like. Put a lot of people where there’s not enough for everyone, and you get a lot of killing. The book says the smoke traps heat in, and makes the earth hotter. Course, Heet knows that can’t be true. It never gets above 35 degrees, that is fahrenheit, outside. It normally keeps a steady 20. Inside, though, people turn their furnaces real high - up to 55 or so when they’re feeling rich. Heet thinks it’s wasteful. He leaves it around 50. 45 at nighttime. He’s got his share of blankets, stitched cloth he’s been able to fetch, so he keeps warm enough.
No one seems to notice how screwed up the world is. After the frost, people stopped caring. They’re just into themselves. Heet can’t brag himself, though, he’s never seen another person for more than five minutes he hasn’t run away from. Or shot. But he wishes he could see a plant. They seem cool - making their own food from the sunlight. Don’t need to steal from other folks. They remind him a bit of himself - or who he wants to be. He wants to be Heet the Plant. He chuckles at that thought. So much he’s learned from this little book he just found. Heet looks at the cover. “McGraw Hill - 5th Grade Science.” This one’s a keeper. He likes this. Heet has always loved books. They’re rare, nowadays - He’s only got a few, maybe 15. And he’s a real collector. He loves to read them, and imagine the stories or think about the facts. He prefers non-fiction. Nothing seems real in reality, he doesn’t need any faraway stories. His life is an action book already. He looks up from the book, and is struck again by the ugliness of the world. It’s all grey. Not a light grey, like fog and the water, but a dark, thick, blackish grey. The sun looks twice the size for all the filtering through the clouds of smog. Heet knows it’s not always been this way, but he can’t imagine what it used to look like. He looks back at his little house, blackened by the smog. He loves it, not for the structure, but for all the goodies he’s got hidden away in there. He’s never had enough fuel to sell, or even to turn up his heat. Much the less experience luxuries like electric lights or a stove. He does, though, have lots of odd little things he’s found. He looks down again, and his eyes set on some more paper - this time, a small pamphlet. It’s handwritten. “Wind Turbines,” its title reads. He settles in on the ground, interested already. There’s a huge block of text on this side of the page, but he’s curious and flips to the other side. There is a picture of something he’s never seen before. It’s tall and thin, and at the top there’s a head with three sticks coming off. There are lines to parts of it, explaining their use. He flips to the other side, and two bolded words come to his attention: alternative energy. He reads the definition: “energy generated in ways that do not deplete natural resources or harm the environment, especially by avoiding the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power.” His mind is racing. If this thing exists, then fuel shouldn’t be used so predominately. The clouds of smoke above his head come from burning fuel, and this alternative energy clearly doesn’t burn any fuel. It doesn’t even require fuel. Perhaps because the vendors use the fuel to leverage into power, and alternatives ruin their monopoly. Nothing’s clear, but this little sentence has turned his world upside down. He reads the whole paragraph. It’s filled with technical definitions on the workings of the wind turbine. He reads each word, and quickly a plan starts to form in his head.
He’s awoken from his turbine - filled dreams by a sound: a gunshot. He doesn’t even look, he just instinctively runs from his crack. He runs toward his house for his gun, but he knows that nothing screams fuel like a house, and that makes him dead as a doornail. He carries his gun away, toward a stone a few hundred feet away. His goodies in his house are well locked up in some sort of safe he constructed. They’re safe, but he still has to make sure he doesn’t get shot. He checks his pockets for his pamphlet and book. His left, his right, his back left. He lets out a nervous sigh. His back right. Yes, he’s left his book and his pamphlet - the most inspiring things he’s ever found - back at that crack, several hundreds of feet away. And then, he hears his house’s door opening. He scopes in his sniper to his house, but his finger’s off the trigger. He traces the path down a few yards, then left along one crack, then over it, then forward, and left again. There it is, just a speck on his scope, but still there. He breathes a sigh of relief. But he needs to go, now. He sprints, taking an alternative route to the left. Over one crack, along another. Suddenly, he hears a shot, and sees a whole open up in his right shoe. The laser has skimmed his right pinky toe, and it’s singed, and hurting badly. Hit heart skips a beat. He turns around and looks through his scope towards his house, running it down a bit, down, and… the person holding the laser gun looks demented. They have burns along all their clothes, and on their arms, and their legs. Their face, though, looks immensely troubled. It manages to look deeply depressed while also seeming completely relaxed with his gun. Heet puts his finger to the trigger, his other hand unlatches the safety.
He pulls the trigger, and the body falls to the ground. He moves along, and his hands rest upon his wind turbines pamphlet. To lose this little revelation would be to lose his life. He walks along the cracks slowly, and enters his little house. As decoration, he has reams of papers with his own notes, and other people’s, and in the center he has his own little safe. He only keeps what really matters to him, he has so little space, and he opens it up by turning the stick to the right rotation. There are no labels, he just knows it by feel. It opens, and he places his papers in the little room. He needs to rest now, tomorrow he’ll begin.
For a foundation, he needs something heavy. A rock sounds reasonable. The rock he used yesterday is large and flat. His decision is made. He looks down at the paper. Next, he’ll need a long rod. Nothing like that exists, so he’ll need to build it. He’s remelted plastics and metals with a hot fire to build the walls of his house, and he has some of the material left over. It’s a nice material; it’s moldable when hot, but completely solid when it’s cooled down. He looks at the wall of this house. They’re chrome-colored, like metal, but completely smooth and have a far lower melting point. Yes, this is a perfect material. He sets up a fire. Not a furnace with fuel, that might work better, but he has barely enough to heat his home. He builds the fire out of paper, a flammable material made from plastic that’s quite thin. Spark it with a tad of oil, and voila, a blazing fire. It doesn’t last too long, so he has to act quick. He takes a few plastic jugs that he has gathered, and a few rusty metal rods, and places them on the fire. They melt and mold into a smooth material. With a bit of molding, and a lot of measuring off his pamphlet, he’s got a bunch of pieces. The long shaft will attach directly to the rock, so he does that last so it’s still melty. He puts all the pieces on a cloth, attaches a rope, and drags it all. Another advantage of his metal-plastic hybrid is that it’s extraordinarily light, a useful thing for something as tall as this. He uses the same rope to pull up the shaft, and then uses that like a pulley to lift the other pieces. Last, he’ll need an engine. He’s got one that’s broken that he’s never bothered fixing, because he doesn’t have enough fuel to get electricity. A little fire has always done the trick for lights. The pamphlet calls for a generator, and he knows that that’s the same as an engine. Simple electromagnetism, and you can generate electricity. Or, less commonly, use electricity to rotate it. Either way, a wind turbine needs an engine, so now he should repair it. It turns out it’s not too damaged: a few quick patches over the copper coil and he’s got himself a working engine. He tests it with a bit of fuel, and up it goes. He looks up at his new wind turbine, and it’s the most majestic thing he’s ever seen. Even in its unmoving state, it looks gorgeous. It stands like a gentle hand, a father to the world, looking down with kind eyes. He grabs the two leads, and puts a bulb between them.
For a moment, the turbine is calm. Suddenly he feels warm air start to push at him from the side. He looks up and sees the moving head turn with a low rumble to face the wind. At first it just stares at the wind, but steadily Heet can make out a little movement in the three legs. They turn just a little bit, but start to move faster, and faster, until they beat in a circle, not so fast that they blur, but just fast enough, like a beating heart, breathing vitalization into the earth. Boom, boom, boom. Heet can just feel the power. The light illuminates the ground below him; a solid few meters around him the light cuts through the smoke.
Winds are dangerous. They have a tendency to blow things down, and put folk off. They come so often, with enough force to blow a poorly designed house halfway across the world. Winds have always been loved, though, because they provide the little heat people get. They say they form in the hot parts of the world - where it’s so hot no one can live there, and travel down to the frosty areas. They form in differences of temperature, and the difference from the frost to the heat is massive. Heet thinks about this as he walks back towards his house, carrying his leads. It doesn’t take long for him to rig some lights up in his house, as well as an old stove. He reroutes his refrigerator from “Fuel” to “Engine.” The two settings are designed so that people can run wires from the vendors to their houses, and abandon the hassle of reloading their fuel. Of course, that comes at a huge house. He changes his furnace, too, to the electric setting. Except he’s not wiring to some vendor’s output, he’s using his own output, and there’s no smokestack on his. He connects his house to his wind turbine, and it lights up, so bright he can see through all the way to his wall without noticing the smog. The bulbs are blindingly bright. He’s not used to excess fuel. He realizes that he’s completely fuel independent now. He can connect his desalinator to this, too. He has just made his life that much more simple. And the world a whole lot better. The lights flick off, and Heet walks outside. The gust has stopped. He needs a way to control the flow. He grabs his electrical bin and he rigs up a little control panel on his house that stores the extra for use when the charge is too low. He watches the little makeshift dial increase steadily, as his little house consumes less energy than his turbine is generating. The wind starts up again, and Heet’s house lights again. He watches his makeshift dial measure how much stored energy he has. It goes up, and up, and up, until it hits the top and stays there, a token to what he has just created.
Heet looks up at his wind turbine, beating as usual. The wind forces against it, and he can hear the rumble as it rotates, over and over. Suddenly he notices that it’s blocking the smoke in it’s path, and it’s cleared a small area of the sky. He looks up at the windmill and sees a bit of the sky. It’s shaded light blue, a color he’s never seen in a world as dark as this.
A few days later, Heet hears heavy footsteps over the rumbling of the turbine. He grabs his sniper rifle. It’s smooth, and long, and has a very precise scope. He stalks away from his house, and jumps into a crack to scope out the situation. He finds two people walking together. This is very uncommon - people can’t resist killing another person for their fuel. He watches them for a moment, and then notices something even odder - they’re not moving toward his house. They’re walking casually towards his wind turbine. He steps quietly and quickly in their direction to get a better look. They’re both men, fairly strong looking, but neither is carrying a gun. Another oddity. This gives Heet the courage to come out of hiding. He holds his gun to one’s chest - a necessary precaution, and demands they tell him what they’re up to. He’s not used to speaking to another person, though he often mumbles to himself. He stutters at first.
“T-this is my ground. What are you doing here?” He tries his best to sound tough, but he’s out of practice.
Apparently, the two men hadn’t noticed Heet. “Oh, fuck,” one says, and turns to face Heet, while the other runs a few steps before stopping.
“You know, you can feel the rumbling for miles. That big pillar. Do you know anything about it?” His speech is practiced and strong with no hesitation.
“Put that gun down,” says the more skittish person.
Heet lowers his gun. These people clearly have no intent to harm him, which is a wholly new experience. “The pillar is mine.”
“What the hell is it? I kept looking at it, it’s so creepy up there. You know, it cuts through the smoke.” The skittish one is speaking.
“It’s a wind turbine. Alternative energy. It’s generating electricity without any fuel.” Heet explains it nonchalantly, curious how they would react.
They both just sort of stand there for a moment. “With… no fuel, you mean. How does it work?”
“Simple, really, takes the energy from the wind and turns an engine. I’ve it powering my home.”
“We’re on the run for fuel. At first I was going to kill Nuin here, but he just screamed and told me he had nothing. Then the sense came to me. This man is in the same boat as I am. He doesn’t have fuel, so killing him isn’t going to help. I need to get over my obsession with myself. We’ve been working together since then. Scavenged some fuel from little shacks. You’d be surprised how much they leave abandoned. I’ve got a gun, too, but I try not to use it. I’m darn thirsty, haven’t drank in days.”
Heet realizes that these people had a motive. They need fuel, a desire he had already forgotten. They must have seen that pillar and come, on the off chance there was some fuel around it, for whatever reason. And here they were right. “You know, look at this dial,” Heet realizes they have walked subconsciously over to his home. “It’s been on full for a while now. I don’t have anything to do with it. I’ve got some leftover walls. If you want, you can settle down here and use my electricity.”
“Oh, that sounds wonderful. I can’t thank you enough. We can set up a little village,” he chuckles.
The house setup is simple to set up, and soon three houses stand by each other, each drawing power from the massive wind turbine. That night, though, the power cuts off, and the cold wakes each one up. In the middle of the night, the three light a fire to mold the special material. They keep the fire running longer so they can warm their hands, then set right to work. Heet has already done it before, so the work runs smoothly. Before daybreak, a second wind turbine has been set up, and the batteries are fast recharging. They won’t likely run out again. A few days later, another person approaches Heet and his comrades. Heet goes out with his gun, but he has a plan.
“Put down your weapon, and I’ll give you all the fuel you want.” The approaching woman immediately sets down her gun and follows Heet’s motion to follow. She joins the village, and networks with the power grid. Heet anticipates the dangers of the fourth person, and sets up not just a third but a fourth and fifth wind turbine to connect to the now expanded grid. As the sounds and sights expand, more and more people come wandering. Each one, Heet goes out armed, requests they drop their arms, and guides them to the free fuel. As more people come, some people go out foraging for supplies for the village, as it is at this point quite a decent village, and word of the free fuel spreads. With each new person, one or two more turbines are put up to support them. The farm is gorgeous. The power felt within each turbine is magnified by their sheer number, their message of complete ownership. The rhythm beats in each one, and as each gust start, they begin to move in a wave, increasing in speed until in all their glory the move in unison.
One day, Heet sees a visitor. It’s not uncommon for him to see one or two visitors a day, so this visitor shouldn’t be at all special, except for the fact that this person is in the stereotypical vendor garb. A tuxedo with extravagant colors and a pistol tucked under the jacket, there’s no mistaking a vendor. He clearly does not look happy. Heet sees him talk with the first person he sees, and the man points toward Heet’s shack. The vendor works his way towards Heet, and Heet grabs his rifle. Heet comes out of his door with his rifle trained, feeling that this gun is not simply a precaution in this circumstance. The vendor begins speaking with hostility.
“What do you think this is, funny? No one’s coming to me anymore for fuel. Word comes that there’s a guy selling fuel for free. And look at that. The sky’s turning blue. We can’t have that. It’s bad for business. People can’t know that there’s an alternative. Here, I give you a choice. You can stop this operation,” he pulls out his pistol, “or die. Quite simply, really.”
Heet has never been in a duel before. He has always had the advantage of surprise or distance. In this case, he has neither. He never really got the rules of dueling anyway. He supposes he could just shoot the vendor, but then the man might see his attempts and fire the trigger first. He then thinks that perhaps he could put down his gun, then trip the man. The vendor, though, will probably shoot at any sign of movement. Finally, he sees his clear only option. He’s loved this village, and he sees a future in alternative energy. Others can continue his work for him, this is just a beginning. All this he thinks in a few seconds.
“Well?” Says the vendor, and that’s the last thing he says, for he is shot through the top of the head by a pistol. One of the earlier citizens stands there with the pistol, looking somewhat surprised.
“Well, that settles that, I suppose. Thank you. I’ll have to be more careful next time.”
Over the next few weeks, more vendors come to visit Heet. Each time, Heet is careful to have the upper hand on them, and most are willing to return with no violence. Something peculiar starts to happen, afterwards. As Heet looks at the horizon, he can see walls of smoke suddenly cut off. Vendors are losing their visitors, and they are steadily having to stop burning. One day, Heet sees another vendor approach him.
“Put down your weapon. What is your purpose.”
“I need fuel. No one comes to me anymore. I’m just as poor as the rest.” He replies solemnly, as if it were a resignation.
“Of course. Everyone is served here.”
Moths later, Heet looks over his people, and sees people sharing food they have caught, as well as guns they have found, and sees that houses are stretching as far as the eye could see. People are making the shift from fuel. They don’t need it anymore. He looks the other direction and sees his wind turbines, rotating, doing their work, blind to the movement they have created. He looks down at his pamphlet, this little piece of paper that saved the world. And then notices something he cannot believe he hasn’t noticed before. He feels warm. Truly warm, not the feeling he gets when he walks into his home. He takes off his jacket and feels the air, not the usual frigid air. Simply cool air. He finds a thermometer and shows it to the village. It reads 55 degrees fahrenheit. Over months, the temperature starts to stabilize. He, surrounded by his friends, look up at the sky, and see blue all the way across, and in the center the sun, shining down at them.
The frost is over.