The Great Freeze is a horror Short Story (more accurately a Flash Fic, which is a short short story) written by Aza Smith that can be read on Flash Fiction Magazine here
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The story is an excerpt from the notes of Dr. Grace October, a Radiocarbon Dating Technician whose team has been tasked with storing and analyzing a biological specimen that defies description. As the team leave or go mad, the world itself suffers from decline no one could rationally explain.
This short story has examples of:
- Animalistic Abomination: The Specimen is a colossal monster preserved in permafrost and kept in storage at the Terrace Villa Scientific Institute. The creature is described as being a serpent-like creature with white-fur, raptor-claws, and wolf's skull for a head. Despite being completely immobile in ice, the thing is still alive, and is implied to have driven the expedition team that discovered it to suicide and inflict insomnia in the research team. If Grace's theory is accurate, its a Beast of the Apocalypse that is causing the Heat Death of the Universe sextillion years ahead of schedule just by existing.
- Apocalypse How: A slow-acting version of Class X-4. Grace believes that, somehow, the Specimen is causing the Heat Death of the Universe (hence the title) within their lifetimes. The sun is going out, as are the stars, the Earth's rotation is slowing down, plants and animals are dying out from that lack of changing seasons, and humanity is suffering from a species-wide malaise.The world is freezing to death. Not through an ice age or nuclear winter, but from inertia of cosmic proportions.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The Specimen is said to have white fur and is discovered frozen in a cave-system under the Mahalangur Himal, though that's where the similarities between it and the Yeti end. Instead of being a lumbering ape-man, it's more of a world-devouring Great Serpent type of monster.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The story is from the perspective of a scientist who's tasked with researching a Monster in the Ice that defies biology, with the world (and quit possibly the universe itself) suffering from "inertia of cosmic proportions", which may or may not be caused by the monster merely existing.
- Driven to Suicide: The expedition team that had discovered the Specimen all performed autokabalesis*, the implication that the Specimen had driven them to it psychically.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The cave system that the expedition team discovered the Specimen is a complete anomaly, no one in the area having even known it existed, with signs that the cave itself possessed no signs of ever having human or animal interaction.
- Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Several members of Grace's team suffer from night terrors of the Specimen escaping from the ice and devouring the sun, implying it to be a Beast of the Apocalypse. It's implied to be a symptom of the effects the Specimen has on the world, entropy destroying nature faster than it should. Grace's hesitation at destroying the Specimen is partially because she's worried that the attempt would free the Specimen instead.
- Refuge in Audacity: Grace admits that her theory that the Heat Death of the Universe is happening early and its all somehow related to the Specimen is a theory is a wild and unprovable one, but she only came to this conclusion because the Specimen "defied conventional biology", and she has no other alternatives.