In the middle of summer, the remote town of Colder, Alaska has been flash frozen. People and all.

    Kiera Lowe is a physicist picked by the military to join a second reconnaissance team into the town. The first one vanished without a trace after an accident at a superconductor research facility, which Kiera’s father ran. He is presumed dead. The recon team is lead by Sergeant Dominic Scott, Special Ops, a man seeking vindication from a traumatic past.

    They quickly learn the strange nature of the tragedy: the frozen corpses appear to be melding and conjoining with material objects; cars and machines, electronics. They have metal filaments and gears, cameras replace eyes, tools for hands and arms.     And these machined corpses can move, and even attack. Soon they are on the run from them and by mid point they begin to encounter the utterly alien entity that seems to be controlling them.

Kiera puts the pieces together as they fight their way to Encridion Research Institute. They are in the midst of an alien nanotech invasion, and the micromachines have heuristics algorithms that seek self awareness while using dead bodies to defend its beachhead. The recon's mission becomes clear: they must stop the alien nanotech plague before it becomes intelligent. The stakes are ultimate: human civilization will cease to exist if they fail.

    Despite Kiera’s scientific brilliance, she is also haunted by her past; OCD and depression that led to total sensory withdrawal, and subsequent shock therapy, brought on by a father that would not tolerate anything less than stellar academics. This trauma manifested as a childhood phantom, Mr. Blue, a thing of ice that came to her when she blocked out the world. Now, as the stress and horror mount, she has an increasingly difficult time telling reality from dysfunction. She wants nothing more than to find her father alive and confront him, but along the way she realizes he stole her theories and sold them to the military, leading to the tragedy of Colder.     At the institute, the team comes under heavy attack. When Corporal Mike Royal takes a fatal hit, he reveals that he is carrying a micro-nuke, and it is triggered to blow within thirty minutes of his heart stopping.

    By the final sequence, it is up to Kiera and Scott to stop the alien virus and the dead bodies it has commandeered. Scott carries the nuke that is ticking down, minutes left, and Kiera must confront the father that ruined her childhood, yet made her the scientist she is. And her choice is clear--she will have to kill him to stop the crisis, or she will be overcome by the madness that she thought she had escaped long ago.