manipulation of a reference counte

is there a way to manually manipulate the reference counter for an object? i would like to store a pointer to an object and have it not released if it the original object is set to null (or goes out of scope) and a pointer to it is still stored.

ie.

Type test
	Method testret:String()
		Return "testing"
	EndMethod
EndType

Local temp1:test=New test
' want to manually increment the counter
Local temp2:test Ptr=Varptr(temp1)

DebugLog(temp1.testret())
DebugLog(temp2[0].testret())
DebugLog("---")
temp1=Null
FlushMem
' boom.  if the counter was incremented i could continue on
DebugLog(temp2[0].testret())