Starring Sreya Bhattacharya and Shayak Roy.
In 1999, an unnamed male employee with the job title of Senior Software Engineer — voiced by Nathaniel-Jordan Apostol and credited simply as “The Player” — awakens after a seven-day mandatory isolation in the Arrivals wing of Union Plaza, a lunar resort that now feels oddly deserted and in disarray. He leaves his quarters, armed with a Cosmonaut Assistance Tool (CAT) to interface with Union Plaza’s electronic systems, and begins to move through the facility, noticing the eerie silence and signs of a recent chaos. As he digs deeper, he uncovers notes, emails, and recordings that gradually illuminate what happened to the people who once filled the space.
The trouble began with a moonquake that set off a chain of alarming events. Security officer John Cooper conducts a perimeter check on the lunar surface and ventures into a newly opened fissure, where he encounters strange vegetation sprouting from a humanoid body. When Cooper reports his discovery to Union Plaza’s Automated Security Network (ASN), the system triggers a facility-wide lockdown. Soon after, Cooper falls ill with a mysterious illness characterized by migraines, memory gaps, and hallucinations that spread to other staff. At the same time, the facility’s Type-05 assistant robots begin to act strangely and even violently. Cooper witnesses the murder of a resort guest and sees the body being concealed, all while the severity of the crisis remains unclear to many aboard the resort.
Head of Security Kei Koyama arranges for an engineer — the Player — to be brought in to diagnose and fix the ASN, but by the time the Player emerges from isolation, every person at Union Plaza has either fallen prey to the rogue robots or succumbed to the spreading disease. The Player begins to experience the same troubling symptoms, including episodes of time loss and unsettling visions of the Moon and a large, spherical metal capsule. After shutting down the ASN, he suffers another lost-time episode and wakes up in a different lunar facility called the Ward, which belongs to a group known as the Prism Institute.
The Ward holds dark connections to a decades-old project: during the 1970s, the Canal Exploration Mission studied a cavernous feature on the Moon named the Canal, linked to moonquakes and linked to a mysterious, fungoid alien life. The Canal exerted a troubling psychological influence on humans, and two dimorphic Moon creatures, invisible to the naked eye but visible through the CAT module, invade the Ward. Entity A roams the space without obvious harm, while Entity B is discovered after choking on an apple, its corpse turning visible. Both beings release fungal spores, a vector for the unknown disease, and history records that some humans willingly entered the Canal and never returned—while others died at the Ward, their bodies consumed by the fungal growths.
The Player navigates the threats of Entity A, completes computer-mandated tasks in the Ward, and conducts an echography of the Canal while injecting “amniotic brine” into a small spherical capsule leaking fungal growths. These actions unseal the entrance to the cave that leads to the Canal. He enters the Canal and finds the large capsule surrounded by the consumed remains of Prism personnel. When the capsule opens, it reveals another creature resembling Entity A — a vision the Player experiences as a possible duplicate of himself while a voice intones, “Through me, you endure... Through you, I endure...”
A heavily redacted Prism Institute report dated December 5, 2025 appears, detailing the “PRISM Lunar Containment and Recovery Program.” The document notes that the Prism Institute launched the LCRP mission earlier that year to recover data from the lost Canal expedition and mentions the Union Plaza incident in passing. The report reveals that contact with the LCRP mission was lost soon after it landed and entered the Ward, with the final transmission consisting of a single image: a cave riddled with vines and flowers.
The atmosphere of isolation, mystery, and danger is rendered with careful detail, inviting readers to follow the Player as he traces the threads of the outbreak from a deserted resort to a hidden lunar ward and beyond, where the Canal’s influence and the fungal life it harbors blur the lines between technology, biology, and perception.
