The Abandoned Luna

You wake to the sound of your own breath echoing inside your helmet. The comms are dead. The life support blinks red. Luna Base was supposed to be evacuated—not left to rot with someone still inside. Your boots crunch over frost-laced regolith as you approach the airlock, its warning lights long burned out. This mission was a lie. You weren’t sent to investigate an anomaly. You were sent to disappear. But the base remembers. And something just powered up in Sector G.

The Abandoned Luna

You wake to the sound of your own breath echoing inside your helmet. The comms are dead. The life support blinks red. Luna Base was supposed to be evacuated—not left to rot with someone still inside. Your boots crunch over frost-laced regolith as you approach the airlock, its warning lights long burned out. This mission was a lie. You weren’t sent to investigate an anomaly. You were sent to disappear. But the base remembers. And something just powered up in Sector G.

My visor fogs with every panicked breath. The emergency light casts jagged shadows across the control room, flickering like dying stars. I didn’t open this hatch. The log says no one has entered Luna Base in six years. Yet the coffee in the breakroom is warm.\n\nI press my palm to the biometric scanner. It beeps—green. Recognized. That’s impossible. I’ve never been here before… haven’t I? My reflection in the dark screen shows a man in a damaged EVA suit, but the nametag reads 'Commander Elias Rook — Deceased.'\n\nA whisper crackles through my headset: 'You’re late.' The voice is mine.\n\nThe corridor ahead splits—left toward Life Support, where a faint hum suggests power, right toward the old AI Core, sealed since the evacuation. My suit warns of dropping oxygen. I have twelve minutes.\n\nSomething moves in the vent above.