Arrival Protocol [UPDATED]
**Hello everyone, this is my very first chapter .
I hope you enjoy this 😊**
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"We thought we were unearthing a relic. Instead, we woke something waiting."— Memoir fragment, recovered from Operation Farsight archives
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[Location: Antarctica | Sector 09-A | 13 km west of Outpost Halley VII]Date: March 4, 2042 | 05:32 GMT
The wind had a voice in this place.
It howled through the ice spires like a thing alive, a keening sound born of pressure differentials and ancient glaciers collapsing under their own secrets. Above the snowline, visibility was a mercurial beast—one moment as clear as breath on glass, the next a total whiteout.
A convoy of six vehicles crawled across the terrain like metallic beetles under siege. Their treads hissed and whined, protesting the Antarctic crust as it cracked beneath their weight.
Inside the lead transport, Major Lyla Vance stared at the coordinates glowing on her wristband. Her breath fogged the interior of the mask.
"ETA?" she asked without turning.
A voice crackled in her ear. "Three minutes. Assuming we don't get swallowed by a fissure."
"Comforting," she muttered, and adjusted her visor.
Around her, the interior of the transport glowed in cold blue light. It was military, retrofitted for bio-containment, and she hated how quiet it had become. Even the chatter from the younger techs had dulled to a hush ever since the last drone scan returned. The scan that revealed something under the ice that wasn't supposed to be there.
Not a ruin.Not a fossil.Not dead.
Whatever was down there had a heartbeat.
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[Location: Operation Farsight Perimeter | Drillpoint Zero]06:01 GMT
The vehicles parked in a crescent. Already, the air was shifting. The wind, once relentless, seemed to avoid this precise patch of ice.
Dr. Kenji Takamura stepped out last, visor fogging, eyes squinting. He carried a tablet cradled in thermal wrap, gloved fingers already typing diagnostics. A geophysicist by training, but seconded to bio-neural research due to his fringe expertise—deep pattern resonance theory.
"Pulse still steady," he said aloud. "7.4 hertz, continuous, non-rhythmic... but repeating. Not seismic. Not machine."
Major Vance knelt near the ice as the excavation team finished deploying the plasma drill.
"Then what the hell is it?" she asked.
Kenji didn't respond at first. Then: "Possibly… something thinking."
Vance turned. "It's alive?"
"I didn't say that."
"But you didn't not say it."
Before Kenji could answer, the plasma drill ignited.
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[Location: 47 Meters Below Surface | Vertical Shaft A]Time: 07:12 GMT
The shaft was black. Not the absence of light—the rejection of it.
Even high-intensity beams seemed to drown in it, as if swallowed by something ancient and unknowable. The temperature dropped in measurable gradients every six meters. By the time the scout capsule reached the halfway mark, the exterior thermometer was reading -129°C—colder than recorded Martian surface levels.
Then, at exactly 47.8 meters, it stopped.
Without impact.Without resistance.
The drill simply... stopped existing on the sensor grid.
Lyla, watching from the operations trailer, stiffened.
"Redundancy check. Is that a fault in the feed?"
"No, ma'am," said Juno Ramirez, one of the data engineers—nineteen, dyed black hair, hacker-level clearance she absolutely shouldn't have had. "The feed didn't drop. It got absorbed."
"Absorbed into what?"
Juno hesitated. "That's the fun part. There's no material registered. No ice, no metal, no void. It's like the drill entered a perfect zero-state cavity."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning… whatever's down there isn't part of the Earth anymore."
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[Location: Vault Perimeter, Initial Breach Site]Time: 07:34 GMT
The next thirty minutes unfolded in blurs of clipped orders, sensor pings, and sudden tremors that had no epicenter.
The containment crews began erecting the mobile research dome.
Lyla paced the perimeter. She paused near a newly formed crack in the ice—a spiderweb fracture that hadn't existed ten minutes ago.
The fracture was warm.
She pressed her gloved fingers against it, expecting frostbite. Instead, she recoiled.
"Kenji," she called. "The ice is warm."
He rushed over, scanned the site.
"No geothermal anomaly. No venting. The warmth is radiating from… the crack itself."
Before either could speculate further, a low, groaning resonance echoed from beneath the ice shelf. It was not mechanical. Not tectonic.
It was… vocal.
Lyla's hand instinctively went to the pulse rifle on her back.
"We shouldn't be here," she muttered.
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[Location: Research Dome | Provisional Camp Echo-One]Time: 09:12 GMT
The makeshift lab smelled of metal and antiseptic. Kenji's monitor displayed the 3D mapping of the anomaly below.
It was not a cavern.It was not a bunker.It was a vault. A nearly perfect oval chamber, 62 meters across, buried beneath 90 million years of permafrost.
At the center: a structure that pulsed faintly, like a second heartbeat inside the Earth.
"Does this vault show any architectural signs?" Lyla asked.
"None. No seams. No joints. No materials we recognize. Not even mineral composition. It's as if... the space itself refuses analysis."
They stared in silence.
Then a chime. Thermal camera 2 flickered.
Inside the chamber, something moved.
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[Camera Feed Transcript – Timestamp 09:14:03]
Motion detected.Entity: Unknown.Shape: Quadrupedal.Movement: Ripple-like. Unnatural limb sequencing.Eyes detected: Multiple. Thermal signature... internal.
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Lyla's voice was flat. "How long before we can send a manned team?"
Kenji didn't look away from the screen. "We don't send a team into this. We send a team to seal it off."
She turned toward him. "You think we found something we shouldn't have?"
He finally met her gaze.
"I think it let itself be found."
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[Final Entry — Day One Field Log | Operation Farsight]
We arrived expecting silence. What we heard was breathing.Not from the Earth. Not from the past. But from something waiting to inherit what we leave behind.
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[End of Chapter I — Arrival Protocol]
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**It is my very first time writing journals in novels. I have seen them in some survival games so thought of adding it . Give your feedback ..... :)**
**If you liked this chapter, hurry up and add this to your library ... More chapters are coming soon.....**