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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/googlyeyes93 on 2024-11-22 00:37:15+00:00.

I don’t even know where to start here. If you’ve managed to intercept this, then odds are that you’re in for a bad time. If you’re one of the bastards back home who got me into this mess, then I hope you rot. Either way, I’m trying to send this out to as many people as possible. At the very least, you deserve a little warning of what’s to come.

From the top- my mane is Pierce Valens. For the past… seven years now, I believe, I’ve honestly lost track of time… anyway, I’ve been stationed on the moon. I’m a geologist, called up here to help with a mining operation after some unknown minerals were found. Unfortunately I’m the last person alive up here now, and I don’t see that lasting too much longer.

So, consider this my last will and testament. I ain’t getting out of here, and I’ll be damned if the Rot is getting out of here either. Guess if I have any solace, it’s that the big wigs who were up here bit it first.

Okay… none of this is going to make sense unless we start from the top. The big thing you need to know is that the space race ended and became more of a space marathon. It wasn’t about who finished first, it was just about getting there and setting up your territory to see what you could find. The States ended up working together with other countries- China, the former Soviets, India, basically anyone who could pop a rocket into orbit got an invitation. Hooray, world unity, right?

Not when it comes to this. Everyone is up here working together, but they’re about to end the entirety of humanity through their combined efforts. All their resources went into building a nice little outpost up here on the moon, though I’m not sure what the original purpose of it was.

Eventually, probably around… I don’t know, six years or so ago from the briefing I got, they started mining. Initially it started out as just a “let’s find out what’s under the surface” type of thing. Innocent enough, right? Find some rare minerals and maybe change how things operate on Earth. Except the mining is what got us into this stupid situation.

About three years ago was when they found the Great Table. That’s the technical term for it, anyway. Apparently it was during one of the regular mining operations, workers tunneling under the surface of the moon (seems like a fantastic idea, right?) ended up breaking through into this huge hollow antechamber. Big discovery, right?

Turns out, Hollow Moon was the least of our conspiracy addled worries. This place was big, located pretty damn close to the center of the satellite, but it didn’t match up. The dimensions of the place made no goddamn sense when compared to our measurements of the Moon itself. When placed in comparison to the surface area, our tunnels, and everything else, it’s like it took up far more room than was physically possible, yet nothing was different if you were looking down from the surface. That threw everyone for one hell of a loop, naturally.

I was already here for geological survey, testing out samples that some of the excavation crew brought back and seeing what they compared to back on Earth. Nothing too crazy, and the pay was good at the start, especially for how easy the work was. Most of the materials found up here were just different forms of basalt, silicon, the occasional deposit of iron… all stuff we’ve seen before.

I can still remember watching the live feed when they found the chamber. We had excavated down probably three hundred miles below the surface of Earth’s lunar body. As far as what they were trying to find… I don’t know. Maybe they were hoping for water or some new energy source. Instead we found a vast, empty cavern that steadily kept sloping downward. I honestly was surprised we didn’t hit the top of it and fall through, instead crashing through almost perfectly perpendicular to the floor of it.

They set up an elevator to get more of us down there before long, and let me tell you just stepping into that cavern almost broke my brain. See, one thing the Moon has going for it is the lack of light pollution. Set up at the right spot on the base and you could see stars you never thought existed. Entire galaxies were visible far off, almost to the naked eye if you looked hard enough. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen, and you could catch it from almost anywhere on the surface.

In here though, complete darkness. It was a void, even with our strongest lights set up. Couldn’t see the top of the place, no ceiling above, just the dark absence of anything. It was the first time I’d seen complete darkness in a while, and something about it was just… primal. Everything in me told me to run the moment I stepped down there.

We eventually set up a full base camp and started exploring the chamber. It… we never found an end to it. The entire thing just stretched on forever, even after we had an estimated six hundred miles covered. There’s just… there’s no way we wouldn’t find some end around there with the dimensions of the moon. I fully expected to come across a massive cavern wall at any point, ready to crack through to the surface on the other side or at least into SOMETHING. But no, we just kept moving… until we found the Great Table.

I wasn’t on the mission that found the first bit of Rot. I did see that team when they got brought back through our base camp though. The videos they had… god it was like a bad movie.

The pale lights off their suits were lighting solid rock in every direction, the darkness beyond encroaching like it was trying to take the team. Eventually though the color of the rock changed. It was so gradual you would hardly notice it at first, just the lightest hint of dark creeping into the gray rock. Eventually though it started clustering, darkening the gray to a dark charcoal color. Eventually it took over so fully, such a dark black, that it mixed into the abyss around them, making ground near indistinguishable from the void. Even with a more high powered light, it still looked like the team was just floating in space, likely to fall into the ground at any moment.

Every so often there would be a crack in the floor, a deep green breaking through the black. I can’t really blame the team for being hesitant to check it, but eventually one of them noticed that the cracks were… pulsating. One finally suggested that he believed it was glowing, and that was where the first mistake was made.

The five members of the team gathered close, each putting a hand on another before turning off their lights, one by one down the line. As the darkness began closing in with each one deigniting, the green glow of the cracks became more defined. They were indeed pulsating, the green ebbing and flowing from one direction as it went in waves. The team took a moment to orient themselves, keeping their lights off while turning to face the direction the pulse was originating from. The last one in line tripped in the shuffle, losing his hand on the one in front of him. There was a brief shout, terror filling his voice, then it was gone. His camera feed blinked out with a small burst of glitched pixels.

The rest of the team turned their lights on immediately, shouting for him to do the same and stay close. Their cameras panned in every direction, desperately searching for their friend there just moments before. Nothing. Just the cracks, still pulsating a faint green against their pale lights. The fifth member of their party was gone, nowhere in sight.

The fear in their faces as the suit cams kept shaking, everyone desperately turning to try and find their teammate… it’s something I’ve never been able to shake. That was four years ago now, and looking back… that was our sign to get the hell out of here.

The team followed their line back after a while, making it back to base camp after a couple of days. None of them were… normal, though. Everyone began to steadily decline, their health beginning to crash out starting with intense bouts of insomnia. By the time they were brought back through my segment of the base… it was like seeing corpses get walked through. They couldn’t be taken out of their suits at this point due to how damn frail they were, worrying that they could break a limb in the process of getting them out or back in for transport. They were just… wasting away in there.

By the time they got back to the surface… they were practically soup in there. So damn decomposed their bodies just melted within hours. I don’t know if it was the raid rise back to the surface, maybe a change in atmospheric pressure? I don’t know, but the reports we got back were that they had to just dispose of the suits themselves, because they were… well, they were dead and gone.

Unfrotunately however they disposed of the suit wasn’t enough. Despite the rotten corpses sloshing around inside the atmospheric suits… god it makes me gag just thinking about it. The footage we got from up here a couple of days later was something even more disturbing than the fear I had seen on their faces just days before.

They sent us the security tapes. I guess that in absence of any real idea of what to do with their festering bodies in those suits, they were just put in a cold storage in hopes of… I don’t know, stalling any further putrification? They were in a deep freezer that was serving as a makeshift morgue, suits still on, and the gasses inside causing them to stay rigid nearly laying on the tables. God, the poor bastard that had to move them……

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