Charles Phillips hates the "meat" of himself—the asthma, the weak bones, the fragility of being human. In a desperate bid to become "durable," he visits a back-alley geneticist who promises a software patch for the human soul using the DNA of the world's most resilient bacteria. The treatment is a success, but Charles soon learns that evolution is never safe. As he begins to shed his humanity in the breakroom of a grey corporate office, his coworkers realize that the lockdown isn't to keep people out—it's to keep the "optimized" predator in.

In the suffocating heat of the Texas brush, disgraced academic Dr. Aris Thorne is digging for redemption. But beneath the ruins of the Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo, he unearths a history that should have stayed buried.

The excavation reveals a crypt of skeletons, the "Silent Choir," all bearing the same gruesome mark: a perfect hole drilled into the frontal bone. As Aris attempts to decode the logic of these ancient surgeons, a low-frequency vibration begins to rise from the earth—a sound that isn't heard, but felt.

As the camp descends into madness and the feral "Night Runners" close in from the darkness , Aris realizes that the mission wasn't built to keep the wilderness out, but to keep something else in. When the pressure builds inside your own mind, how far would you go to let it out?

Arthur lives in a "suburban tomb" of hermetic silence, dedicating his existence to a "grey struggle" against the dust that constantly threatens to coat his mahogany bookshelves. But his carefully curated museum of comfort is shattered when he discovers a rusted analog SLR camera buried deep in a closet box marked Winter. The camera is heavy, "infectious," and smells violently of "ozone" and "burnt rubber"—the scent of a world that moves too fast.

While Arthur is seized by a primal terror and attempts to hurl the object into a ravine, the camera returns to his kitchen table, "slick with black mud" and demanding attention. His wife, Sarah, appearing "too vivid for this gray house," insists that the camera is a "witness" and that Arthur must develop the film to unlock the doors of his own mind.