The Eden Aperture Project

June 6th, 2026

Day of discovery

It’s taken 17 years, 6 months, 22 days, 6 hours, and, by my watch, 24 minutes.

But we found it. Or perhaps it found us.

Buried beneath strata that defy geological logic, wedged between anomalies we long dismissed as sensor noise, it waits, utterly motionless, utterly silent. A structure, if one can call it that. Not built. Not grown. Simply… there.

It responds to nothing. No light, no temperature shift, no sound or electromagnetic stimulus. It casts no shadow. It reflects nothing. And yet, it is real. Tangibly, undeniably real. We’ve run tests and verified results across multiple systems. Every metric screams it shouldn't exist.

But it does.

The team has started calling it the Doorway. Premature, maybe. Still, it’s hard to disagree. It looks like one. A clean, arched frame fused into the cavern wall, hewn from some impossibly smooth, alien substance. Markings ring its edge, carved with a precision that suggests intention and intelligence, though none of us recognise the symbols.

And here we are, standing before it like children before a sealed box, aching to know what lies within.

Of course, we can’t act. Not yet. Protocols are ironclad. We need Oversight Committee clearance before we can go near it, let alone touch it. That means paperwork, chains of approval, and at least one round of “ethical review”. Weeks, if we're lucky. Months, if they’re afraid.

So we wait. We follow the rules. But I need to record this now—this exact moment.

Because this is the line.

Before, we were researchers.

Now, we are witnesses.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

July 27th, 2026

Day 51 since initial discovery

Permission has been granted.

The clearance came through this morning. An unceremonious email stamped with three levels of encryption and a paragraph so cautiously worded it may as well have been written with gloves on. Still, it's official. We’ve been authorised to proceed to Phase Two: low-impact study, surface-level scans, and containment architecture.

It’s taken weeks of manoeuvring. White-paper gymnastics, interdepartmental jostling, risk assessments wrapped in risk assessments. We lost nearly five days over a disagreement about whether the structure should be classified as geological, technological, or potentially metaphysical. In the end, it was listed as “anomalous,” which is the bureaucratic way of saying we don’t know, and we’re scared to guess.

The team took the news with the cautious optimism of people who’ve been burned before.
Carter, our systems engineer, grinned, but I caught the twitch in his jaw. He’s been working twelve-hour nights designing the shielding for the probe array. Says it’s just a precaution, but I know he doesn’t believe in precautions.
Mara, our symbologist, asked whether the structure had changed shape since we first made the discovery. When I said no, she just stared at the arch like it had insulted her.

Anton, our materials specialist, made coffee for everyone and left his cup untouched. That’s how I know he’s worried.

Then again, I don’t blame them. In three days, we’re due to meet with what the Oversight Committee is calling a “liaison team”. Four hand-picked specialists, sent to “observe and assist”. We’ve been told nothing beyond that. No names. No fields. No indication of how long they plan to stay.

From experience, that always means the same thing: the project’s not ours anymore.

Still, we push forward.

Tomorrow we begin surface scans.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

July 30th, 2026

Day 54 since initial discovery

They arrived precisely on schedule. Four strangers in matching grey coats, each of them stepping off the transport with the posture of people who’ve spent too long being told they’re the smartest in the room. I was braced for silence, clipped language, and the usual scent of institutional suspicion. Instead, we got handshakes. Real ones. Warm. One of them even smiled.

Their leader introduced herself as Dr Elena Cruz, a theoretical physicist with a background in interdimensional modelling. She made a joke about having been dragged out of retirement for “this particular circus,” and I’ll admit, she won me over almost immediately. She asked good questions. And she listened to the answers. It briefly reminded me of why I took this job in the first place. Not for glory, or headlines, or even discovery, really. Just the rare, clean feeling of being understood. It's been a while since I felt that.

The others mostly followed her lead.

Dr Reza Karim is a former military officer who transitioned into engineering. Quiet, observant, built like someone who could carry a generator without assistance. He seems more comfortable with machinery than people, but when Carter showed him the probe schematics, they were debating torque tolerances within five minutes.

Alex Li is the youngest of their group, late twenties, maybe. A specialist in neurological mapping, he was nervous, brilliant, and painfully sincere. I believe his credentials because he looks like someone who forgets to eat when he's excited.

And then there’s Roche. No discipline listed. No field offered. Just "Roche." Always watching, always listening. Mara calls her “the babysitter”. I suspect she’s something else.

They’re integrating well enough, even helping with calibration. But they’ve set up their own station. Separate everything. “Just a precaution,” Cruz says. We nod, but no one buys it.

Still, the atmosphere is… better than I feared. There’s tension, yes, but not the corrosive kind. We’re professionals. We want answers. And for now, at least, it seems we’re all pulling in the same direction.

Tomorrow we begin phase three.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

August 20th, 2026

Day 75 since initial discovery

Apologies for the silence.

It’s been a hectic few weeks. The kind of hectic that rearranges your sense of time. Days have blurred into a slow, fevered blur of data, recalibrations, and the ever-familiar hum of sleepless minds orbiting the same unsolvable problems.

But we’ve had a breakthrough.

That sentence feels strange to write, even now. And stranger still, because it was so brief, we almost missed it.

Three days ago, at precisely 03:17 local time, the structure opened. Briefly, just for two seconds. But long enough to change everything.

It responded to a harmonic pulse test, a sequence we’ve run dozens of times: no sound, no warning, just sudden presence. Space twisted. Reality blinked. Then it vanished.

We’ve analysed the telemetry from every angle. We’ve taken temperature fluctuations. Atmospheric pressure. EM readings. We even measured for cosmic radiation drift. Nothing conclusive, except for one detail: the local magnetic field showed a momentary irregularity: a ripple, just a heartbeat before activation. Cruz believes the event was triggered not solely by our input, but by external environmental factors. She’s building a model around solar wind intensity, sub-crustal magnetic lines, and, most interestingly, planetary alignment. We’re in a minor celestial conjunction. She suspects that it may have nudged the balance.

“If it is a doorway,” she said, “maybe it opens for the sky, not just for us.”.

Carter hasn't stopped working since. He sleeps in the data lab, chasing what he calls “the frequency ghost.” Anton’s taken the opposite approach. I think the loss of control, even briefly, rattled him more than he’s letting on. Mara hasn’t said much. She sits near the chamber with her sketches, tracing and retracing the symbols that flared during activation. We still don’t know whether they were part of the structure or of whatever was passing through it.

Roche, our quiet observer, has started asking more pointed questions, not about the technology, but about intent. She asked me today what I believed would happen if the doorway stayed open, not what I wanted, but what I believed. I didn’t answer.

Truthfully, I don’t know.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

August 26th, 2026

Day 81 since initial discovery

Another breakthrough. This one lasted five seconds, long enough to be undeniable. The doorway opened, held, and closed again.

We should be celebrating. Only… We’re not.

Something’s shifted.

Conversations are clipped. Tempers are shorter. Reza snapped at Carter during a diagnostic this morning, entirely out of character, and Alex Li, usually the most curious voice in the room, has grown quiet. When I asked if something was wrong, he just looked at the arch and said, “It knows we’re here.”.

Mara confined herself to her quarters. She leaves her sketches outside her door now, without explanation. Carter and Anton argue about procedure almost daily, but their arguments no longer sound like disagreement. They sound like fear with nowhere to go.

Even Cruz seems different. She still leads, but her questions have shifted, from focusing on structure to emphasising containment. And Roche… she’s always been hard to read, but lately I’ve caught her standing in the chamber alone, facing the arch with her eyes closed, as if she’s listening to something only she can hear.

I’m not sure what to think. More study is needed.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

August 29th, 2026

Day 84 since initial discovery

All testing has been suspended.
Officially, the pause is for “recalibration” and “equipment review.”
Unofficially, I think it has to do with the bleeding.

It started two days ago. Reza, mid-shift, during the third passive scan cycle, just a nosebleed. He waved it off: dry air, fatigue, stress. Understandable. We’ve all been stretched thin.

Then it was Alex Li. Then Carter. Then Mara.

Initially, we referred to them as isolated incidents. Occupational hazards. Long hours, recycled air, elevated pressure.

But today, I passed blood in my urine.
An hour later, a single tear, thick, dark and red, slid from my right eye as I was reviewing the field harmonics data.

I’ve told no one.

Not because I don’t trust them. But because I can’t be the one to say it. Not out loud.
It’s not radiation. Not contamination. Every scan has come back clean—no pathogens, no foreign agents, no chemical exposure. The data is frustratingly normal. But something is happening.

Cruz called an emergency roundtable this evening. She suspects a psychosomatic response tied to the last activation, which she’s calling “neurological anomalies”. Headaches. Sleep disturbances. Sensory distortions.

She hasn’t mentioned the bleeding.
Either she doesn’t think it matters, or she’s hiding it too.

Afterwards, Alex Li pulled me aside, quiet, cautious, like the walls might listen.
He said, “It’s not in our heads. It’s in the air.” Then he looked at his own hands like they didn’t belong to him.

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

One thing is certain, though: the door opened.
But in the silence that followed, a question took root.

Was it truly we who opened it… or something on the other side?

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

September 3rd, 2026

Day 89 since initial discovery

We triggered a full opening, and this time, it held.

Then the power died—total systems blackout. We’re running on emergency backups now. Communications are dead. No outgoing signal. No incoming orders. We are alone.

And to make things worse. The dome has sealed itself from the outside.

Some kind of automatic lockdown protocol, allegedly a fail-safe in the event of a breach. But no one activated it. Hell, no one even knew it existed. The hatches are fused shut, the airlocks won’t cycle, and the overrides? Useless.

We are trapped.

Not long after, Roche vanished. No blood. No signs of a struggle. Just… gone.

The theory no one’s speaking aloud is the only one that makes sense: she went through.

Whether it was her decision or something else’s is anyone’s guess.

The final message from Oversight came just before the blackout: No one is to attempt entry until further testing confirms the doorway is safe.

Still, it stands open. And with the power gone and no contact from the outside, tension is pushing toward the breaking point.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

September 6th, 2026

Day 92 since initial discovery

It’s been three days since Roche disappeared.

The theory hasn’t changed. She went through.

As for the rest of us, things are deteriorating fast.

The bleeding has worsened.

It began with nosebleeds and fatigue. Now it’s more frequent. More violent.

Reza collapsed yesterday, blood streaming from his ears.

Mara’s eyes have turned the colour of old wine; she doesn’t seem to notice.

Alex was coughing up something dark before he stopped speaking altogether.

I haven’t told them of my symptoms. Not fully. I wake with blood on the pillow. And now, it’s started pooling beneath my fingernails. Small things. Easy to hide. For now.

The power remains out. Auxiliary systems are sputtering. We’ve shut down everything non-essential. The lights flicker at random. The heat is failing. Water filtration’s gone. We’re drinking from standing reserves.

And still, the gate hums.
Constant.
Open.
Watching.

Our last supply drop was delivered just before the blackout. We can see it through the observation panel, sealed in the outer bay. Crates of food. Filtration capsules. A portable generator. Close enough to touch, yet utterly unreachable. I’ve started calling it the Lost Table, a feast laid out for ghosts.

Now, tempers are fraying.

Today, Anton struck Reza hard over a ration bar. No one stopped him. Not even me.

We are afraid now.
Afraid of the dark.
Afraid of each other.

Soon, I fear something will break.

Perhaps it already has.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project

September 7th, 2026

Day 93 since initial discovery

They're gone.

I went to sleep —or something close to it —and when I woke, the dome was silent. No footsteps. No voices. No hum of machinery. Just the arch, still open, still pulsing with that steady, bone-deep resonance.

There are no signs of struggle. No blood. No bodies. Just absence. Their things remain. Beds unmade. Tools left mid-use. Anton’s mug was still warm. Reza’s jacket folded neatly at the foot of his bunk.

Mara’s sketchbook was left open on her desk. Half an image left unfinished, as if she’d stood up and walked away mid-thought.

The doorway remains unchanged.

I don’t know what lies beyond it. None of us ever did.
But I can’t stay here, not with the silence.
Not with the sense that something is waiting on the other side.

I can feel it. Watching. Patient.

If there’s any chance they’re still out there —if something took them —I have to follow.

This will be my final entry.
Not by choice. By necessity.

The field around the arch disrupts electronic devices at close range. Once I step through—if I step through—there’ll be no signal.
And likely… no way back.

I’m leaving this journal here, beside the console.

If you find it, I want you to understand:

We came here to uncover something alien.

But we were wrong.

It was never hidden.

It was simply waiting.

And now, its waiting is over.

—Dr. Eleanor Voss
Lead Researcher, Eden Aperture Project