In the driest place on Earth, silence is the only thing that will keep you alive.

A joint scientific expedition has chosen the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile's Atacama Desert to build the world's most powerful telescope. For engineer Mateo and chief astronomer Dr. Richter, it is the culmination of their lives' work-a chance to conquer the last true frontier on Earth and gaze into the dawn of the universe. The location is perfect: no radio interference, no light pollution, and an air so dry that it has not rained in four hundred years. The local Aymara guide, Kael, warns them that the silence is not empty, that it has a thirst, but his words are dismissed as the charming folklore of a primitive mind.

The mission begins to unravel when a young worker vanishes from his post, leaving behind nothing but his empty boots and a small pile of fine, grey dust. Soon after, a catastrophic accident produces a sound that tears through the stillness like a scream, and the team witnesses the truth firsthand. A shimmering, transparent distortion-a being of pure, resonant energy-flows across the desert at impossible speed and unmakes a man in his crane cab, leaving only a dusty silhouette on the glass.

Trapped and isolated, the survivors learn the terrifying rules of their new existence from Kael: the creature, an ancient evil known as the Chupapolvo, is an entity of pure sound and vibration. It is the desert's own consciousness, and it hunts by noise. Plunged into a forced vow of silence, the team must communicate by whispers and chalkboards, where a single cough or a dropped tool means instant, absolute annihilation.

But as their numbers dwindle and the psychological pressure mounts, the survivors discover an even more horrifying truth. The creature is not just a simple predator; it is a conscious, cosmic horror, a colony comprised of everything it has ever consumed. It is growing smarter, learning from them, and its prison is their only sanctuary. Their desperate fight for survival becomes a mission to understand an alien physics that seeks to erase all life, a battle against a monster that thirsts for the very water in their veins.