A civilization-scale secret, inside a 42-parsec volume of engineered dark.
What it is. What it is not.
The premise note we send to department heads and collaborators before the script ships.
A classified survey team crosses into an engineered dark region and discovers that the speed of light is a containment seal. The film is about the crew deciding what to do with that discovery.
Not a creature feature. Not a monster story. The antagonist is the physics, and the moral weight is on the crew. Closer to Arrival than to Event Horizon.
Prestige. Cold. Instrument-driven. The camera treats the mission with documentary respect; the score is sparse; the dark is never styled for beauty. It is a working environment until it is not.
c is a causal clamp. Not a speed limit.
The physics canon of the film in one paragraph. Every leakage effect in the script is derived from this rule.
In the world of Hyperdark, the speed of light is not a property of space. It is a confinement field — a boundary condition that keeps energy, matter, and information inside 3+1 dimensions.
An engineered dark region is a place where the clamp has been selectively relaxed. Inside the boundary, light bleeds. Telemetry delays. Memory thins. Energy routes outward into higher dimensions — and, on the builder's terms, routes back in.
The crew's discovery is not a creature. It is the builder's intent.