10: Skeletons Of Sand

August 1, 2025·33 min·2 clips

Jonathan Tozer explains that Deka sends archaeologists to dead planets before drilling — because every civilization they find was destroyed, and the company wants to know why before the same happens to Earth.

Someone answers by breathing. The call to the Concentrics starts with a recorded promise about living fully, then tightens into silence, fear, and the awkward work of proving that words are getting through. Hello barely gets anything back. That failed contact gives the episode its pressure, because every instruction sounds simple until another person stops responding like a person. The scene stays physical and fussy at first. There is a suit, a roamer, Stanley nearby, and Jonathan trying not to damage anything while crawling toward symbols. The symbols do not help. He photographs them because stopping to interpret them would take too long, which makes sense until sense stops helping. Someone hears something outside. The open end of the vertical manhole starts shrinking from all sides, slow and mechanical, like a camera aperture losing patience. For a moment, there is still light. Then the passage shuts completely, and the hole with scribbles becomes a coffin without the narration needing to push. Oxygen becomes the clock. The terror is not just that Jonathan is trapped. It is that the place seems built to give him one last look before taking it away. Ads interrupt the recording. Their clean, polished voices make the dread around them feel stranger, as if another world has wandered in with no idea what just happened. The excerpt keeps circling broken communication: a silent caller, a worried team, a sealed chamber answering with pressure. Nobody gets enough certainty. What remains is a bleak little sequence of ordinary logistics, a few photos, a route back, and the awful discovery that the exit was never guaranteed.

As heard by us

A daughter search through The Concentrics becomes a claustrophobic trap as symbols, silence, and a closing manhole take over.

A phone line opens with a polished welcome, then settles into something far less steady, and the piece lets that unease gather at its own pace.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for a missing-daughter call that turns into a sealed-in, oxygen-dropping nightmare.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Deca Tapes