Pandorum

Bower wakes from hypersleep in a locked chamber on the Elysium, a massive colony ship carrying humanity's survivors to a distant planet. He has no memory. He wakes his commanding officer, Payton, who also remembers nothing. The door to the rest of the ship is sealed; the reactor is failing. Bower crawls into the ventilation system to reach the reactor core.

What he finds beyond the chamber is a ship transformed. The corridors are dark, overgrown, and prowled by fast, feral humanoid creatures — the Hunters — who stalk anything that moves. Bower barely survives his first encounters, aided by Nadia, a fierce botanist living in the walls, and Manh, a soldier who fights in silence. Together they push toward the reactor.

Back in the chamber, Payton is not alone. A damaged survivor called Gallo has emerged — claiming to have been awake for years, watching. He speaks of pandorum: a deep-space psychosis that strips crew members of reason and turns them violent. He may have it. Or Payton may.

A long-term survivor named Leland, half-mad from isolation, fills in the gaps: the ship has been traveling far longer than anyone knew. People woke early from hypersleep over generations and had children. Those children adapted — evolved — into the Hunters, their humanity stripped away by centuries in the dark.

Bower reaches the reactor. The truth about Payton surfaces at the same time: Gallo is not a separate survivor. Gallo is Payton — a fractured identity born of pandorum, the original commanding officer who lost his mind long ago and has been cycling through woken crew members ever since, watching them break.

Bower shuts down the reactor. The ship, dark outside not because of deep space but because it sits submerged at the bottom of an ocean, begins to sink. The impact triggers the emergency cryo-pod release. Millions of sleeping colonists float upward through the water and break the surface of Tanis — their destination, reached long ago. Humanity survived. It just didn't know it yet.