The Alba region, known for its natural deposits of gold, silver and copper, is one of the oldest mining areas in Europe. The village of Geamăna, located in a valley, lies about seven kilometres from Roșia Poieni, the largest copper mine in Romania. The geological structure of the site made it suitable to use as a reservoir for chemical waste from the open-pit mine. In 1977, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered the evacuation of the area and its flooding with toxic waste, including large amounts of cyanide compounds used in ore processing. The area was transformed into a huge artificial lake that today covers more than 130 hectares. This contamination poses a serious threat to groundwater, surface waters and local ecosystems. Toxic substances released from the mine can eventually enter the soil and the food chain, turning Geamăna into a ticking ecological time bomb. Drawing on literary analogies to Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, the reservoir is treated here as an artificially created “organism” – an anthropogenic entity with unpredictable consequences for the ecosystem. Ordinary human laws lose their meaning in this context; this entity escapes simple understanding and seems to act without clear motivation, simply existing and profoundly reshaping its surroundings. Like Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, the lake is a product of human technology and ambition that, over time, becomes a source of danger and a foreign, not fully comprehensible being – one that slips beyond control systems and evokes fear and a sense of guilt. Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature debunks the romantic myth of pristine Nature as a pure, external backdrop to human life. Geamăna lake reveals this illusion: what appears to be a living, almost edenic landscape is a hyperobject of industrial waste, inextricably intertwined with us. An innocent “return to nature” is impossible; the lake is not “somewhere out there,” but a symptom of our rootedness in a world of people, machines, and toxins.