From a galaxy so remote it is unknown to us, a light brighter than a billion suns is guided through the shaft of a wormhole, fading in intensity through the expanding cosmos, but not before some of it - however faintly - reaches earth. Within minutes, during one moonless night in 1996, a few thousand photons from this powerful light landed on the mirror of a telescope in New Mexico. A computer at the observatory registered the faint signature of light, but no one could have fathomed that it had triggered something that had been lying dormant in the desert of Chaco Canyon for 1200 years.

In the summer of 1996 two college students innocently stumble upon an otherworldly artifact while hiking in northern New Mexico near an ancient archeological site, called Chaco Canyon. Through a chain of mysterious events, this artifact ends up in the hands of the ACIO, an ultra-secret, unacknowledged department of the National Security Agency responsible for reverse-engineering recovered extraterrestrial technologies.

The artifact, which becomes known among ACIO operatives as the Compass, is quickly determined to be of extraterrestrial origin, and its purpose is eventually construed to be a homing device. This leads the ACIO to assume it is not an isolated artifact randomly discovered, but rather part of a larger configuration of artifacts - possibly leading to a spacecraft.