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.

An exploratory team from the ACIO is dispatched to the discovery site of the Compass artifact where it is confirmed that the Compass is a homing device, leading the team to an intricately designed structure carved deep inside a canyon wall. A helix-shaped corridor spirals up through the rock with 23 chambers jutting out at ten-meter intervals. This amazing discovery is initially thought to be an extraterrestrial time capsule left behind by an alien race. Each chamber contains an enigmatic wall painting and an impenetrable technology artifact. In the uppermost chamber, the scientists uncover an optical disc presumably holding the information about the site's creators and their purpose.