Above, us, in the dark shadows of the outer solar system, there is the shape of something unknown, something unspeakable. It waits, it bides its time, and as the days of summer grow longer, so does its voice grow louder.<br><br>On the quiet island of Sarah Ann in the Pacific Ocean, home of the renowned Firmament Foundation, awkward teenager Eirian Calohan has come in search of the mystery of their father's recent demise. Instead, they are confronted with the stark contrast between languid life on the tiny island and an unspeakable cosmic horror.<br><br>Together with their new friends, they set out to unravel the truth surrounding the death of their father and to also uncover just what it is that the Foundation has reached out to in the dark eternal night of the distant void.

All Cats Are Beautiful

They said the first homunculi, the type they had first developed for sending into space, was a weird hairless cat-thing, something between one of those ugly Sphynx cats and a pig, stocky and solid. Meow, they had been called, though they didn’t know if there were any living still. Whatever the case, they were preserved in the DNA sequences of all subsequent homunculi, so they kind of were alive still, Eirian reflected, but they had never been especially fond of the idea of the things despite having never seen one in the flesh.


The second wave, the ones developed after it was obvious that no one was going to go into space like the Firmament Foundation wanted, were made as beasts of burden mostly, workers that could be held partly within the memories of a tiny, wafer-thin matter sequencers that ended up resembling playing cards as the technology was refined, and partly within the giant computers the Firmament Foundation owned.


Chapter 4