Sixteen years ago a war that humans had been slowly losing for more than two thousand years ended in a place called Iowa. The victors unknowingly overcame seemingly insurmountable odds at the last possible moments and the losers in this titanic battle fled into the unassailable shadows from whence they had come, hiding behind mathematical equations so complex even they were unable to solve all of them. Sixteen years later humans struggle to rebuild from the ashes, plucking discovery upon discovery from the rubble, waiting fearfully in the darkness of space for the return of that which had almost consumed them utterly. One day, sixteen years later, a confluence of events brings humanity both to the brink of a destiny they were completely unaware of being possible and to annihilation. One day, a term almost without meaning to the seemingly vanquished enemy, fate would rise out of the blackness of space, out of a dimension where fate was as predictable as a linear equation, into another where almost nothing could be reliably predicted even with the most fastidious attention to mathematical detail. One day can be as short as a heartbeat or last forever.