In the hundred and twenty-fifth year of his secondary body, Vaurn Vayren moved through the silence, carrying the charge the Congruence had laid on him. AC+79 3888 lay on his course. Logged in humanity's star atlases as "an ordinary red dwarf": faint, distant, a cosmic bloodstain no telescope had ever cared to look at twice. The star that Voyager, in forty thousand years, would graze in its blind passage and leave behind. The fates of the Veyr and humankind were drawing quietly toward the same point in that pale light.

QNOMA is a dark work of science fiction that inverts the idea of first contact, an inquiry into consciousness, identity, science, and what it means to be human.

Because sometimes the most dangerous thing that can happen to a civilization is not to be heard, but to be understood.