The first time anyone heard the sentence, "The meationatic of Lucoma is the base of Karbotics," they laughed. Linguists dismissed it as nonsense. Scientists believed it was the result of a failed machine translation. Historians assumed it belonged to a forgotten language. Even the most advanced artificial intelligences on Earth classified the phrase as "meaningless." Yet no one knew that these eight strange words were the key to a mystery older than humanity itself.   It all began in the year 2479, when Earth had become a member of the Celestial Alliance, an organization of more than three thousand intelligent