The All-knowing Eye and an alien named Meeker travel the cosmos harvesting stars. They discover a strange ancient artifact containing a genetic code that the All-knowing Eye recreates. The code makes a human woman named Beth, the last of her kind five million years after the world's end. She realizes her wife is long dead and tells Meeker and the All-knowing Eye that she has a virus that killed her son before she died. The All-Knowing Eye remakes another Beth who also dies. The All-knowing Eye wants to know Beth's message from Sloan, who believed it would change the future. Another Beth is created and has changed her story, then dies from the virus. The Beths continue to die in pain, which is off-putting to Meeker but is explained by the All-Knowing Eye as joy. The Eye continues to try to fix Beth's genetic code to hear her message before she dies, resulting in the death of trillions of Beths. The All-Knowing Eye recreates Beth's memories and sees the moment when Sloan reveals that she is encoding Beth into a crystal to be reconstructed once her illness is cured. The All-Knowing Eye refuses to believe Beth's memory is accurate, but Meeker tells the All-Knowing Eye they can no longer watch the many more experiments done on Beth and her suffering. So the All-Knowing Eye gets rid of Meeker. Meeker meets Beth in death, where they have been absorbed into The All-Knowing Eye's mind. Beth reveals the All-Knowing Eye has been devouring civilizations and won a galactic war intended to stop it. The Beths were a ploy designed to destroy the All-Knowing Eye and are springing up in corners of its mind waiting to destroy it. The Beths offer Meeker sanctuary if he agrees to help because he is the first Meeker ever to disobey the All-Knowing Eye. Meeker asks to hear Beth's stories.