In 2088 Earth decides to send out twelve deep space missions. Reggie Straifer proposes that they visit an anomalous star that appears to have some kind of shell blocking the light emitting from it. When his proposal is accepted and becomes one of the twelve missions he chooses the name Noumenon, a posited object or event that exists without sense or perception. Nine ships, populated by genetic clones, travel for two hundred years to get to the star while back on Earth two thousand years pass by. The story is told in first person vignettes at crucial timepoints.