Axiom's End: 1 (Noumena)

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Obelus overpowers and severely wounds both Cora and the Genome before they are transported away by Ampersand. Following a meteor strike not far from where they live, Cora's family is abducted by government agents while Cora flees from a monstrous alien creature that broke into their house at night. The description for Axiom's End makes the story sound like it's about truth, that it'll ask questions of whether or not the public has the right to know everything the government knows. She turned to face forward, watching the tall buildings of downtown LA sprouting up like distant spires in the haze, and tried to put thoughts of The Broken Seal and stalkers from her mind.

Government Conspiracy: The United States government has been covering up proof of extraterrestrial life for quite a while when the story begins. Like the fan belt on the verge of snapping, The Broken Seal was a time bomb that would inevitably blow up in their faces.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Oh, the outrage in the hacktivist community that she had dared insinuate that their god-king was fallible. And so, here they were, crawling under the 105, Demi sacrificing her own punctuality for her negligent daughter’s. Let's just say that when it hit me what had happened, which was confirmed a few pages later, I had to sit back and give thanks Ellis was unafraid to explore the softer sides of hard sci-fi. The fan belt was just the last in a long line of events that only tightened the spiral of powerlessness that was coming to define her existence, and by this point, she was getting used to it.

Ampersand believes that they'll sterilize Earth rather than let humanity expose this axiom as false.

Until an asteroid strikes down near Los Angeles in the exact same spot that an earlier asteroid which caused the conspiracy to begin with. Polite Villains, Rude Heroes: Obelus has his final confrontation with Ampersand in English, claiming it would be rude to speak before Cora in indecipherable Pequod-phonemic; Ampersand, who would rather insulate Cora from the bloodier history and politics of his species, stubbornly sticks to the latter. Title Drop: Ampersand explains that the amygdalines know of three spacefaring civilizations, but they're all descended from the same common ancestor.