The issue starts in the distant past where the monolith instructs a hunter on how to craft a spear and then shifts to the future where two astronauts discover an alien ruin. One of the astronauts is killed by a creature, but the other, Woodrow Decker, is transported into a pastoral countryside by the monolith. Here he rapidly ages until he dies and is converted by the monolith into an embryo-type creature referred to as a ''new seed'' to explore the galaxy.