Jake's wife, Stella, has been missing for eight years. He raises his son, Josh, alone. Though declared legally dead, Stella's disappearance remains a painful mystery that offers Jake a dim ray of hope; he takes that painful hope and turns it into an obsession to reach the stars.
Our solar system has been fully explored and found to be lifeless but for Earth. Jake works at Space Cruiser Inc., where they have refined the fringe-matrix-capacitor technology and made instantaneous space travel a reality. Humankind can now leave the cradle of our solar system and explore distant stars.
Jake and his special crew will be the first to pilot the prototype speedglobe beyond our solar system to a planet three parsecs away, a planet especially picked for its likelihood of harboring life.
This epochal voyage leads to an alien encounter unlike anything ever imagined before, a bizarre dialogue that reaches into the most intimate levels of each crew member's life.