"These five self-contained worlds bearing the hopes for our future as a species are poised on the edge of the greatest adventure humanity has yet conceived. Small Earth clones with the seeds of new beginnings will challenge the imagination of even the most fundamental minds for centuries to come. You are history!"

As the head of Odyssey Central bids farewell, five separate colonies brave a decades-long journey into deep space. Soon separated by light-years, each crew faces challenges posed not just by the riggers of space but by connections made before the Day of Leaving. One crewmember's pre-flight effort to improve the biorecycling systems mutates into a nightmare, while another-driven by revenge-corrupts the very heart of the artificial intelligence platform their lives depend on. Isolated in the harshest of environments, the Chang, the Hawking, the Einstein, the Newton, and the Kepler each find themselves in a deadly race against time.