It is 2061 and seventy-five years after its last appearance in 1986 became the astronomical flop of the century, Halley’s Comet is right on schedule to reappear. Not only will Halley now have an impact, but that impact will be a devastating collision with the planet sure to wipe out humanity.
At a New Mexican launch site, three state-of-the-art luxury interstellar spaceships were designed by the Pleiades Corp. to accord with their company's mission statement to reimagine the concept of interstellar travel as luxury living among the stars reserved for the adventurous members of the elite. The ships are massive and stand silently waiting for those who have been called into service to make an exodus from earth to a far-away destination named after a legendary figure in astronomy, a planet called Sagan. The chosen ones are comprised of top scientists in their fields, culled from many different disciplines who have been allowed to bring their children along.
The Peñas are a husband and wife team bringing doctorate educations in botany and geology aboard as well as their daughter Petra and her younger brother Javier. Sagan was chosen because it is the nearest planet deemed enough like Earth to potentially sustain the survival of the human species. The only problem is that it is located so far away that the trip will require four hundred years, meaning the pilgrim scientists will require a state of suspended animation in order to survive the journey with their knowledge and capacities intact.
Part of this process of extended induced unconsciousness is a program referred to as Downloadable Cognizance through which children receive a subconscious education intended for them to become experts in scientific disciplines upon arrival and awakening from a deep sleep. Each of the kids is allowed to choose an elective course as well and Petra chooses one which will result in the download of centuries worth of folklore, myths, legends, and other stories passed down through generations.
During their inactive state, generational human caretakers who remain awake known as Monitors are charged with making sure nothing goes wrong with the process of maintaining those who remain asleep. Even before the mission begins, back on earth Petra’s parents learn of a movement calling itself the Collective propagating a future for humanity based on the idea of universal unanimity of thought, insisting it is the only possible way for humanity 2.0 to avoid the kind of conflict which produces war.
An evolutionary revolution takes place which results in the ship being overtaken by a group known as the Collective. Over the course of time, the Collective slowly begins to take control of the ships and they introduce into the Downloadable Cognizance program the ability to purge all memories of the imperfections of human history from the minds of the sleeping. As a failsafe, should his purging of memories fail, the sleeper so affected will be purged. Those who have remained suspended in unconsciousness then receive an education for the future consisting primarily of the message that their entire mission is not devoted only to the goal of serving the Collective.
Not quite four hundred years later, arrival at planet Sagan finally is accomplished. The sleeping passengers awaken from their state of slumber with no memories of the past and equipped only with the knowledge that their purpose is to serve the Collective. There is just one chink in the armor of this near-perfectly executed plan. The process of purging has failed in the case of Petra. She awakens from the induced sleep as the one singles passenger who remembers Earth's history and, as a result of her elective, remembers a library’s worth of stories about what it meant to be human.
Those fellow children who were asleep alongside Petra know only what the Collective has allowed them to know and so the stories that Petra proceeds to tell them begin as entertainment, but eventually become the stimulus for slow recollection of that which has been forgotten, but not entirely erased from their memories. At the same time that Petra is sharing her memories with her friends, she is also forced to maintain her secret from the Collective.
Sagan turns out to be less than a perfect mirror of Earth and presents dangers the Collective deems potentially worthy of rejecting the new planet as a worthy substitute on which to build a perfect society. The Collective in their aim for a perfect utopian world devoid of weakness are therefore willing to sacrifice whoever must be sacrificed in order to learn enough about the extent of its imperfections of Sagan that will allow a rational conclusion to be made. The conflict thus becomes a showdown between mindless devotion to a unified goal of perfectability and the adaptability of the creative mind to survive imperfection.
In order to defeat the power of the single-minded goal pursued by a collective of like-minded individuals, the resistance to the Collective which has grown up around Petra’s memories and stories about Earth must exploit its one advantage: the imagination to consider a world that isn’t perfect still being worth calling home. And so, the small group devises a plan that the Collective held in the grip of a logical group-think match: imagining that Sagan has the potential to be the new Earth they are looking for. As Petra looks around at the colors of Sagan that are not quite the colors of earth and sees her small cadre of story-loving rebel friends lying beneath a sky filled with more stars than anyone on Earth had ever even imagined, the sound of the Pleiades booster kicking in recall the sound they had last heard nearly four-hundred years earlier. In an instant, the Collective disappears into hyperspace, and Petra wonders if they will ever come back or keep going until they finally find a planet that meets their Goldilocks requirement of being “just right” for colonization of their perfect utopian society.
