In the year 2570, a sleeper will wake .
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.In the mid-21st century, the Kernel, a strange object on a five-hundred-year-orbit, is detected coming from high above the plane of the solar system.
Could it be an alien artefact? In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway.
Nothing more is heard of him.
But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns .
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.By 2570 Earth is transformed.
A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps.
It is not an age for expansion;
there are only small science bases beyond the Earth.
But this is a world you would want to live in: a Star Trek without the stars.After 500 years the Kernel returns, and a descendant of Stoney, who Malenfant will call Emma II, mounts a mission to see what became of Malenfant.
She finds him still alive, cryo-preserved .
.
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His culture-shock encounter with a conservative future is entertaining .
.
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But the Kernel itself turns out to be attached to a kind of wormhole, through which Malenfant and Emma II, exploring further, plummet back in time, across five billion years .
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