It's been almost 500 years since humanity first ventured into space, hopeful and eager to explore, to discover, to find alien civilizations and friends.

There was just one problem.

After exploring 22 star systems, we had found no other life. Not no other intelligent life, but no other life at all. Period. Eventually exploration just... stopped, because humans had more than enough room and not near enough hope.

And then one day there was a signal, one no one chose to believe was real. No one except one hopeful, sarcastic and professionally drunken 487 year old ex-spacer. He, his 42 year old girlfriend, and a group of friends too young to have given up on that hope, set out to steal a mothballed spaceship and go find the source.

Humor, intrigue, romance, inter-species warfare, and one hundred and twenty five thousand, three hundred and fourteen pair of shoes ensue.

And the universe, for humans, will change forever.