In the beginning, GOD created the Earth—a profound statement unless you know that by "GOD," I mean the General Observable Dimension corporation, and by "Earth," I refer to their immensely profitable simulation known as human existence. Among GOD's lesser-known creations is Richard, a nobody to everyone on Earth except his beloved wife and children. After his sudden demise, Richard finds himself in a transformed version of Hell—an unlikely utopia built upon a foundation of smothered fire and brimstone by its inhabitants.

Ben, Chloe, Mark, and the others are off on another adventure, back where they had just stopped one interplanetary war. Now, they are searching for the mystery ship. What could it be up to? They rescue two new beings, but things go awry as their planet doesn't even want them back. Then they discover some more refugees, only some are not what they claim to be, and they land in the middle of another war, all while planning a wedding between Meera and Dylan. After that, the ship finds a derelict that looks like it came out of a 1950s campy movie, only one that someone shot full of holes.

Prince, a charismatic (and lackluster) real-estate agent with a complicated past, gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make it to the literal top of the business—fly an advanced spaceship known as “The Kepler” to an alien planet, where he will resume his career as an intergalactic realtor—selling luxury homes to the ultra-rich and live like the king he always knew he was. But when the plan falls short, and Prince discovers the dark forces manipulating his life on Matlitodus, he finds himself in the middle of an intergalactic scheme.

A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood. That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.