A stand-alone novelWhere have all the stars gone?Living ten billion years in the future, twelve-year-old Darby has plans to follow in the footsteps of her explorer uncle Max and her lost father, to see the universe, or what's left of it. She uses her unique talents to clear her path. Spaceships, AIs, and a once human friend are her tools. Twenty years later, her final destiny is not what she or anyone else could have expected.CHAPTER 1Uncle Max says, even at twice the speed of light you can't outrun your past or your future. Mom says not to listen to him. We're the last, but everyone says the final thing is a long way off. Max isn't so sure. He told me he's looking into it.On my last birthday, I was twelve; the universe was fourteen or thirty-two billion, depending on who you listen to. If it's thirty-two, it's lasted about two billion more than it should have, after the discovery, give or take a few hundred million years, I guess. While it will probably go on forever, nothing living or moving will last; the big stretch will see to that. Physicists say that the apparent time extension is because everything has slowed down or sped up, or there's more energy or less than they thought, long ago. In other words, they don't know spit about it. Mom doesn't like it when I spit. She says it's unladylike.Anyway, it really doesn't matter to me today. We're going on a field trip to the only star we can see from our system. They say it's the only other one in our universe. I don't believe them. We haven't looked far enough, yet. This trip is a rite of passage; it lets the youngsters see, firsthand, that there's more in the out-there than we can see from home. When you get older, that becomes important for some reason. None of us care. For most, this is their first trip off-planet, out of our planetary system. I've been to all three of our moons, but that doesn't count. We do have other things hanging in the sky, like our three moons and other planets. I've forgotten some of their names. We learned those last year, but after the test, my brain didn't see fit to keep that information organized for easy retrieval. If someone started listing them, I think I could spot it if they added one or two wrong names or left one or two out. There's eleven.When we get to the only other star, Horizon, we'll be able to look back at ours. I've seen pictures from there; our sun is just a tiny point of light in the big black. Two points of light rotating around a common center. Horizon has only one planet, which is strange. At least it's not all hot and gushy like our planetary neighbor, Johnna, or a huge gassy one like Veeder. We'll land and be able to walk around. I wonder who named those planets; what were they thinking? I could look it up, but I don't care that much. Not only does Horizon have only one planet, but there's no asteroid belt or comets or any other hunks of rock or ice-volatiles zipping around it. That's been a complete mystery since we got here, around twelve thousand years ago.Our last home was set to be engulfed in its enlarging sun, so we left. Well, not right away, it took a few thousand years to locate this system. They weren't even sure if any others still existed-at least any we could get to. If they hadn't found this one, I wouldn't have been born.
