Stella Nemo, the most appealing sort of sophisticated naif, plunges her paper ship, the Nautilus, into deepest, blackest space, crossing into the fraught domains of other planets and other minds, beaming requests for information to Ada Byron (a clone and psychic information scientist), and dreaming of the renaissance poet Thomas Wyatt (who exists as data). Stella's mission: to attempt to think and to write without being disturbed, derailed or killed.