Who would have thought eight months ago that I would be sitting in a cave a hundred light years from Earth waiting for an alien to kill me? Fifteen-year-old Ryder faces some of the common challenges of any young man his age: isolation, sibling rivalry, first love, and bullying. But life takes a sudden change when he is invited, along with his sister and five classmates to spend a year abroad.

They didn’t read the contract. Instead of going to Europe on Earth, Ryder and his friends are conscripted to Europe in Demeter, an asteroid over a hundred light years from Earth.

The good news is that Ryder gets closer to his classmate Cynthia Flores and to develop his talent at gaming with systems that deal with real life scenarios including saving Demeter itself from invasion. The bad news is that his reckless younger sister has a talent for mischief and disaster. Ryder realizes that his only real problem is figuring out how not to get killed by aliens.