It begins innocently enough . A young doctorate student on board a research station in orbit around a stabilized black hole used for interstellar travel is scanning the area to collect data on subatomic particles for his thesis project. His scans keep returning results for particles which supposedly cannot exist. Frustrated, he turns the program over to the station’s A.I., a being known as a machine sapient, interfaced with the facility at a quantum level.

Unfortunately for everyone on board, this triggers a chain reaction within the A.I. Faced with a problem, a possibility, that it can’t seem to unravel it begins to divert power from all over the station, slowly creeping into every last system in an effort to find enough computing space to use to solve these impossible equations. The station’s administrators have no choice but to evacuate all personnel and then destroy the A.I. in order to keep its takeover from spreading beyond the station’s systems back to Earth.

Helice Maki, a member of the team that created the machine sapient, manages to download the data from the incident before she evacuates. She takes the information back to Earth to her employer Minerva, the corporation that owned and operated the station. What she discovers is that the results the doctorate student’s program produced were not a mistake. He had unknowingly uncovered the existence of another universe alongside our own. The station’s A.I. essentially went mad trying to understand this.

Titus Quinn, on the other hand, understands it all too well. He already knows this other place exists. He’s been there before. And it ruined his life.

Two years prior to the events on the station Titus used to work for Minerva piloting ships through the black holes that the corporation maintains. He used to have a wife and daughter. Then, during a routine run, the black hole destabilized and the ship Titus was piloting began to break apart. But Titus and his family did not find themselves sucked out into the crushing vacuum of space. Instead, they awoke to discover that they had been transported into the Universe Entire.

Months later, Titus turns up back in this conventional universe on a distant planet well off of the shipping routes. A search-and-rescue team sent by Minerva finds him ranting incoherently about another dimension and repeating frantically that his wife and daughter are still trapped in this other place.

Anxious to make sure that news of this accident or Titus’ story doesn’t become known to the public and thus spark off a panic that would lead to an interruption in the flow of business, Minerva extends him an enormous payoff in exchange for his silence. Humiliated and bitter, Titus now lives alone in a cabin in the woods on the coast of Oregon. He has almost convinced himself that he imagined the whole incident, that his wife and daughter actually died when the ship was destroyed and he alone somehow survived.

However, now seizing upon the possibility of expanding their reach through inter-dimensional travel, Titus’ former employers come calling to force him to act as their emissary to this new realm. Helice Maki, appointed to oversee the project, personally makes the threat to Titus that she will ruin the lives of his brother and his brother’s family if he refuses to comply. Titus is left with no choice.

He is taken to a deep space industrial platform belonging to Minerva. There, a portal has been prepared and a team is already at work scanning the area for the concentration of particles indicating a spot where the fabric between the universes is thin. Titus is placed inside of a special rig that will push him through the portal when a breach is located. The wait is not long and so, without any fanfare, Titus finds himself back once more in the Universe Entire.

A wild, quite possibly infinite place, the Entire was discovered and made habitable by the brutal, insect-like Tarig who hold sway over the dozens of sentient species that now populate it. Among these races is the Chalin, a human-analogue civilization based on feudal Chinese culture. It is with the Chalin that Titus must cast his lot and try to learn the fate of his family that was left behind, all the while hoping to avoid detection by the Tarig.

The first volume in a planned series called The Entire and the Rose, Bright of the Sky is an exciting take on the parallel universe theme. Titus Quinn is a tragic, yet no less intriguing central character. For most of the story he is nearly helpless, knowing that at any moment anyone could decide to turn him in to the Tarig. But slowly he comes to realize that he may truly have an opportunity to gain power and that somewhere in the Entire may lay the means to turn the tables on the ones who threatened him and sent him there in the first place.