Riley 3.0

Journey to the end

By: M C Neuffer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Riley 3.0: Journey to the End
Somewhere in the final era of the universe, a twelve-year-old girl puts her hand through an alien artifact and feels nothing — which means everything.

Darby Daniels lives at the edge of what remains. Two stars. One solar system. A civilization that knows the Big Rip is coming and keeps exploring anyway. Her uncle Max charts the outer dark from the bridge of an exploration ship. Her mother studies the crystals of long-dead thinking trees. And from somewhere outside time, two ancient intelligences named Riley and Michael watch it all unfold — arguing, playing virtual games, and waiting for the right person to arrive.
Darby is that person.

What follows spans her entire life: from a gifted, sharp-tongued cadet at a space flight academy to a combat pilot fighting a civil war with abilities she can barely explain to the generals — or herself. She can step sideways through time. She can heal. She can end a battle without firing a shot. And she's been chosen to carry something through to the other side of the universe's final collapse.

Riley 3.0 is the culmination of a trilogy that began with one woman gaining alien technology in a New York City apartment and ends fourteen billion years later with the birth of a new cosmos. It also includes Trespass, a standalone short story — a first-contact thriller set in the present day, where an alien civilization arrives with terms of surrender and a fondness for human entertainment.

The end, it turns out, is also a beginning.
Riley Trilogy — Book 3. Can be read as a standalone