M. Romanek, captain of the starfleet geology team, is left behind as his spaceship leaves uninhabited desert planet Ephestos without him. Romanek's oxygen levels are running low and hope is slowly leaving him. While trying to get in touch with the ship that left him behind he establishes contact, through a wormhole*, with 7-year-old Nele, who was playing hide and seek on earth. Romanek hopes to get rescued and Nele, unaware of it, will help him rediscover the beauty and wonder of being alive in a place as mysterious as the universe. *A wormhole or Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a hypothetical topological feature that would fundamentally be a shortcut connecting two separate points in spacetime.