Helena is a young woman who has spent her entire life in deep space, born en route to a distant colony and left alone when a malfunction in her craft made it impossible for both her and her parents to arrive safely forcing her parents to turn back and leave Helena to continue her journey to a better life alone. It's a lonely but simple life until her craft rendezvous with an engineer sent to fix the fault and it turns out everything has been a lie, nothing but an extended social experiment. And Helena has been on earth the entire time.