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In today's world, Braxton Thorpe suffers from incurable cancer and arranges for his head to be cryogenically preserved upon his death--an Icicle. He awakens a century later as an electronic upload--A Tensor Matrix.
Working with colleagues, he moves out into the Solar System where he discovers another electronic entity, the Oort, and learns about an existential threat to thr Solar System. Aliens who attacked the Solar System in the distant past are returning to do it again. Working with the Oort and cooperating nations of Earth through the Oort Federation, Thorpe and his allies thwart the aliens' scheme.
With the alien invasion behind them, Thorpe and his colleagues govern the Solar System through the Oort Federation. Its various players are Thorpe's Phoenix, his colleagues' Ogden Enterprises, and their collective nemesis, Isidor Orlov and his Udachny Enterprises. Thorpe and Orlov follow parallel paths to FTL drives using different technologies. Both groups travel to the alien star system where Thorpe allies with the aliens, and together they overcome Orlov. Thorpe and the aliens work together to open the galaxy.
Thorpe, with the participation of the Oort and the aliens, prepares to journey outside the galaxy in the Starship Andromeda, searching for a point in the universe that his scientists suspect is an intersection of our universe with a parallel universe.