Ranna Kikken creates the Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but its first 2028 conference is ruined when ex-astronaut Joe Commer time-travels from 2036 to lecture Ranna's nonprofit ladies on the coming breakdown of the solar system and an unavoidable war with a psychotic Alpha Centaurian Empire. Tormented by his role in dropping the superbomb that ended the Final War but rendered Earth uninhabitable, Joe has quit the Space Force, much to the disgust of his older brother Jack, Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force. Meanwhile, feckless young Urside Charmouth is horrified by the revelations from the future, fearing that he's harmed the timeline with his own drug-like time travel experiments.