Dominion

Dr. Tom Woodward is the Director of NASA/AMES Research Center. When Woodward meets Chris Torrance at the University of Washington, he discovers that Chris has experienced an instantaneous ‘jump’ in space-time, combining a genetic anomaly with a rare catalyst in the pollen of an unusual flower.
Meanwhile, the genetic control mechanism is also connected to an incident at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, when a Russian technician ‘blinks out’ of the Universe for a moment, and the rip in the fabric of space-time is reflected on the other side of the world during an experiment with the National Synchrotron. The Russian FSB, monitoring developments in Geneva, also note the incident, rumored to be the creation of a microscopic singularity.
In Los Angeles, a Japanese American scientist who is involved with the BICEP2 cosmology experiments at the South Pole has published a paper theorizing a human, genetic link to gravitational waves and the elusive ‘graviton’. Shiratsu suspects that a plasma collider might be adaptable to manipulating graviton particles, thus accessing the folds in space-time. His paper comes to Woodward through a Canadian scientist connected to the dark matter experiment (DEAP-3600) deep underground near Sudbury, Canada.
As the ‘black’ project gets underway it is also militarized, and the team realize that any local singularity may connect to the supermassive black hole at the galactic center, and thus act as a gateway to other systems. With the burgeoning list of earth-like exoplanets growing out of the Kepler mission, the team capitalize on the 2015 discovery of a new planet in Alpha-Centauri, only 4.4 light years distant. Using the ESO’s VLT observatory in Chile they confirm the presence of both continents and an atmosphere on the new planet, christened Nova Prime One. Together the team and the American military construct an FTL system underground at Brookhaven and plan a jump to Alpha Centauri.