1:04 - The Starship Avalon is traveling through space from Earth towards a destination called Homestead II. The Avalon is in a state of complete autonomy, with the 258 crew members of the ship asleep in machines called hibernation pods, devices that are capable of temporarily shutting down a person's metabolic activity for a long period of time.
2:18 - The Avalon enters a barrage of meteors. The ship's autopilot turns on its shield to prevent any weak points from being penetrated, but one meteor gets through, striking the ship and causing a brief shut down. The Avalon is able to reboot, but something is wrong.
3:42 - One of the 5,000 hibernation pods belonging to passengers riding the Avalon wakes up the passenger inside. All hibernation pods are supposed to awake their inhabitants 4 months before the destination of Homestead II is reached. There are still 90 years to go on the Avalon's journey.
4:22 - James (Jim) Preston, a mechanical engineer and the passenger who was awoken early, is greeted by a Wake-up Hologram welcoming him as if he were 120 years in the future.
8:05 - Jim quickly realizes he is the only human currently awake on the ship, and he tries whatever he can to get help or return to his state of hibernation. He sends an interstellar message back to Earth (11:22), tampers with the machinery of his hibernation pod (15:54), and attempts to break into the crew pod room (16:50), an area of the Avalon that contains crew members but cannot be accessed without special authorization.
13:00 - None of these efforts bear fruit, and Jim quickly begins to lose hope. He stumbles into a part of the ship that was designed in the likeness of a bar, he finds a bartender who appears to be a person, but in reality is an android running on artificial intelligence. Still grasping on to any human connection, Jim speaks of his despair to the AI, named Arthur.
18:11 - Arthur advises that Jim should stop worrying about his dilemma and instead try to "live a little." Jim takes this advice, making the most of the luxurious benefits and various entertainment systems of the Avalon.
20:16 - None of these features can compare to human interaction; without that in his life, Jim becomes depressed and has suicidal thoughts. He nearly uses the technology provided to him by the Avalon to take his own life (24:06).
25:14 - But then, Jim meets Aurora Lane. Aurora is another passenger on the starship Avalon. She, like every other passenger, is also still in hibernation, but Jim is able to learn more about her by using the ship to access her passenger profile (25:47).
27:47 - A moral dilemma arises. By tampering with Aurora's hibernation pod in a similar way to how he tampered with his own, Jim could make it so that it also woke Aurora up early. He would no longer be alone on the Avalon, but he would also be subjecting an innocent person to live out the rest of their life on a ship.
29:18 - He battles with himself, begging himself not to do something so ethically wrong. But after a year passes, he can't fight it anymore. Using the resources on the Avalon provided to him, Jim wakes Aurora up (30:45), pretending that her hibernation pod also malfunctioned.
34:13 - Jim explains to Aurora the situation that they're in, how they can't access any of the maintenance parts of the ship due to firewall protection (34:28), and how they can't reactive their hibernation pods without special equipment that isn't available on the Avalon (35:30).
36:10 - Aurora needs to sleep and process this information. While she rests, Jim confides in Arthur (37:09). He tells him of Aurora's awakening, asking him to keep it a secret that he was the one to wake her. Arthur promises to keep it a secret for as long as it is a secret.
43:29 - A brief amount of time passes on the Avalon as Jim and Aurora get to know one another. They discuss the Homestead Company, the corporation responsible for providing interstellar transportation.
45:04 Aurora paid for a full price ticket and plans to purchase another one to return to Earth so that she'll become the first journalist to complete a round trip across space. Jim, meanwhile, is part of a trade program; he received a discount on his ticket across space, and will repay the debt at Homestead II by giving 20% of his total earnings to the Homestead Company (43:42).
45:27 - Aurora wanted to travel to share to the world the experiences of planet colonization. Jim wanted to travel so he can return to building and fixing things, a field that has disappeared from life back on Earth (42:57). The two bond over their stories and develop a close connection as a year passes.
1:00:15 - But on the day of Aurora's birthday, tragedy strikes. Jim still hasn't confessed to Aurora about the fact that he was responsible for her hibernation pod failure, and in a miscommunication with Arthur, the android believes that the secret has already been revealed (1:00:58). As a result of this, Arthur casually discusses with Aurora of Jim's excitement in first waking her up (1:01:23).
1:02:48 - Aurora finally finds out the truth. She pushes Jim away, feeling more trapped on the Avalon than ever before. Jim desperately tries to apologize, using the intercom of the ship to explain himself to her when she refuses to see him in person (1:05:44). But Aurora couldn't care less. In her eyes, he took her freedom and her life; that is something she cannot forgive.
1:07:16 - Meanwhile, more and more errors are occurring on the Avalon. The autopilot uses the system diagnostics of the ship to handle these failures, but then the system diagnostics fails (1:07:45). It stops displaying any problems that the ship is having, resulting in the autopilot doing nothing to solve such problems. Thus, the ship begins to devolve into a worser state.
1:09:13 - Seeking refuge in memories of her past, Aurora uses her holographic tablet to watch videos of her old friends celebrating her departure towards Homestead II. In one of the videos, her best friend speaks to her closely about taking chances in life and letting people in. Aurora contemplates this message but still holds resentment towards Jim.
1:11:49 - This causes another one of the hibernation pods to malfunction, this time one of the pods of a crew member on the Avalon. His name is Gus Mancuso, a deck chief. Upon waking up and meeting up with Jim and Aurora, he is given the rundown of their situation (1:12:24).
1:13:22 - Immediately, Gus believes that there is something wrong with the Avalon, and he takes the two passengers with him to the navigation room of the ship. It's here where he finds that while the ship's autopilot still seems to be on course (1:13:15), he can't find any data on the errors of the Avalon, due to the failure of the diagnostics system (1:13:29).
1:14:29 - To retrieve the data of each area on the ship, they will have to take devices called tech slates to various tech stations. They split up the work, with Gus going to the hibernation bay to examine the failed hibernation pods.
1:14:55 - Jim finishes up his work quickly, and so decides to head down to see Gus as he finishes up taking a look at each hibernation pod. Gus has determined the cause for each hibernation failure: for Jim, the clock processor on his hibernation pod burnt up; for Gus, his pod experienced multiple system failures, resulting in him currently not feeling well.
1:15:22 - For Aurora, it was the act of a human's tampering that caused her to awaken. Gus asks Jim how long he had been awake before he did what he did, finding sympathy for him but also understanding the pain he has inflicted onto Aurora as a result of the act he committed. When he speaks with Aurora on the subject, they have a similar conversation (1:16:28).
1:17:19 - Gus tries to get some rest in the hopes that it will help him recover, but he is put straight back to work when the gravity of the Avalon goes out momentarily, another malfunction amongst many that the Avalon has already recently experienced (1:18:12).
1:20:35 - Back in the navigation room, when Gus asks the system diagnostics computer to display the errors that the ship has undergone over time, he notices that a cascade failure is underway. According to a risk diagnostics, a "mission critical failure is imminent." (1:21:12) The three of them need to figure out what's wrong with the ship before it's too late.
1:21:48 - However, Gus's condition has gotten to incredibly poor levels. Aurora and Jim take him to the infirmary and place him on a machine called the Autodoc. The device analyzes Gus's current state and determines that he is suffering from progressive organ failure. Because of the malfunction of Gus's hibernation pod, his death his already underway. He needs a few moments to fully process this.
1:23:52 - The Avalon has now gotten to a point where it is completely falling apart. Jim and Aurora attempt to find Gus, and when they do, he is moments away from passing on. He gives the two his ID, so they can access any part of the ship and hopefully fix it (1:24:36). His final wish is that the two take care of each other, and then he closes his eyes for the final time.
1:26:20 - Jim and Aurora get to work, traveling to the main engineering sector of the Avalon to search for anything that may be broken. They get what they're looking for when they break into the power plant section of the sector; in a near death experience, the two of them discover that there is a hole in the ship, caused by the meteor strike 2 years ago (1:28:06).
1:28:32 - Following the path the meteor took when it penetrated the ship leads Jim and Aurora to the Avalon's reactor. It is here where they find that the meteor didn't just strike a hole in the ship, but it also destroyed the reactor control computer.
1:29:17 - Jim and Aurora are able to find a spare reactor control computer, and replace the broken computer with it. However, the reactor is still not getting cooled; there is one final problem, that being the outer vent at the outside of the ship being unresponsive (1:30:05).
1:30:16 - Jim decides that he needs to travel out there and open the vent manually, otherwise the Avalon is going to overheat and explode.
Spacesuits have been commonly used on the Avalon: Jim used one to travel out into space when he was still alone (21:07), and then used them with Aurora when their love was still blossoming (52:55). Now, he was going to use his suit to save the ship from destruction.
1:31:45 - He heads out into space, using a communication device (1:30:23) so that he can talk with Aurora as he makes his way to the vent tube. He is successful in opening it manually from the outside, but he has to stay right in front of the vent tube as Aurora pulls the lever to vent the reactor (1:33:44).
1:34:40 - Aurora refuses to do this at first, stating that if Jim were to die, she would also die. But Jim reminds her of the 5,000+ passengers still on the Avalon. They are innocent people, and don't deserve to have their lives taken from them. Aurora sobbingly pulls the lever at Jim's request. The reactor is successfully cooled, but the force from the heat escaping the ship sends Jim into space.
1:36:30 - Jim is still alive, but a hole has been punctured into his spacesuit. He is quickly losing oxygen. Aurora gets into a spacesuit herself and hurriedly plunges into space after him. She is able to recover his body and drag him to the Autodoc, but he is declared by the machine to be dead (1:39:30). Aurora, in a state of denial, refusing to allow Jim's death, demands the Autodoc to resuscitate him.
1:39:52 - The Autodoc does have the ability to do this, and thanks to Gus's ID, Aurora is able to get authoritative permission. She has the device perform every act related to resuscitation available, despite its recommendation otherwise (1:40:16). She watches it perform its operations, and Jim's lifeless body lay motionless; but then he breathes, and he is back. Aurora embraces him, a sign of her forgiveness.
1:42:17 - In the next few days, the two of them focus on repairing the Avalon. During this process, Jim discovers that the Autodoc has an option in command mode to turn off all of metabolic activity, making it similar to a hibernation pod (1:43:13). He offers this feature to Aurora, and with this a return to the life that she originally wanted before meeting him.
1:44:07 - Aurora knows that in using the Autodoc like a hibernation pod, Jim would be left alone, and she'd never see him again. She decides to stay with him on the Avalon, as he was the one in her life she chose to let in. The two of them live their lives in the Avalon together, and then time jumps 88 years into the future, five months before the ship is about to arrive at Homestead II (1:4634).
1:46:56 - The ship's crew are awoken, and are surprised to be greeted with greenery and life surrounding nearly the entirety of the grand concourse. With the cargo hold being full of animal and plant life (58:39), Aurora and Jim made sure that they lived their life together to the fullest. They may not have been part of the colonization of Homestead II, but they created a colony of their own, right on the Starship Avalon.