*grin*

"There's no such thing as pessimists, only realists."

"That's a very pessimistic answer!"

*facepalm*

great story, but, stop the green stuff. it's like in the ttp. it got annoying cus it doesn't apply at all to the story.

I think you ought to tone down the description in the first paragraph. It's all very, very unnecessary, you could easily convey the same information in a much better way.

Factual errors:

'This event, which will occur in around 3 billion years, will eventually lead to the destruction of the universe as we now know it.’

No it won't. One small star destroy a whole universe while going through a cycle all stars eventually do? I don't know if it's exactly 3 billion-it's either far less or far more-but the sun /will/ expand into a red giant eventually, which would just mean that humans will have to hightail it out of there before it becomes uninhabitable. Stars don't exactly expire overnight. Again, I'm not sure of the exact time, but it won't be that fast. We'd probably go hang out on Mars or one of Jupiter's moons and enjoy artificial water, light, air and energy. :P

'He just smiled at her. “Many hours on the computer, hacking numerous data bases and spending extensive hours doing calculations.”'

Uhm. I'm not exactly sure when the theory about the sun's expansion surfaced, but when it did, it wasn't exactly kept secret. All Artemis would need to do is go Google it.

Nitpicking aside...

Great characterization, pretty damn good writing...if it wasn't quite so blatant, I'd love it. *thumbs up*

D