Nicole is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking San Francisco transplant drifting between tedious jobs and prolonged states of isolation.  Over the course of a weekend, she registers the disappearance of the Andromeda Galaxy from the night sky, and becomes convinced that the Big Rip - a theoretical event in which the universe's expansion accelerates to the point that all matter is torn apart at the molecular level - will occur in approximately two weeks.   The weight of this knowledge forces Nicole to examine the consequences of sharing it with others, and she is ultimately driven to contact Monica, a young physics professor at Berkeley who may also be aware of the extinction pending in the cosmos.