Ainsley Grace is a brilliant young astrophysicist at MIT who has always dreamed big. Her current passion, "Project Cosmic Company," will integrate strategic observatories around the globe to build the world's largest and most powerful telescope.
Things haven't come easy for Ainsley. Her mother, an equally brilliant young astrophysicist, died when Ainsley was just a child. Ainsley struggled to fi t in as the "brainiac" who started college at age sixteen, earning her Ph.D. before most people her age had even settled on a major. Everything seems to be falling into place when Ainsley teams up with her mother's former colleague at MIT to finish Project Cosmic Company, a project on which her mother had been working when she died.
Then the dream unravels.
Encouraged by her mother's former colleague, Ainsley takes a short-term opportunity to pay off her mountain of college debt by writing stock trading codes for a high-frequency trading firm on Wall Street. Her job is to make sure that her firm's supercomputers are faster than any others on Wall Street.
Because she is able to draw on the same algorithms she's been writing for Project Cosmic Company, it's a snap. And because astrophysicists are Wall Street's new whiz kids, it pays well. But there is a hidden price that comes with Ainsley's work. The world of high-frequency trading is "survival of the quickest," and the difference between making a billion and losing a billion dollars could be less than a nanosecond. With stakes this high, Ainsley finds herself caught in the middle of a secret and deadly battle for speed. When Ainsley is framed and indicted for stealing Wall Street trade secrets, her personal life, her career dreams, and even her groundbreaking research at MIT are turned upside down...and the terrible truth about people she trusted most is revealed.