With a Side of Universal Destruction

Bad luck happens to Will Strooter when he's away from his goldfish. And today he wakes to find his pet belly up. Now minus his aquatic talisman, he predicts a whirlwind of trouble at the office. Just as expected, a dark cloud of misfortune surrounds him when he finds himself at the center of a confounding glitch and bizarre happenstance that could cause him to lose his job. His parade of bad luck continues when he barely evades a hit squad in a grocery store parking lot and is rescued in the nick of time. By aliens. Will is whisked off into space aboard a clunky freighter, with his former babysitter/no-nonsense intergalactic warrior concerned about a cosmic artifact embedded in Will's puny mortal frame. This is news to him, but it turns out several alien races are convinced the Earthling has an ancient anomaly tucked away in his psyche that, if extracted, could either bring unlimited universal power . . . or end all of time and space. Strooter does what any hunted human alone in the galaxy would do to survive: he surrounds himself with a ragtag band of misfits and hopes for the best. Along the way, he must avoid destroying a prison planet, escape from a death cult, and do his best not to anger a powerful god whose disciples are sentient asteroids. Oh, and save all of reality. That goes without saying, of course.