In the far future, a roving black hole pulled the Earth away from the sun, causing the planet to freeze over. There is only one family left alive, who go out in spacesuits to collect frozen air and water from the vacuum that is our atmosphere and bring it into their blanket fort of an apartment where they live. The son, on an oxygen collection run, thinks he sees the face of a beautiful young woman, but it is only a light reflecting through a window in the apartment building opposite their own. His parents and younger sister are initially skeptical, but when they see he is serious his mother freaks out thinking a monster is there to attack them and his father decides to go out with his son and check. Though they see nothing, they can't shake the feeling that they are being watched.

Back inside, the son asks his father to tell them all the story of the Earth before the black hole stole it away, to take everyone's mind off the unexplainable lights outside. He tells a long story about how the Cold War ended and natural disasters began as the planet was jerked around. People froze in their beds and chairs, the climate changed so quickly. The boy considers that people may have become unfrozen and that was what he saw in the other building, becoming icy and horrible monsters in the process.

Suddenly, the blankets around them shift and in walks the young woman the boy had seen outside, now standing with two other men. They are other survivors who live with a group of other people using a nearby power plant and old nuclear bombs as fuel to keep them warm. When they offer to take everyone with them back, the boy's parents get cagey and ask to think about it. It's a big move for them to live in a large city with lots of strangers, but the hope they feel at that possibility makes up their mind for them. They ultimately decide to go.