200 Billion Light Years from Home

Sixteen very diverse people from entirely different time zones simultaneously collapse in a coma and wake up in a featureless dome, that can make itself transparent when it wishes. They are on a highlights tour of the known universe, beyond the last days of planet Earth, beyond the Milky Way, heading, as we all are, for the end of the universe. And when they get there, they are going to stop it from happening.
Along the way they visit strange planets and places where, sometimes, one of their number is left behind, sometimes willingly, sometimes not; sometimes tragically, sometimes joyously. The group are an odd lot; amangst them a British TV personality; a French entrepreneur; a Canadian comedienne; a Congolese mass-murderer; an absconding American hedge fund manager; a Chinese surgeon; and an Australian fridge mechanic who is able to use his enthusiastic knowledge of Science Fiction to interpret for the others what they are seeing. Slowly it becomes plain that these people have been chosen with great care, and that somewhere along the line, each will find their true purpose-and with that, the very reason why human beings exist at all.
Driven by forces that lie far beyond the Laws of Physics and Quantum Mechanics, immersed in a universe where thought is in fact the most powerful force, their encounters with the sorts of beings that control such forces are presented to them in terms of the significant moments in great works of Science Fiction, thus providing them with a basis whereby their simple human minds can comprehend what they are experiencing. And more importantly, why they are experiencing it?