SCIENCE FICTION

One Pilot Awake

By Crash Landry

The easiest job in the solar system has one rule: stay high.

Larry Voight is a long-haul freight pilot, which means that twice every five months he wakes up, sits in the left seat, rests his hand near a red button he has never pressed, and watches the docking arm come in the way it always does. The rest of the time he is exactly where the System Transport Authority wants him: in the slow warm nothing of the regimen every pilot takes, because a hundred and thirty years ago somebody worked out that pilots who are high do not care how big space is.

Larry did not become a pilot in spite of the drugs. He became a pilot for them.

Then, one morning at Tycho Orbital, he doses early, gets his boots on, and leaves his ration case in a locker. He is twenty-seven hours into a five-month transit to Ceres before he notices. There is no turning around. There is no spare. And the rest pod that was supposed to carry him through the worst of it will not open without the very thing he left behind.

He is going to have to do this one awake.

One Pilot Awake is the story of what a man sees when he finally starts looking. Larry does not go mad, the way the training slides promised. Instead he counts days on the galley wall. He measures the sun with a docking camera. He reads the nine-hundred-page manual nobody reads, and finds a paragraph in an appendix that changes what the red button is for. He writes to a twelve-year-old daughter he has not spoken to in three years. And slowly, with a co-pilot who is keeping a secret of her own and a kind man on Ceres who never once tells a lie, he begins to understand that the ship is not on the route the clock says it is, that a freighter has six frames on its spine the manual calls medical transit capacity, and that the pilots who noticed before him never docked again.

Wry, claustrophobic, and quietly devastating, One Pilot Awake is science fiction about addiction, automation, bureaucracy, and the dangerous act of paying attention. It is a novel for readers who like their spaceships lived-in, their protagonists reluctant, and their conspiracies made not of villains but of procedures and people who chose not to look.

Some things you can only see sober. Some of them are looking back.

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