shaker_e | M Singh's Long-haul Space Trucking Adventures 1

"Starship pilot who HATES this part" - Make Up a Starship Pilot, Cohost, 2024

By law, all pilots had to have their consciousness imprinted into a digital backup. Ostensibly, this was to recover data from after an accident. But the reality of the situation was that it was necessary so they could resume piloting the ship as quickly as possible after the ship passed survivable rates of acceleration approaching light speed. All of the other unconcious crew members and passengers would simply die instantly and then slowly be rebuilt in the resurrection pods. But someone had to be conscious to make certain commands which legally couldn't be handled by the ship AI, even the advanced 'true' intelligences.

So the pilot stays awake. And dies. And reawakens about .65 seconds later. This is why pilots make the (alleged) big money vs navigators and other command staff. Not because they have unique skills, but as a minor compensation for having to endure this - sometimes several times in a trip.

M Singh has been a working pilot for four years now - closer to thirty years of time back home, thanks to time debts from near light travel. And in his four years he has gone through eightyseven jumps. And he was sure, so sure at the beginning, that it would get better after a while, that he would get used to it.

He has not.

This is pilot M Singh of the vessel Long Stepper. Control, I have reached safe transition distance. Is my departure vector clear?

All clear, Long Stepper. The road is all yours. Safe journey.

As he finished the final checks, his hands began to tremble, and the monitors in his combination resurrection/piloting module began to chirp alarms as his pulse spiked and his blood pressure dropped.

Long Stepper, beginning transition. In 3. 2. 1.

He took a shuddering breath, and gave the system the command through his uplink. The massive fusion engines flared into full life and he was immediately crushed under the weight of more gravity than any human body could endure. He would have screamed if his lungs hadn't already burst. Death came less than a second later.

Half a second later he returned to consciousness in his digital locker, the Long Stepper continuing to pile on gravities as it accelerated towards near light. Through metaphorically gritted teeth he forced himself to ignore the phantom sensation of pain from nerves that wouldn't be regrown for weeks, their last message to his brain echoing in the digital environment. Checking in on the rest of the crew and the passengers, he saw all had died, and their resurrection pods were in 'maintenance' mode, keeping the tissues preserved until the time came to begin repairing and jumpstarting the bodies. From their perspective, it would be like waking from a long sleep. None of them would remember dying.

He gave the go ahead to the ships systems to continue departure as planned, and "sat down" to his main responsibility - babysitting the computer until they left the inner solar system and it could be trusted to take over from there.

I hate this fucking job.