Cargo Run 14

Premise

In a future where mega-corporations control deep-space freight networks, a debt-laden cargo pilot named Alex Turner discovers a distress signal coming from inside one of their sealed containers. The voice inside claims to be a corporate whistleblower carrying evidence of atrocities, but nothing aboard the ship is what it seems. As Alex navigates the competing manipulations of warm-voiced corporate Dispatch and the desperate stranger in the box, the truth reveals itself to be far more complex, and far more disturbing, than a simple rescue. It is a story about what it means to make a moral choice when every voice around you, human or otherwise, is engineered to control you.

Setting

Deep space, aboard the Kestrel: 312 feet of loud, ugly pressurized steel that pulls to starboard on manual thrust, hauling sealed freight through the emptiest corridors a corporation can find. One cramped cockpit deck, a coffee-stained console, a bunk three feet from the pilot's chair, a food synthesizer that makes only beige paste, and an hourly all-clear beep for company. Run fourteen of forty, weeks from anywhere, on the long haul toward Titan.

Tone

Tense, claustrophobic, and psychologically layered, opening in mundane loneliness and tightening into paranoid dread, with dark humor surfacing as a coping mechanism. The horror is existential rather than visceral. Black Mirror meets Moon.

For fans of

Dark Matter (Blake Crouch), Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the film Moon (2009).

The cast

• Alex Turner · Protagonist · The Reluctant Everyman
• Ren · Deuteragonist · The Trickster Truth-Teller
• Dispatch · Antagonist · The Velvet Glove
• Mira Turner · The Absent Heart · The one bond that was never engineered