The accidental astronaut

The accidental astronaut

The vending machine was broken. Dave Kowalski just wanted his crisps.

Dave is an IT support technician in Birmingham with modest ambitions: fix the fourth-floor Vendmaster Pro 3000, catch the 17:43 to Wolverhampton, eat a mushroom and spinach pasta bake. What he does not have on his agenda is being accidentally teleported onto an alien survey vessel by a well-meaning robot who mistook a faulty electromagnetic relay for a distress signal.

Now Dave is forty thousand kilometres from home, facing a thousand-question repatriation form, a ship's AI who writes poetry to cope with her anxiety, a navigator made entirely of mist who communicates exclusively in haiku, and a galactic bureaucracy so thorough it has a form for deleting forms — which has been stuck in administrative proceedings for forty years.

Back on Earth, a government analyst is staring at satellite data that doesn't add up. In the Cepheid Belt, a waystation administrator is still recovering from three months of late paperwork. And somewhere aboard the Perpetual Inconvenience, Dave is learning that the universe is vast, largely indifferent, and absolutely full of beings who are just trying to do their jobs, connect with each other, and get through the week.

Funny, warm, and unexpectedly moving — a love letter to anyone who has ever been put on hold by a large organisation, which is all of us, which turns out to be the most universal thing of all.

"The universe does not care about you. It does, however, occasionally teleport you."