My short story "Autonomous" published in Aurealis magazine #157

 I am very pleased to announce my new story Autonomous is published in the latest edition of Aurealis magazine, #157.  And a superb edition it is too - great stories, beautifully illustrated and wrapped in a nice cover. 

You can buy Aurealis here. 

"Autonomous" tells the story of a man working at the user support call-center for a brand of self-driving cars. If a vehicle fails to sense road conditions adequately, it notifies the help center and a support tech takes manual control until the vehicle is back within specifications. The job entails long hours on the night shift, short periods of white-knuckle anxiety interspersed with time to think about things. Too much thinking leads him to a revelation about his place in society. 

Excerpt from the beginning of "Autonomous":

It wasn’t immediately apparent why the autonomous vehicle notified Surya that it wanted to hand over control to a human. Surya, sitting in his cubicle in the Faraday data centre, struggled with the camera views before he realized the person in the driver’s seat must be incapacitated. Surya could tell they had slumped over from the way there was no head between the rear-view mirror and the car’s internal camera. Drunk, asleep, giving head… It wasn’t his place to figure out why. His task was to get the vehicle to safety.