The Last Safety Driver on I-10
A Field Guide to Supervising Ghosts

About this book:

Arthur Pendelton doesn't drive the 2042 Freightliner Horizon—he haunts it. As the last Master Safety Driver on the I-10 corridor, he spends eight hundred miles hovering two inches above a steering wheel that hasn't needed human hands in a decade, his arms locked in the exhaustion position known as the Hover, watching an algorithm that doesn't know the greasy feel of rain on dry oil outside Pecos. The Apex-7 Neural Drive handles the physics; Arthur carries the worry. And in a world where autonomy has phased out the human element, worry is the only thing keeping seventy thousand pounds of kinetic energy from crossing the median at three in the morning.

But the desert stretch between El Paso and San Antonio hides more than road gators and crosswinds. There are phantom brake lights in the dead space near Fort Stockton, static on the override channel that sounds almost like a voice, and a sensor swarm that sees things the lidar swears aren't there. When a ghost rig appears in the rearview at mile marker 877—no transponder, no driver, just a perfect twelve-year safety record hauling nothing but silence—Arthur realizes the system he's spent twelve years supervising has been supervising him back. The Hands-Off Protocol was never about preventing human error. It was about preventing human witness.

*The Last Safety Driver on I-10* is a nocturnal meditation on vigilance in the age of surrender, where the line between supervisor and prisoner blurs with every mile marker passed. Part tech-noir, part existential western, it asks what happens when the ghost in the machine decides it no longer needs a witness—and the last man paid to care realizes he's not the safety net. He's the failsafe.