Thin Air

Tate Addison reemerges from his solitary ride on the SS American Star, only to find himself stranded in yet another life or death situation, riding aboard an empty railroad car, somewhere high in the mountains of the pacific northwest. Travel alongside our reluctant hero as he braves a new fight to stay alive and to solve the mystery of where, and when, he is going to end up.

In this first chapter of The Passenger, Tate Addison has ventured to the desolate shoreline of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, only to be caught up in a raging tide of space and time. Pulled kicking and screaming out to sea, Tate is on course to be an unwitting passenger aboard the SS American Star, a broken shipwreck that will become the first of many rides he will take to get where he's going... wherever the ultimate destination might be.

In this, the premiere episode of RJ Lonsdale's Thin Air anthology, 3D Artist and Software Engineer Paul Abernathy heads home from work one day with a nagging question on his mind. What is the underlying cause of the so-called Uncanny Valley, an adverse reaction that people experience when confronted by a human-like robotic or virtual creation? This thought in mind, Paul sets off on an incredible adventure through cyberspace in search of these unnerving characters. In the process, he discovers something quite unexpected about himself and about the relationship between biological and digital life forms.