Pariah

Allerton steps off the battered airlock after three lonely years drifting far from Earth, only to find a crowd of umbrella‑clad reporters waiting in a dreary rain. The mission that was supposed to be a one‑year jaunt has turned his return into a surreal public spectacle, with flashing cameras and a stunned press corps asking him for news that never happened. As he shivers in his rain‑slicker, the reality that he was declared legally dead begins to sink in, and the familiar sky feels oddly foreign.

Back on the ground, Allerton is thrust into a maze of paperwork, lingering questions about his family, and a cold bureaucracy that treats his life like a line on a ledger. The captain’s quiet warning about “real” spacemen lingers, hinting that the freedom of the stars may not fit neatly into a terrestrial routine. As he looks toward the home he imagined, he must decide whether security and stability outweigh the restless fire that once drove him beyond the horizon.