Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?

Kelly is the only one awake aboard a ship crawling through the void. The crew surrendered their bodies long ago, their minds dissolved into a shared dream inside a vast tank of protoplasm, and now they drift in a lotus-eater's paradise while their physical shells waste away in their beds. They need Kelly. They need him to wake them, to feed their bodies, to service the ship that keeps their brains alive. But here's the question that haunts Kelly as he moves through the silence: who needs whom? When you hold the power to rouse minds from eternal pleasure or let them rot, when your charges have become something more than human and less than alive, the line between caretaker and god blurs into something dangerous. This is mid-century SF at its most unsettling: a compact, creeping horror about what we sacrifice for survival, and whether the price of extended life is the death of the person we used to be. Walton builds the dread slowly, letting the strangeness of the body tanks and the intimacy of Kelly's role work under your skin.