A great way to spend summer vacation.

There were five surefire ways to die on a spaceship, and lance was just about to try one of them.  It was a bit of desperation, a tad of boredom, and a whole hunk of inexperience that pushed him in that direction.  He was about to go to sleep.  Might seem harmless to a surface dweller, sure.  Sleep was solved with a pill, a simple compound that overclocked the brain, shuffled around some hormones and somehow got you rested all in the same eight hour period.  Couldn't be on it constantly, but it solved having to sleep.  It also meant that spacecraft were designed for people who were awake constantly.  No day or night, just work and play and more work.  It wasn't like they weren't as capable as pre-pill machines, it's that they got much more done for the sacrifice of having to sleep.  There were fail-safes; rudimentary AI and self-regulating life support systems were standard.  A few winks of real sleep would not in theory kill you.

Spacefairers are a suspicious lot though, and tempting some cosmic karma to strike you down in a moment of inattention would scare most half to death before they even tried it.  The fact that most people who would think of a nap happened to be inexperienced enough that they undoubtedly screwed something up that needed fixing, and consequentially exploded did nothing but reinforce sleeping's position as third of the five deaths.  Lance however, was not yet a veteran of space, his second trip up after lengthy training on the ground.

The ship itself had already violated the second rule against death though, and so having to deal with his sister for hours on end without ceasing helped push Lance over the edge.  Never share a ship with a person who you already find annoying on the ground.  The only thing to trump that is the prohibition of drugs(sleep pills excluded) in space.  Trying to figure out which door to open that didn't end in an airlock happens more often than not after say, alcohol.  Modular spaceship design at its best one might think.  Lance had at least seen the wisdom in the first rule, and would have held to the second rule if he hadn't been forced into it by her whining back home.  Some might call it blackmail, but that's not the important part right now.

Lance had shut his eyelids, drifted away into a land of blissful ignorance to everything around him.  To say his dreams were enjoyable would understate exactly what he felt then.  They were the best dreams of his life, they were jewels of sanity among the chatter that his sister had been on about since the first day.  It's a shame they were the last good dreams he had for years afterwards.

No he didn't die.  Many people who had a malfunction just exploded, some in more remarkable fashion than others.  Lance had the fortune of a longer adventure in the stars than he really had been comfortable with.  See, when a warp drive fails, it doesn't just explode, it tends to start working a bit erratically.  Meaning random jots across the universe until the ship is left dead with naught but emergency power.

This is why the warp drive has a dedicated manual disconnect attached to it.  A manual disconnect that one is supposed to pull if any strange activity seems to be happening with the drive.  A manual disconnect for a problem that, unlike most problems on a space ship, is not accompanied to a warning light and sound that might wake up a sleeping pilot with theoretically enough time to fix the problem before the ship exploded.  Yes, one would expect less volatile equipment aboard a space ship, but that just happens to be how some of the more complicated things tend to work.

As it happened, when Lance woke up next, fate had chosen him to be the first great explorer of a planet we like to call, Perseus XII, or more descriptive in nomenclature, the green dot of death.