Kit Anderson’s graphic novel Second Shift offers a dream-like science fiction tale that captures the slowly disorienting mental states of workers on a high-tech base on a faraway planet. Established by the megacorporation Terracorp, the base is staffed by three workers and monitored by a verbal AI system called Station that also manifests itself as a chatty shapeshifting hologram companion to the workers. Station provides updates on maintenance and offers a selection of immersive role-playing VR environments that seem to slowly replace whatever sense of reality the long-isolated workers have left. In this 12-page excerpt, we meet workers Birdie and Heck as their colleague Porter prepares to go into her scheduled artificial deep sleep. Second Shift by Kit Anderson is out now from Avery Hill Publishing.