Escape Pod
By Mur Lafferty
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Podcast Description
The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine. Each week Escape Pod delivers science fiction short stories from today's best authors. Listen today, and hear the new sound of science fiction!
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EP346: Hawksbill Station | By Robert Silverberg Read by Paul Tevis Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine All stories by Robert Silverberg All stories read by Paul Tevis Rated 15 and up Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg Barrett was the uncrowned King of Hawksbill Station. He had been there the longest; he had suffered the most; he had the deepest inner resources of strength. Before his accident, he had been able to whip any man in the place. Now he was a cripple, but he still had that aura of power that gave him command. When there were problems at the Station, they were brought to Barrett. That was axiomatic. He was the king. He ruled over quite a kingdom, too. In effect it was the whole world, pole to pole, meridian to meridian. For what it was worth. It wasn’t worth very much. Now it was raining again. Barrett shrugged himself to his feet in the quick, easy gesture that cost him an infinite amount of carefully concealed agony, and shuffled to the door of his hut. Rain made him impatient:. the pounding of those great greasy drops against the corrugated tin roof was enough even to drive a Jim Barrett loony. He nudged the door open. Standing in the doorway, Barrett looked out over his kingdom. Barren rock, nearly to the horizon. A shield of raw dolomite going on and on. Raindrops danced and bounced on that continental slab of rock. No trees. No grass. Behind Barrett’s hut lay the sea, gray and vast. The sky was gray too, even when it wasn’t raining. He hobbled out into the rain. Manipulating his crutch was getting to be a simple matter for him now. He leaned comfortably, letting his crushed left foot dangle. A rockslide had pinned him last year during a trip to the edge of the Inland Sea. Back home, Barrett would have been fitted with prosthetics and that would have been the end of it: a new ankle, a new instep, refurbished ligaments and tendons. But home was a billion years away, and home there’s no returning. The rain hit him hard. Barrett was a big man, six and a half feet tall, with hooded dark eyes, a jutting nose, a chin that was a monarch among chins. He had weighed two hundred fifty pounds in his prime, in the good old agitating days when he had carried banners and pounded out manifestos. But now he was past sixty and beginning to shrink a little, the skin getting loose around the places where the mighty muscles used to be. It was hard to keep your weight in Hawksbill Station. The food was nutritious, but it lacked intensity. A man got to miss steak. Eating brachiopod stew and trilobite hash wasn’t the same thing at all. Barrett was past all bitterness, though. That was another reason why the men regarded him as the leader. He didn’t scowl. He didn’t rant. He was resigned to his fate, tolerant of eternal exile, and so he could help the others get over that difficult, heart-clawing period of transition. A figure arrived, jogging through the rain: Norton. The doctrinaire Khrushchevist with the Trotskyite leanings. A small, excitable man who frequently appointed himself messenger whenever there was news at the Station. He sprinted toward Barrett’s hut, slipping and sliding over the naked rocks. Barrett held up a meaty hand. “Whoa, Charley. Take it easy or you’ll break your neck!” Norton halted in front of the hut. The rain had pasted the widely spaced strands of his brown hair to his skull. His eyes had the fixed, glossy look of fanaticism—or perhaps just astigmatism. He gasped for breath and staggered into the hut, shaking himself like a wet puppy. He obviously had run all the way from the main building of the Station, three hundred yards away—a long dash over rock that slippery. “Why are you standing around in the rain?” Norton asked. “To get wet,” said Barrett, following him inside. “What’s the news?” “The Hammer’s glowing. We’re getting company.” “How do you know it’s a live shipment?” “It’s been glowing for half an hour. That means they’re taking precauti | 5/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP345: The Paper Menagerie | By Ken Liu Read by Rajan Khanna Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction All stories by Ken Liu All stories read by Rajan Khanna Rated 10 and up The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried. Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table. “Kan, kan,” she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack. She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious. She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a balloon. “Kan,” she said. “Laohu.” She put her hands down on the table and let go. A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees. I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. “Rawrr-sa,” it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers. I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring. “Zhe jiao zhezhi,” Mom said. This is called origami. I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic. # Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog. One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again. He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom. I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child. “That was the last page of the catalog I saw,” he said. The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true. He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her. “The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn’t know any English other than ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’” What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought? The high school me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine. Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for them. “She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said, she’d start to smile slowly.” He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the Tiger. # At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they could r[...] | 5/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 3 | Soundproof Digest 1 | Since we’ve had trouble with ebook stuff for a couple of months, we’re introducing Soundproof EP Digests! Here is the digest for Q1, nearly all the stories from January, February, and March, as well as some key blog posts. The digest for Q2 will be out soon (as soon as Q2 is over) and we’ll be releasing a special Hugo edition of Soundproof! Thanks for your patience. Mobi version PDF version | 5/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP314: Movement (HUGO REPOST) | If you listened to this back when it aired, then you’ve heard it, but I’m reposting it here for the benefit of people who want to experience all the Hugo nominees in a row! By Nancy Fulda Read by Marguerite Kenner Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Asimov’s All stories by Nancy Fulda All stories read by Marguerite Kenner Movement By Nancy Fulda It is sunset. The sky is splendid through the panes of my bedroom window; billowing layers of cumulous blazing with refracted oranges and reds. I think if only it weren’t for the glass, I could reach out and touch the cloudscape, perhaps leave my own trail of turbulence in the swirling patterns that will soon deepen to indigo. But the window is there, and I feel trapped. Behind me my parents and a specialist from the neurological research institute are sitting on folding chairs they’ve brought in from the kitchen, quietly discussing my future. They do not know I am listening. They think that, because I do not choose to respond, I do not notice they are there. “Would there be side effects?” My father asks. In the oppressive heat of the evening, I hear the quiet Zzzapof his shoulder laser as it targets mosquitoes. The device is not as effective as it was two years ago: the mosquitoes are getting faster. My father is a believer in technology, and that is why he contacted the research institute. He wants to fix me. He is certain there is a way. “There would be no side effects in the traditional sense,”the specialist says. I like him even though his presence makes me uncomfortable. He chooses his words very precisely. “We’re talking about direct synaptic grafting, not drugs. The process is akin to bending a sapling to influence the shape of the grown tree. We boost the strength of key dendritic connections and allow brain development to continue naturally. Young neurons are very malleable.” “And you’ve done this before?” I do not have to look to know my mother is frowning. My mother does not trust technology. She has spent the last ten years trying to coax me into social behavior by gentler means. She loves me, but she does not understand me. She thinks I cannot be happy unless I am smiling and laughing and running along the beach with other teenagers. “The procedure is still new, but our first subject was a young woman about the same age as your daughter. Afterwards, she integrated wonderfully. She was never an exceptional student, but she began speaking more and had an easier time following classroom procedure.” “What about Hannah’s…talents?”my mother asks. I know she is thinking about my dancing; also the way I remember facts and numbers without trying. “Would she lose those?” The specialist’s voice is very firm, and I like the way he delivers the facts without trying to cushion them. “It’s a matter of trade-offs, Mrs. Didier. The brain cannot be optimized for everything at once. Without treatment, some children like Hannah develop into extraordinary individuals. They become famous, change the world, learn to integrate their abilities into the structures of society. But only a very few are that lucky. The others never learn to make friends, hold a job, or live outside of institutions.” “And… with treatment?” “I cannot promise anything, but the chances are very good that Hannah will lead a normal life.” I have pressed my hand to the window. The glass feels cold and smooth beneath my palm. It appears motionless although I know at the molecular level it is flowing. Its atoms slide past each other slowly, so slowly; a transformation no less inevitable for its tempo. I like glass — also stone — because it does not change very quickly. I will be dead, and so will all of my relatives and their descendants, before the deformations will be visible without a microscope. I feel my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She has come up behind me and now she turns me so that I must either look in her | 5/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP344: The Homecoming | By Mike Resnick Read by Patrick Bazile Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Asimov’s All stories by Mike Resnick All stories read by Patrick Bazile Rated 10 and up The Homecoming by Mike Resnick I don’t know which bothers me more, my lumbago or my arthritis. One day it’s one, one day it’s the other. They can cure cancer and transplant every damned organ in your body; you’d think they could find some way to get rid of aches and pains. Let me tell you, growing old isn’t for sissies. I remember that I was having a typical dream. Well, typical for me, anyway. I was climbing the four steps to my front porch, only when I got to the third step there were six more, so I climbed them and then there were ten more, and it went on and on. I’d probably still be climbing them if the creature hadn’t woke me up. It stood next to my bed, staring down at me. I blinked a couple of times, trying to focus my eyes, and stared back, sure this was just an extension of my dream. It was maybe six feet tall, its skin a glistening, almost metallic silver, with multi-faceted bright red eyes like an insect. Its ears were pointed and batlike, and moved independently of its head and each other. Its mouth jutted out a couple of inches like some kind of tube, and looked like it was only good for sucking fluids. Its arms were slender, with no hint of the muscles required to move them, and its fingers were thin and incredibly elongated. It was as weird a nightmare figure as I’d dreamed up in years. Finally it spoke, in a voice that sounded more like a set of chimes than anything else. “Hello, Dad,” it said. That’s when I knew I was awake. “So this is what you look like,” I growled, swinging my feet over the side of the bed and sitting up. “What the hell are you doing here?” “I’m glad to see you too,” he replied. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said, feeling around for my slippers. “I heard about Mom – not from you, of course – and I wanted to see her once more before the end.” “Can you see through those things?” I asked, indicating his eyes. “Better than you can.” Big surprise. Hell, everyone can see better than I can. “How did you get in here anyway?” I said as I got to my feet. The furnace was as old and tired as I was and there was a chill in the air, so I put on my robe. “You haven’t changed the front door’s code words since I left.” He looked around the room. “You haven’t painted the place either.” “The lock’s supposed to check your retinagram or read your DNA or something.” “It did. They haven’t changed.” I looked him up and down. “The hell they haven’t.” He seemed about to reply, then thought better of it. Finally he said, “How is she?” “She has her bad days and her worse days,” I answered. “She’s the old Julia maybe two or three times a week for a minute or two, but that’s all. She can still speak, and she still recognizes me.” I paused. “She won’t recognize you, of course, but nobody else you ever knew will either.” “How long has she been like this?” “Maybe a year.” “You should have told me,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “You gave up being her son and became whatever it is you are now.” “I’m still her son, and you had my contact information.” I stared at him. “Well, you’re not my son, not anymore.” “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he replied. Suddenly he sniffed the air. “It smells stale.” “Tired old houses are like tired old men,” I said. “They don’t function on all cylinders.” “You could move to a smaller, newer place.” “This house and me, we’ve grown old together. Not everyone wants to move to Alpha whatever-the-hell-it-is.” He looked around. “Where is she?” “In your old room,” I said. He turned, walked out into the hall. “Haven’t you replaced that thing yet?” he asked, indicating an old wall table. “It was scarred and wobbly when I still lived here. | 5/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP343: The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees | By E. Lily Yu Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld All stories by E. Lily Yu All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated 10 and up The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees By E. Lily Yu For longer than anyone could remember, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw. Much later, after he had been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope. The villagers’ subsequent incursions with bee veils and kettles of boiling water soon diminished the prosperous population to a handful. Commanded by a single stubborn foundress, the survivors folded a new nest in the shape of a paper boat, provisioned it with fallen apricots and squash blossoms, and launched themselves onto the river. Browsing cows and children fled the riverbanks as they drifted downstream, piping sea chanteys. At last, forty miles south from where they had begun, their craft snagged on an upthrust stick and sank. Only one drowned in the evacuation, weighed down with the remains of an apricot. They reconvened upon a stump and looked about themselves. “It’s a good place to land,” the foundress said in her sweet soprano, examining the first rough maps that the scouts brought back. There were plenty of caterpillars, oaks for ink galls, fruiting brambles, and no signs of other wasps. A colony of bees had hived in a split oak two miles away. “Once we are established we will, of course, send a delegation to collect tribute. “We will not make the same mistakes as before. Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.” It took two weeks to complete the nurseries with their paper mobiles, and then another month to reconstruct the Great Library and fill the pigeonholes with what the oldest cartographers could remember of their lost maps. Their comings and goings did not go unnoticed. An ambassador from the beehive arrived with an ultimatum and was promptly executed; her wings were made into stained-glass windows for the council chamber, and her stinger was returned to the hive in a paper envelope. The second ambassador came with altered attitude and a proposal to divide the bees’ kingdom evenly between the two governments, retaining pollen and water rights for the bees—”as an acknowledgment of the preexisting claims of a free people to the natural resources of a common territory,” she hummed. The wasps of the council were gracious and only divested the envoy of her sting. She survived just long enough to deliver her account to the hive. The third ambassador arrived with a ball of wax on the tip of her stinger and was better received. “You understand, we are not refugees applying for recognition of a token territorial sovereignty,” the foundress said, as attendants served them nectars in paper horns, “nor are we negotiating with you as equal states. Those were the assumptions of your late predecessors. They were mistaken.” “I trust I will do better,” the diplomat said stiffly. She was older than[...] | 5/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP342: Certus Per Bellum | By S. Hutson Blount Read by Mat Weller Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in The Fifth Dimension All stories by S. Hutson Blount All stories read by Mat Weller Rated 15 and up for language and violent imagery This episode has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/escapepod for a free trial membership*. Audible® Free Trial Details * Get your first 30 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one credit. In almost all cases, one credit equals one audiobook. After your 30 day trial, your membership will automatically renew each month for just $14.95, billed to the credit card you used when you registered with Audible. With your membership, you will receive one credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. If you cancel your membership before your free trial period is up, you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. See the complete terms and policy applicable to Audible memberships. Certus per Bellum (Decided by War) By S. Hutson Blount “It’s quiet outside,” Nohaile said, trying to find a comfortable way to sit in his armor suit. “Are you sure it’s started?” “It’ll get plenty loud,” said the girl. She was armored only in a ratty sweatshirt and a patched bib coverall. She’d entered the bunker with a vest and some sensible-looking boots, but promptly removed them. Her bare feet made her look about twelve years old. “For right now,” she continued after some rapid two-thumb typing on her hand console, “we got time to kill.” “Miz Bamboo, do you think we can win?” Nohaile had a matching helmet to go with his armor. He felt foolish either leaving it off or putting it on, so it worried in his hands. The girl laughed a little. It didn’t reach her eyes. “There’s no ‘miz.’ Bamboo is my handle, not my name.” “I’m sorry.” “No worries. And yeah, we can win. The other guy hired cheap.” Bamboo kept looking at the display on her console, checking through her seemingly-infinite pockets and producing unidentifiable items to inspect and disappear again. Everything she carried seemed dirty but functional. Nohaile looked down at his shiny armor suit and was ashamed. “So, when do I get the story?” Bamboo asked. “I thought you said you didn’t care about the circumstances of the lawsuit.” She’d been very clear on that point. Rude, even. “I don’t. But every client has to tell. You care enough about whatever this disagreement is to put your ass on the line. You might as well get it over with.” “I don’t want to burden you while you’re…” He gestured at her control pad, blinking and murmuring to itself on the concrete floor beside her. She’d produced a handgun hidden somewhere in that shapeless coverall, a considerable-looking piece of artillery. To Nohaile’s inexperienced eyes, it looked like it would break her wrists if fired. Bamboo stopped disassembling it and looked at him more pointedly. “Where did you say you were from, again?” “Baltimore,” Nohaile said. “Before that, Dire Dawa. In Ethiopia,” he added, because he knew he would have to. “They grow ‘em polite in Ethiopia, I guess. Burden away. When something happens, I promise I’ll take care of it.” She grinned at him, freckles behind straw-colored bangs. Nohaile set his streamlined, buglike helmet beside him. “It was a patent infringement case. Originally, I mean. I had tried to interest VesterDyne in my extrusion bearing process. Shortly after the first round of presentations, they cancelled the exploratory contract. They said they’d found another source with a similar product. I knew it couldn’t be similar, I had a patent.” Bamboo test-fit[...] | 4/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP341: Aphrodisia | By Lavie Tidhar Read by Alasdair Stuart Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons All stories by Lavie Tidhar All stories read by Alasdair Stuart Rated 17 and up for language and sexual imagery This episode has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/escapepod for a free trial membership*. Audible® Free Trial Details * Get your first 30 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one credit. In almost all cases, one credit equals one audiobook. After your 30 day trial, your membership will automatically renew each month for just $14.95, billed to the credit card you used when you registered with Audible. With your membership, you will receive one credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. If you cancel your membership before your free trial period is up, you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. See the complete terms and policy applicable to Audible memberships. Aphrodisia By Lavie Tidhar It began, in a way, with the midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver. It was a night in the cool season… The stars shone like cold hard semi-precious stones overhead. Shadows moved across the face of the moon. The beer place was emptying – Ban Watnak where fat mosquitoes buzzed, lazily, across neon-lit faces. Thai pop playing too loudly, cigarette smoke rising the remnants of ghosts, straining to escape Earth’s atmosphere. In the sky flying lanterns looked like tracer bullets, like fireflies. The midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver said, ‘Where are you going -?’ mainlining street speed and ancient wisdom. Tone: ‘Where are you going?’ The driver sat on the elevated throne of his vehicle and contemplated the question as if his life depended on it. ‘Over there,’ he said, gesturing. Then, grudgingly – ‘Not far.’ But it was far enough for us. Tone and Bejesus and me made three: Tone with the hafmek body, all spray-painted metal chest and arms, Victorian-style goggles hiding his eyes, a scarf in the colours of a vanished football team around his neck – it was cold. It was Earth cold, not real – there was no dial you could turn to make it go away. Bejesus not speaking, a fragile low-gravity body writhing with nervous energy despite the unaccustomed weight – Bejesus in love with this planet Earth, a long way away from his rock home in space. Tone, in Asteroid Pidgin: ‘Yumi go lukaotem ol gel.’ ‘No girls,’ I said. Tone smirked. Bejesus danced on the spot, nervous, excited, it was hard to tell. Tone said: ‘Boy, girl, all same.’ Bejesus, to the driver: ‘I dig your body work, man.’ Tone shaking his head. ‘Dumb ignorant rock-worm,’ he said, but with affection. The hunchback midget tuk-tuk driver grinned, said, ‘You come with me, no pay. Free tuk-tuk!’ ‘Best offer we’re going to get,’ Tone said, and I nodded. Bejesus passed me a pill. I dry-swallowed. The floating lanterns seemed larger then, like warm eyes blinking high above. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. My heart was beating too fast. ‘Hungry and horny and a long way from home,’ Tone said – a bad poet in hafmek armour. We went. # Piled at the back of a solar-powered tuk-tuk at night, Aphrodisia tunes blaring out, blurring my careful composure – Aphrodisia, the Upload Deity, queen of no-space – Aphrodisia who loved me and f****d me and sang to me and left me – left everything and everyone behind. She was everywhere now, goddess bitch, and I cried and the tears were multicoloured in rust and acid-rain. Bejesus, the tentacle-junkie, wrapped his arms around me, and even Tone patted me on the back, there, there, awkwardly. I shrugged them off. Nest-brothers, we shared a hub in Tong Yun City years before, the asteroid-worm and the orbital hafmek and me – shared food and drugs and sex and minds – but we were younger then, on Mars. Earth is different to anything you can imagine. Pictu | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP340: Golubash (Wine-Blood-War-Story) | By Catherynne M. Valente Read by Marguerite Croft Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Federations All stories by Catherynne M. Valente All stories read by Marguerite Croft Rated 13 and up simply because kids likely won’t be into a story about wine. Golubash (Wine-Blood-War-Story) by Catherynne M. Valente The difficulties of transporting wine over interstellar distances are manifold. Wine is, after all, like a child. It can _bruise_. It can suffer trauma—sometimes the poor creature can recover, sometimes it must be locked up in a cellar until it learns to behave itself. Sometimes it is irredeemable. I ask that you greet the seven glasses before you tonight not as simple fermented grapes, but as the living creatures they are, well-brought up, indulged but not coddled, punished when necessary, shyly seeking your approval with clasped hands and slicked hair. After all, they have come so very far for the chance to be loved. Welcome to the first public tasting of Domaine Zhaba. My name is Phylloxera Nanut, and it is the fruit of my family’s vines that sits before you. Please forgive our humble venue—surely we could have wished for something grander than a scorched pre-war orbital platform, but circumstances, and the constant surveillance of Chatêau Marubouzu-Debrouillard and their soldiers have driven us to extremity. Mind the loose electrical panels and pull up a reactor husk—they are inert, I assure you. Spit onto the floor—a few new stains will never be noticed. As every drop about to pass your lips is wholly, thoroughly, enthusiastically illegal, we shall not stand on ceremony. Shall we begin? 2583 Sud-Cotê-du-Golubash (New Danube) The colonial ship _Quintessence of Dust_ first blazed across the skies of Avalokitesvara two hundred years before I was born, under the red stare of Barnard’s Star, our second solar benefactor. Her plasma sails streamed kilometers long, like sheltering wings. Simone Nanut was on that ship. She, alongside a thousand others, looked down on their new home from that great height, the single long, unfathomably wide river that circumscribed the globe, the golden mountains prickled with cobalt alders, the deserts streaked with pink salt. How I remember the southern coast of Golubash, I played there, and dreamed there was a girl on the invisible opposite shore, and that her family, too, made wine and cowered like us in the shadow of the Asociación. My friends, in your university days did you not study the rolls of the first colonials, did you not memorize their weight-limited cargo, verse after verse of spinning wheels, bamboo seeds, lathes, vials of tailored bacteria, as holy writ? Then perhaps you will recall Simone Nanut and her folly, that her pitiful allotment of cargo was taken up by the clothes on her back and a tangle of ancient Maribor grapevine, its roots tenderly wrapped and watered. Mad Slovak witch they all thought her, patting those tortured, battered vines into the gritty yellow soil of the Golubash basin. Even the Hyphens were sure the poor things would fail. There were only four of them on all of Avalokitesvara, immensely tall, their watery triune faces catching the old red light of Barnard’s flares, their innumerable arms fanned out around their terribly thin torsos like peacock’s tails. Not for nothing was the planet named for a Hindu god with eleven faces and a thousand arms. The colonists called them Hyphens for their way of talking, and for the thinness of their bodies. They did not understand then what you must all know now, rolling your eyes behind your sleeves as your hostess relates ancient history, that each of the four Hyphens was a quarter of the world in a single body, that they were a mere outcropping of the vast intelligences which made up the ecology of Avalokitesvara, like one of our thumbs or a pair of lips. Golubash I knew. To know more than one Hyphen in a lifetime is rare. Officially, the great river is still called the New Danube, but e | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP339 – “Run,” Bakri Says | By Ferrett Steinmetz Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Asimov’s All stories by Ferrett Steinmetz All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated 15 and up for violence “Run,” Bakri Says By Ferrett Steinmetz “I just want to know where my brother is,” Irena yells at the guards. The English words are thick and slow on her tongue, like honey. She holds her hands high in the air; the gun she’s tucked into the back of her pants jabs at her spine. She doesn’t want to kill the soldiers on this iteration; she’s never killed anyone before, and doesn’t want to start. But unless she can get poor, weak Sammi out of that prison in the next fifty/infinity minutes, they’ll start in on him with the rubber hoses and he’ll tell them what he’s done. And though she loves her brother with all her heart, it would be a blessing then if the Americans beat him to death. The guards are still at the far end of the street, just before the tangle of barbed wire that bars the prison entrance. Irena stands still, lets them approach her, guns out. One is a black man, the skin around his eyes creased with a habitual expression of distrust; a fringe of white hair and an unwavering aim marks him as a career man. The other is a younger man, squinting nervously, his babyfat face the picture of every new American soldier. Above them, a third soldier looks down from his wooden tower, reaching for the radio at his belt. She hopes she won’t get to know them. This will be easier if all they do is point guns and yell. It’ll be just like Sammi’s stupid videogames. “My brother,” she repeats, her mouth dry; it hurts to raise her arms after the rough surgery Bakri’s done with an X-acto knife and some fishing line. “His name is Sammi Daraghmeh. You rounded him up last night, with many other men. He is – ” Their gazes catch on the rough iron manacle dangling from her left wrist. She looks up, remembers that Bakri installed a button on the tether so she could rewind, realizes the front of her cornflower-blue abayah is splotched with blood from her oozing stitches. “Wait.” She backs away. “I’m not – ” The younger soldier yells, “She’s got something!” They open fire. Something tugs at her neck, parting flesh; another crack, and she swallows her own teeth. She tries to talk but her windpipe whistles; her body betrays her, refusing to move as she crumples to the ground, willing herself to keep going. Nothing listens. This is death, she thinks. This is what it’s like to die. # “Run,” Bakri says, and Irena is standing in an alleyway instead of dying on the street – gravity’s all wrong and her muscles follow her orders again. Her arms and legs flail and she topples face-first into a pile of rotting lettuce. The gun Bakri has just pressed into her hands falls to the ground. Dying was worse than she’d thought. Her mind’s still jangled with the shock, from feeling all her nerves shrieking in panic as she died. She shudders in the garbage, trying to regain strength. Bakri picks her up. “What is your goal?” he barks, keeping his voice low so the shoppers at the other end of the grocery store’s alleyway don’t hear. Why is he asking me that? she thinks, then remembers: all the others went insane. She wouldn’t even be here if Farhouz hadn’t slaughtered seventeen soldiers inside the Green Zone. It takes an effort to speak. “To – to rescue Sammi.” “Good.” The tension drains from his face. He looks so relieved that Irena thinks he might burst into tears. “What iteration? You did iterate, right?” “Two,” she says numbly, understanding what his relief means: he didn’t know. He’d sent her off to be shot, unsure whether he[...] | 4/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP338 – The Trojan Girl | By N. K. Jemisin Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Weird Tales All stories by N. K. Jemisin All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated 15 and up for language The girl was perfect. Her framing, the engine at her core, the intricate web of connections holding her objects together, built-in redundancies… Meroe had never seen such efficiency. The girl’s structure was simple because she didn’t need any of the shortcuts and workarounds that most of their kind required to function. There was no bloat to her, no junk code slowing her down, no patchy sores that left her vulnerable to infection. “She’s a thing of beauty, isn’t she?” Faster said. Meroe returned to interface view. He glanced at Zo and saw the same suspicion lurking in her beatific expression. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Meroe said, watching Zo, speaking to Faster. “We don’t grow that way.” “I know!” Faster was pacing, gesticulating, caught up in his own excitement. He didn’t notice Meroe’s look. “She must have evolved from something professionally-coded. Maybe even Government Standard. I didn’t think we could be born from that!” They couldn’t. Meroe stared at the girl, not liking what he was seeing. The avatar was just too well-designed, too detailed. Her features and coloring matched that of some variety of Latina; probably Central or South American given the noticeable indigenous traits. Most of their kind created Caucasian avatars to start — a human minority who for some reason comprised the majority of images available for sampling in the Amorph. And most first avatars had bland, nondescript faces. This girl had clear features, right down to her distinctively-formed lips and chin — and hands. It had taken five versionings for Meroe to get his own hands right. “Did you check out her feature-objects?” Faster asked, oblivious to Meroe’s unease. “Why?” Zo answered. “Two of them are standard add-ons — an aggressive defender and a diagnostic tool. The other two we can’t identify. Something new.” Her lips curved in a smile; she knew how he would react. (Note: We secured only audio rights to this story, so there will be no website version.) | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP337 – Counting Cracks | By George R. Galuschak Read by Mat Weller Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared on Strange Horizons All stories by George R. Galuschak All stories read by Mat Weller Rated 15 and up for language Counting Cracks By George R. Galuschak Four of us, jammed into my sister’s Ford Festiva, going to kill the monster. Sylvia drives. The Hum has left her untouched, so she’s the only one left in town who can drive. My sister licks the palm of her hand, touches it to her nose and bumps her forehead against the steering wheel. Then she does it again. “Today would be nice, sis.” I say. I’m in the back seat with June, a twelve-year old girl clutching a teddy bear to her chest. “I’m going as fast as I can,” she tells me. “It’s bad today.” “The Shop-Rite has three hundred and fifty-seven ceiling tiles,” Michael tells me. He’s a little kid, nine years old, sitting up front with Sylvia. “I counted them.” “Inpatient oranges creep handsome banisters,” June says, rolling her eyes. “Good for you,” I say. My left leg hurts, which I guess is a good sign. My left arm feels like dead weight except for the tips of my fingers, which are tingly. “Do you count tiles, Mr. Bruschi?” Michael asks. “No. I counted cracks on the sidewalk. When I was a kid.” A sparrow collides with the windshield. It bounces off and skitters to the pavement, where it thrashes. I haven’t seen a living bird in days. It must have flown into the Hum. “Swill,” June says, pointing at the bird. “Maraschino cherries. Skittles. Cocktail weenies.” “All right. I’m ready.” Sylvia twists the key, and the car starts. We back out of the driveway. “The streets are so empty,” she says. “That’s because everyone is dead,” Michael tells her. “They listened to the Hum and went into their houses and pulled the covers over their heads and died. I had a hamster that died, once. It got real old, so it made a little nest, and then it laid down in it and died.” “We’re not dead,” I say. “Not yet,” Michael corrects me. “Give it time.” # It started a week ago. Tuesday morning, hot day, storm clouds gathering like bad thoughts. I walked out to my car. I was going to work, the way normal people do. I’m not normal, but I’ve gotten good at pretending. I saw a robin fluttering its wings on the sidewalk. At first I thought its back was broken, but when I came closer it squawked and ran onto the lawn. It gave a little hop, flapping its wings, and then hopped again. I put my hands to my temples. My head hurt. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I could feel the beginnings of a migraine forming. I looked at the robin, hopping and flapping its wings on my lawn. It didn’t look injured; it looked like it had forgotten how to fly. I shrugged and walked away. The bird’s behavior was strange, but I needed to get to work. So I went. When I drove home that evening the sidewalks and streets were covered with birds, all squawking and flapping their wings. The bird story made the nightly news. The newswoman stood in Buehler Park surrounded by a flock of distressed pigeons. She talked too loud and stumbled over her words. Her voice sounded a bit slurred, like she was drunk. “Put something else on,” my wife said. We were eating dinner in front of the TV, the way we did when things were good between us. “All right.” I shrugged and switched the channel. We watched a movie, and I forgot all about the birds. The next morning my wife went blind. # We pull into Shop-Rite’s parking lot. Normally it’s jam-packed. They average three fender-benders a week, because the designers of the lot made the lanes too small, the spaces too tight. But today we drive right in. “This is far enough[...] | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP336: The Speed of Time | By Jay Lake Read by Josh Roseman Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared on Tor.com All stories by Jay Lake All stories read by Josh Roseman Rated 13 and up for content The Speed of Time by Jay Lake “Light goes by at the speed of time,” Marlys once told me. That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat. There is no t in e=mc2. I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all. # Let me tell you a story about Sameera Glasshouse. She’d been an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech, certifications from several middle-tier authorities, bouncing from contract to contract in trans-Belt space. Ten thousand women, men and inters just like her out there during the Last Boom. We didn’t call it that then, no one knew the expansion curve the solar economy had been riding was the last of anything. The Last Boom didn’t really have a name when it was underway, except maybe to economists. Sameera had been pair-bonded to a Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the surname long after she’d dropped Roz from her life. For one thing, “Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese grandmother, which was a reward in itself. She was working a double ticket on the Enceladus Project master depot, in low orbit around that particular iceball. That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded housing allocation and a fatter pay packet for her trouble. The E.P. got to schlep one less body to push green inside their habitat scrubbers. Everybody won. Her spare time was spent wiring together Big Ears, to listen for the chatter that flooded bandwidth all over the solar system. Human beings are — were — noisy. Launch control, wayfinding, birthday greetings, telemetry, banking queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out there, multiplied and ramified beyond comprehension by the combination of lightspeed lag, language barriers and sheer, overwhelming complexity. Some folks back then claimed there were emergent structures in the bandwidth, properties of the sum of all that chatter which could not be accounted for by analysis of the components. This sort of thinking had been going around since the dawn of information theory — call it information fantasy. The same hardwired pareidolia that made human beings see the hand of God in the empirical universe also made us hear Him in the electronic shrieking of our tribe. Sameera never really believed any of it, but she’d heard some very weird things listening in. In space, it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped playing in the bandwidth. When she’d picked up a crying child on a leaky sideband squirt out of a nominally empty vector, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. When she’d tuned on the irregular regularity of a coded data feed that seemed to originate from deep within Saturn’s atmosphere, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. But one day God had called Sameera by name. Her voice crackled out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the three syllables over and over and over in a voice which resonated down inside the soft tissues of Sameera’s body, made her joints ache, jellied the very resolve of the soul that she had not known she possessed until that exact moment. Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down to the master depot’s tiny sacramentarium. Most p[...] | 3/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP335: The Water Man | By Ursula Pflug Read by Christiana Ellis Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Anthology Series: Tesseracts # 3, 1991 All stories by Ursula Pflug All stories read by Christiana Ellis Rated 13 and up for language This episode has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/escapepod for a free trial membership*. Audible® Free Trial Details * Get your first 30 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one credit. In almost all cases, one credit equals one audiobook. After your 30 day trial, your membership will automatically renew each month for just $14.95, billed to the credit card you used when you registered with Audible. With your membership, you will receive one credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. If you cancel your membership before your free trial period is up, you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. See the complete terms and policy applicable to Audible memberships. The Water Man by Ursula Pflug The water man came today. I waited all morning, and then all afternoon, painting plastic soldiers to pass the time. Red paint too in the sky when he finally showed; I turned the outside lights on for him and held the door while he carried the big bottles in. He set them all in a row just inside the storm door; there wasn’t any other place to put them. When he was done he stood catching his breath, stamping his big boots to warm his feet. Melting snow made little muddy lakes on the linoleum. I dug in my jeans for money to tip him with, knowing I wouldn’t find any. Finally I just offered him water. We drank together. It was cool and clean and good, running down our throats in the dimness of the store. It made me feel wide and quiet, and I watched his big eyes poke around Synapses, checking us out, and while they did, mine snuck a peek at him. He was big and round, and all his layers of puffy clothes made him seem rounder still, like a black version of the Michelin man. He unzipped his parka and I could see a name, Gary, stitched in red over the pocket of his blue coverall. I still didn’t have a light on; usually I work in the dark, save the light bill for Deb. But I switched it on when he coughed and he smiled at that, like we’d shared a joke. He had a way of not looking right at you or saying much, but somehow you still knew what he was thinking. Like I knew that he liked secrets, and talking without making sounds. It was neat. Seemed to me it was looking water–a weird thought out of nowhere–unless it came from him. He seemed to generate them; like he could stand in the middle of a room and in everyone’s minds, all around him, weird little thoughts would start cropping up–like that one. My tummy sloshing I looked too, and seemed to see through his eyes and not just mine. Through his I wasn’t sure how to take it: a big dim room haunted by dinosaurs. All the junk of this century comes to rest at Synapses; it gets piled to the ceilings and covered with dust. If it’s lucky it makes a Head; weird Heads are going to be the thing for Carnival this year, just as they were last, and Debbie’s are the best. Her finished products are grotesque, but if you call that beautiful then they are; the one she just finished dangles phone cords like Medusa’s hair, gears like jangling medals. Shelves of visors glint under the ceiling fixture; inlaid with chips and broken bits of circuitry, they hum like artifacts from some Byzantium that isn’t yet. Two faced Janus masks, their round doll eyes removed; you can wear them either way, male or female, to look in or out. Gary was staring at them, a strange expression on his face. Like he wanted to throw up. “Do you think they’re good?” I asked, to stop him looking like that. “Good enough,” he said, “if you like dinosaurs.” “I like them. They are strange and wonderful.” “But dinosaurs all the[...] | 3/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP334: The Eckener Alternative | By James L. Cambias Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, edited by David Moles, 2004 All stories by James L. Cambias All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated all ages. Zeppelins! The Eckener Alternative by James L. Cambias The Hindenburg swung gently on the mast at Lakehurst as the sky over New Jersey turned to purple twilight. All the passengers, the reporters, the newsreel men were gone. A couple of sailors stood guard beneath the big ship to enforce the no-smoking rule. John Cavalli waited until the watchman below had turned away, then slid down the stern rope to the ground. He hunkered down next to the big rolling anchor weight for a couple of minutes, then hurried off into the darkness beyond the floodlights. Once he was clear, Cavalli stopped to peel off the Russian army arctic commando suit he’d been wearing ever since the Zeppelin had lifted off from Frankfurt-am-Main. It had kept him warm as he hid among the gas cells with his IR goggles and fire extinguisher, but now in the warmth of a spring evening it was stifling. He hit the RETURN button on his wristband and disappeared. # “You can’t make big changes,” said the instructor the first day of Temporal Studies class. He was a very laid-back physicist recruited from California in 2020s. “That’s the most important rule. The folks we work for are the result of a particular set of historical events. Change history too much and their probability level drops below 50 percent. If that happens, all this” — his gesture encompassed the Time Center — goes away and we’re out of a job. If we even exist anymore.” A student in the row ahead of Cavalli raised his hand. “What about making little changes?” “Little changes are fine. We make little changes all the time. Most of them are things like making long-term investments, buying up art treasures for safekeeping, keeping species from going extinct, that kind of thing. You’re going to learn all about gauging the effect of changes, avoiding heterodynes and chaotic points, and when it’s okay to step on butterflies.” Cavalli was listening, but in the margin of his notebook he was doodling airships. # The timegate stage was dark and the control room was empty, just as he’d left it. The Coke can was still on the console. Was it maybe a little further to the left than he remembered? He stepped off the stage and took a drink. Still tasted the same. It would take a pretty big timeshift to change the flavor of Coca-Cola. Cavalli locked the door behind him with his purloined master key (the Time Center used mechanical locks because they were a bit more resistant to minor time-shifts) and headed for the library. He found a book about Zeppelins he didn’t remember and skimmed the pages. Hindenburg served safely until 1939; scrapped when WWII broke out. No postwar Zeppelins. The usual “return of the airship” speculations. Damn. It hadn’t worked. He had hoped erasing the vivid image of the Hindenburg fire would have been enough to keep passenger airships alive, but the war still marked the end of their era. # “So why don’t we stop things like the Holocaust or the firebombing of Dresden?” It was a relatively quiet dorm room party with half a dozen trainees blowing off steam after the first written exam. Cavalli didn’t see who asked the question, but he sounded drunk. Anna Kyle, the third-year trainee, answered. “Too big. The models predict major shifts in the 21st Century if there’s no Holocaust. You lose the Cold War and the whole Jihad era. We just stay away from World War II if we can help it. Rescue a few things from museums before they get flattened, take some videos for historians, that’s all.” “Why not stop the whole war?[...] | 3/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP333: Asteroid Monte | By Craig DeLancey Read by Rajan Khanna Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Analog All stories by Craig DeLancey All stories read by Rajan Khanna Rated 15 and up for language, drug abuse Asteroid Monte by Craig DeLancey “You don’t look like an omnivore.” I was supposed to spend the next several years working side-by-side with this bear monster thing from an unpronounceable planet, and the first words she speaks to me are these. “Excuse me?” “Your teeth are flat,” she hissed. “Like a herbivore’s.” I had been waiting in the tiered square outside the Hall of Harmony, main office of the Galactic police force officially called the Harmonizers, but which everyone really called the Predators. Neelee-ornor is one of those planets that makes me a believer. Cities crowd right into forests as thick as the Amazon, and both somehow thrive with riotous abandon. It proves the Galactic creed really means something. Something worth fighting for. Something that could get me to take this thankless job. So I waited to meet my partner, as I sat on a cool stone bench under a huge branch dripping green saprophytes. The air was damp but smelled, strangely, like California after the rain, when I would leave CalTech and hike into the hills. I almost didn’t want her to show, so I could sit and enjoy it. I really knew only three things about her. She had about two e-years under her belt as a Predator. She was a Sussuratian, a race of fierce bearlike carnivores evolved from predatory pack animals, only a century ahead of humanity in entering Galactic Culture. And she was named Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess. God help me. I rose awkwardly every time a Sussuratian passed, only to sit again after it walked on. Finally I gave up, and then a moment later a Sussuratian bounded out of the passing crowds, and addressed me with this comment about my eating habits. I sprung off the bench and bowed slightly. “I am Tarkos.” We were talking Galactic. But my Galactic is pretty good, really. Better than hers, I was betting. Her name, however, was a Sussuratian name, and in that language a human larynx was hopeless. Well, here goes. “I am honored to meet you Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.” She was about six feet long, with short dark fur that had black and green and gold patterns in it reminiscent of a boa. She was a quadraped, and walked on all fours, her claws clicking. Now she sat back on her haunches and put her front hands together, threading the seven claws on one hand through the seven on the other. The effect was a Kodiak holding a bouquet of knives. Her four eyes — two large green ones set below two small black ones — fixed on me. “I am called Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess,” she said. I bowed slightly again. “Yes. I apologize for my pronunciation.” I took a deep breath and tried again. “Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.” “No,” she said, speaking now very slowly. “It’s Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.” For the life of me her pronunciation sounded exactly like mine. Except with a bunch of hissing involved in all the S’s. “Can I just call you Bria?” Her small black eyes closed. I knew that expressed something – impatience? Disgust? Chagrin? I couldn’t remember. It’s hard to learn emotional expressions from a crash video course. “This assignment is of great importance and could be perilous,” she said. “I told them I didn’t want to work with a human.” “Well, thanks for your honesty.” She ran her long, dark-red tongue over fangs longer than my fingers. Maybe she understood human sarcasm, because this 300-kilo carnivore then offered an explanation: “You’re dangerous. I fear you.” I nodded. “Yeah. I hear that a lot.” _____ I didn’t[...] | 2/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP332: Overclocking | By James L. Sutter Read by Wilson Fowlie Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Apex Magazine in December, 2009 All stories by James L Sutter All stories read by Wilson Fowlie Rated 15 and up for language, drug abuse Overclocking by James L. Sutter They’re waiting for him when he comes out of the tank. Whether plainclothes or just another pair of clockers, he can’t quite tell, but the way they avoid looking in his direction tips him off in a heartbeat. When Ari Marvel walks by, you _look_. They start drifting idly in his direction, and that clinches things. Reaching down into the lining of his pocket, Ari palms the whole batch and trails his hand over the edge of the bridge railing. The brittle grey modsticks crumble with ease, and by the time the two have dropped their cover and made the sting he’s moved smoothly into position, hands against the brick and legs spread wide. The pigs don’t even thank him for being so efficient. The patdown’s rougher than necessary, but after a minute they throw their hoods back up and move off down the street. Ari runs his hands through his faded blue-green spikes, then takes the stairs down to the tube. A beginner might have lingered at the railing and thought about all the time and money now floating down the culvert, but Ari doesn’t look back. Necessary expenditures. Expected losses. It’s just business, baby. # Back at the pad, Maggie’s waiting by the door. She looks like hell: hair in ratty dreads, shirt stained with god-knows-what. Crust in her eyes. “Hey, Ari,” she says. Ari slides his keycard into the lock, checking first to see if the hair he put over the swipestripe has been moved. Still there. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s been there, of course–just that if they have been, they’re good enough that there’s no point in worrying about it. You win some, you lose some. Inside, it looks like he’s won. Maggie plops down on the couch, worrying a hangnail that’s started to bleed. Her foot taps on the coffee table. “Hey,” she says again. He drops his coat onto the chair and moves into the kitchen to get a soda. She picks up the remote and begins flipping rapidly through the channels, then turns the set off again. Eventually he leaves the can on the counter and comes back into the living room, sitting down on the coffee table across from her and taking her hands. “Maggie, look at me.” She does–or, at least, as well as she’s able to at this point. “I’m only going to say this once. You’re welcome to crash here, but you’re not getting a fix. I won’t have that in my house. You understand?” She nods–those wide doe eyes the color of egg yolk–then goes back to gnawing at her thumb. He stands and leaves her there, entering the bedroom and closing the door. Once it’s locked, he jimmies loose the bottom drawer of the dresser and flips a wad of sweaty bills into the crudely carved hollow. Then he drops fully clothed onto the mattress and covers his eyes with his forearm, blocking out the ruddy afternoon light that still filters in through heavy curtains. Out in the apartment, he can hear her moving about restlessly. He’s doing it again. It doesn’t matter that he knows how it’ll end, that he knows how it _has_ ended more than once. It’s simply a given: she’ll show up. He’ll let her in. Things will proceed accordingly. He bears down with his arm until the muted red of his eyelids turns to black, and then to stars. The worst of it is that even through the filth, he can still see her. Inside the shell of those dreads, her hair is still gold verging on white, so fine as to be almost intangible. Behind the bruises and bags, her eyes would still crinkle upward if she smiled. And if he opened his arms, she might still flow into them like water, sparkling and warm and full of life. Ari is not a stupid man, but Maggie is an exception. Eyes clenched tight, Ari curls up | 2/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP331: Devour | By Ferrett Steinmetz Read by Dave Thompson Discuss on our forums. An Escape Pod Original! All stories by Ferrett Steinmetz All stories read by Dave Thompson Rated 15 and up for language, brief sexual imagery, brief violent imagery Devour By Ferrett Steinmetz “I want some water,” Sergio says. The bicycle chains clank as he strains to put his feet on the floor. Sergio designed his own restraints. He had at least fifteen plumbers on his payroll who could have installed the chains – but Sergio’s never trusted anything he didn’t build with his own hands. So he deep-drilled gear mounts into our guest room’s floral wallpaper, leaving me to string greased roller chains through the cast-iron curlicues of the canopy bed. “You’re doing well, Bruce,” he lied, trying to smile – but his lips were already desiccated, pulled too tight at the edges. Not his lips at all. I slowed him down; I had soft lawyer’s hands, more used to keyboards than Allen wrenches. Yet we both knew it would be the last time we could touch each other. So I asked for help I didn’t need, and he took my hands in his to guide the chains through what he referred to as “the marionette mounts.” Then he sat on the bed and held out his wrists while I snapped the manacles on – the chamois lining was my idea – and we kissed. It was a long, slow kiss that needed to summarize thirty-two years of marriage. And it should have been comforting, but his mouth was a betrayal. His lips had resorbed from their lush plumpness. His tongue had withdrawn to a stub. His kiss still sent flutters down my spine. I pressed my hands against his back, moving towards making love, but Sergio pushed me away. ”We don’t know how transmissible this is,” he said. Then he tugged on the chains to verify he could lie down and sit up, but not leave the bed. I pressed the keys into his palm, trying to burn the feeling of his skin into mine forever. He snipped the keys in half with a bolt-cutter, then flung it all into the corner. “That’s that,” he said, and rolled away from me to cry. My arms ached - still ache – from not being able to hold him. Six days later, I’m still here. And Sergio is still leaving. “I want some water,” he repeats now. Louder, more insistent. Too angry to be really Sergio. “You never wanted water before,” I say, keeping a careful distance from the bed. ”You like orange juice.” Sergio tries to put his head in his hands. The chains pull him short. “For Christ’s sake, Bruce,” he says. ”I’m dying. There are going to be changes.” “Yes,” I say guardedly. ”There are.” “And it’s apple cider I like. In a chilled glass. From the local guao yan, no, orchard – and not that sugared crap you like. Don’t try to trick me, okay? It’s just insulting to.” He almost says to us, but then shudders. “I’m not going to do anything crazy with water,” he begs. ”I can’t turn it into. what’s the word? Flamethrowers. It’s water. I’m just. thirsty. I’ll fight with you about the things that matter, but. “Just get me some damn water!” he barks. I stare at him, knowing the old Sergio never yelled, wondering how much is left. Because I can see the traces of a young Sergio within the thing trapped in the four-poster right now. Sergio always had that perfect, youthful mix of good cheekbones and lean muscle. Now, his thighs and biceps are swollen like a hormone-stuffed steer – but aside from that, Sergio would be the envy of any plastic surgeon. His crow’s feet have been pulled from his skin, his collagen replenished. His hair, once a brilliant mane of salt-and-pepper curls, has turned a lank black at the roots. It looks like some horrid[...] | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP330: The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived | By Keffy R. M. Kehrli Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show. All stories by Keffy R. M. Kehrli All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated 13 and up The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived By Keffy R. M. Kehrli I am Sara’s second body. My first memory is of Sara’s resurrection in a room that smelled of cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide. “That’s funny,” a man said. The world felt raw, sore, and new. Under my back, my butt, my fingertips, I could feel every thread in the sheets beneath me. The blanket over my stomach scratched. Padded straps crossed my arms. “What’s funny?” This voice was a woman’s. “Got another error message,” the man answered. “Have you ever seen that one before?” I felt the sheets with Sara’s fingers, and the texture conjured memories I didn’t have. I should have known where I was and what I was there for, but I couldn’t catch hold of the fleeting thoughts. In the dim light of the room I could only see the ceiling. “Let me see.” I heard a frenzied clicking. “It failed twice?” “Nothing copied the first time, so I started over. It got about halfway through, and then it gave me this.” “Error two-one-five-two. Copy error,” the woman said. “I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never even seen an error in the middle of a transplant. Did you check the manual?” “It didn’t list this one.” The woman sighed and said, “The only thing I can think of is if we wipe everything back out and start over.” Operating tables, and the anesthetician’s face. Tissue paper examining tables, candles in a church. “She’s conscious, though,” the man said. “When the machine aborted, it sent the Copy Completed code. Don’t look at me like that! I don’t know if I ought to mess around with it anymore, or…” The woman interrupted, “You know we can’t do that without contacting the parents. Come on, we might as well go see what the damage is.” They stood over me. The man was the younger of the two, and he looked down at me from behind thick glasses. He held his clipboard tight against his chest like a shield. The woman stood closer to me; her hair was light, either blond or grey. She frowned like it was my fault. “Can you hear and understand me?” she asked. The man wrote something on his clipboard. I could hear graphite rubbed free, caught in the paper. My mouth felt dry, and my lips did too, as though if I tried to speak they would break apart. “Yes,” I managed. She unhooked the straps on my arms. I lifted my left arm and looked at the fingers, hand, wrist. Clean, and smooth, unmarked. Cat-scratch scar near my first knuckle, angry red and faded pink. “Do you know why you’re here?” I wanted to say the right thing, but I didn’t know what that would be. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t.” “She’s coherent,” the woman said. “We’ll have to call the parents.” The man nodded, and he was still writing. Scratch scratch scratch. He didn’t answer her. The woman disconnected something that slid out from under the skin of my scalp, and I didn’t like how it rubbed against my skull. “Make sure you tell them that we won’t require the final payment until we get this sorted.” “Copy error,” I said. “Is that why I don’t know where we are?” “Yes, Sara,” she said. “I think.” # I walk until I find a cabin in the woods, the windows broken out by tree branches, by wind and rain and thrown rocks. The door hangs far on its hinges. Shotgun shells, wet with rain. Raccoon droppings. These are the things that litter the floor inside. I step over them in Sara’s boots, into a [...] | 2/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 20 | Soundproof #16 | Click here for the epub version. Hello everyone, Can we talk about Fringe for a second? It’s somehow managed to survive to a fourth season on Fox, which is a feat in and of itself. But it’s also managed to keep the monsters of the week new and interesting, even when they’re new iterations of the same monsters of the week because we’re now in a slightly more adjacent parallel universe than the one we’d gotten used to. And when the new monsters are the old good guys. It’s also notable for surviving because we’re kind of awash in fantasy on the (American) teevee right now. Grimm, Being Human, and Once Upon a Time are the new-ish ‘genre’ shows, and SyFy, which some of you elderly folks may remember as the SciFi channel, doesn’t have a science fiction series that isn’t imminently headed for the grave. Which is kind of a show of how fickle the fates of TV production is, and how swiftly the tide can shift away once a new shiny happy fun ball enters the room. But Fringe continues to turn in the solid mediations on the endless strange that lurks in the corners of space-time, while keeping you caring about characters even as many of them permutate as the show moves from universe to universe. This month we bring you a trio of stories from Judith Tarr, Randy Henderson, and Zachary Jernigan. They contain dinosaurs, a future of literature or at least novels, and the souls of Earth — in a convenient travel cube. —Bill Bill Peters Assistant Editor Escape Pod | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP329: Pairs | By Zachary Jernigan Read by Matt Franklin of Fly Reckless Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Asimov’s, April 2011 All stories by Zachary Jernigan All stories read by Matt Franklin Rated 17-and-up for violence, language, and sexual imagery. Pairs by Zachary Jernigan I had been practicing turning myself into a knife. Between star systems I gathered and focused my particles into a triangle, a sharp shape. Hurling myself against the diamond-hard walls of my small ship, the point of the weapon hardened. I honed myself. You see, I had decided to murder my employer. I had studied his weaknesses and come to believe myself capable of the act. I did not know when and where, nor did I know what would trigger it. I simply knew it had to happen. On that day I would either die or buy myself a measure of freedom. Originally, this was the extent of my plan: To serve myself. My name is Arihant. I am one of two humans still inhabiting a physical form, diminished though it is. Outside the walls of my ship, I am in form a faintly translucent white specter, strong and powerfully built—an artist’s anatomical model. Over the years it has become difficult to remember what my face looked like, and thus my features are only approximately human, my head bare. My eyes glow the color of Earth’s sun. I am quite beautiful, Louca tells me. On more than one occasion she has run her hands over the ghostly contours of my body. “I wish you were solid,” she once said. “Oh, Ari. The things I would do to you.” Louca is the one I am forced to follow and observe. Her name means crazy—an appropriate name. She is the second human possessing a body. Technically, her body is a black, whale-shaped ship one hundred meters long, but her avatars take the forms of anything she imagines. Very rarely, she is human, and never the same person twice. More often, she wears the bodies of flying animals. She dreams of flying, which is appropriate. Our profession is transport. For three centuries we have hauled the disembodied souls of Earth—each stored in a projection cube—from star to star to be sold. They are quite expensive, I am told, but I have no understanding of the means of exchange. Nearly everything is hidden from me, and Louca sees nothing. The reason souls are bought varies. Often they are kept as curios. Sometimes they are used to attract customers to the buyer’s business. My employer used to goad me on these points: “Is it not wonderful to know your people are put to such good use? Imagine how happy it must make them!” But I know the truth. Even without physical bodies, men become lonely. They despair and I feel it. Surely Louca feels it; she goes crazier and crazier in such close proximity to ghosts. Before the events of this story, only the luckiest souls were bought in pairs or groups, a rare occurrence. Now, because of Louca and I, it is the rule that souls must be sold in pairs. It is my one accomplishment, making men marginally less alone. Still, I arrange nothing—I have no power over the situation. I follow Louca from a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers, never any closer, and report anything unusual. I need not watch very closely. Louca’s duty is to dream violent dreams, to defend and deliver her payload. Hopefully, her capacity for violence will never be tested. She is categorically insane—a fact that, my employer insists, makes her uniquely suited to the job of protector. Employer. Job. The terms are ridiculous, for Louca and I are not paid. Our terms of service are not negotiable. I am no one’s employee, but I prefer not to use the word slave. Or master. I cling to life. I value it, though what value it has is measured in a mere handful of molecules. I possess no unique or useful knowledge, only memories. My ship, small though it is, has several lifetimes’ wo | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP328: Surviving the eBookalypse | By Randy Henderson Read by Roberto Suarez Discuss on our forums. An Escape Pod Original! All stories by Randy Henderson All stories read by Roberto Suarez Rated 13-and-up for language. Surviving the eBookalypse by Randy Henderson I entered the City Public Library wearing my plastic replica chainmail and sword, and my suede “book jacket” with a laminated author’s license clipped to the collar. Before me stood a fully automated checkout kiosk for scheduling author recitals. The library floor beyond that was filled with neat rows of author cubicles, each with a desk and chair. Most were occupied. The air was filled with the soft tickity-ticking of keyboards, and the smells of coffee, “New Book” scented air fresheners, and Cup o’ Soup. Heads popped up over cubicle walls in response to the clacking of the door, then disappeared again when they saw I was no customer or potential patron. I understood their disappointed expressions too well. This was not at all where I thought I would be two years after publishing my first e-book. A woman’s smile caught my attention. It was like cherry-haloed sunshine, floating between her neon blue hair and her black lace dress. She emerged from a cube in the Romance section, walked up to me, leaned in close and sniffed at the air. Then she said with the hint of a Mexican accent, “I smell a transfer from Bainbridge library, no? An MFA boy, if I’m not mistaken?” “That obvious?” I asked. “Lucky guess.” She laughed, and flicked my author’s license. “Says so right here.” “Oh. Yes.” I felt the fool. I glanced at her author’s license. “Myra Sweet.” “That’s me,” she said. “So, the great literary novel didn’t work out like you thought it would, eh?” “You’ve heard of my book?” “No, but it’s the same old story. Follow me. I’ll show you around.” She turned and walked away. I followed in the wake of her sugary perfume, and my eyes were drawn down to the swaying of her hips. There lie danger, I felt certain, but tempting danger. On the back of her black suede book jacket were reviews of her work. “Myra Sweet’s recital style would make an audience in Antarctica sweat.” – Romance Recitals Monthly “Sweet lives up to her name with The Bride Wore Pistols. This one has to be heard to be believed.” – Jenna Johnson, Amazon-Random House “Myra Sweet blends sex and action so seamlessly her work deserves a new genre – sextion? Sacxy? Whatever, she’s smoking hot.” – Phoenix Jones I wondered if the reviews were real. I hoped they weren’t. If someone with reviews like that didn’t have a patron supporting her, what chance did I have? I reached back to make sure the blurb for my own book, “Magic Daze and Dark Knights,” was still Velcroed securely to the back of my jacket. We walked past the row of thriller authors, almost exclusively men with crew cuts dressed in various colored jumpsuits and bomber-style book jackets. A few of them gave me an informal salute or a cursory nod as we passed, and their musk cologne made me cough in response. We passed the row of horror authors, with their all-black clothing, red or black hair, and pale skin. Most of them arched a single eyebrow at me, or stared at me until I looked away. Further off I saw cowboys and cowgirls, Renaissance-garbed folks, and business-casual attire. Seeing so many authors of the same genre together just reinforced my opinion that “dressing to genre” was not a good idea for everyone. One man’s mustachio was another man’s weasely whiskers. One woman’s ghostly was another woman’s sickly. It reminded me to straighten my posture and suck in my modest gut. At the back of the library was a “timeline of books” displayed across the wall. We walked along it,[...] | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP327: Revenants | By Judith Tarr Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. First published in DINOSAURFANTASTIC from DAW edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, 1993 All stories by Judith Tarr All stories read by Mur Lafferty REVENANTS by Judith Tarr Janie wanted to pet the pterodactyl. “Here’s the auk,” I said. “Look how soft his feathers are. Look at the dodo, isn’t he funny? Don’t you want to give the quagga a carrot?” Janie wouldn’t even dignify that with disgust. It was the pterodactyl or nothing. Janie is four. At four, all or nothing isn’t a philosophy, it’s universal law. A very intelligent four can argue that this is the Greater Metro Revenants’ Zoo, yes? And this is the room where they keep the ones that can be petted, yes? So why can’t a person pet the pterodactyl? No use explaining that everything else was inoculated and immunized and sterilized and rendered safe for children to handle. Everything but the pterodactyl. They’d just made it, and it was supposed to be pettable when they were done, but not yet. There’d been plenty of controversy about putting it on display so soon, but public outcry won out over scientific common sense. So the thing was on display, but behind neoglas inlaid with the injunction: No, I’m Not Ready Yet. Look, But Don’t Touch. Janie reads. I should know. It’s one of the chief points of debate between her father and me. She could read the warning as well as I could. “So why can’t I touch? I want to touch!” She was fast winding up to a tantrum. I could stop it now and risk an injunction for public child abuse, or wait till it became a nuisance and we were both shuffled off the premises. Inside its enclosure, the pterodactyl stretched its wings and opened its beak and hissed. Neoglas is new, about as new as revenants; it’s one-way to sound as well as sight. The pterodactyl couldn’t see us or hear us, which was lucky for Janie. I wished we couldn’t see or hear it, either. It wasn’t particularly ugly, just strange. One whole faction of paleontologists had been thrown out into the cold when the thing came out of its vat warm-blooded and covered with soft silvery-white fur. Without the fur it would have been a leathery lizardlike thing with batwings. With the fur it looked like a white bat with a peculiar, half-avian, half-saurian head, and extremely convincing talons. Janie’s fixation and the thing’s furriness notwithstanding, it didn’t look very pettable. Its eyes were a disturbing shade of red, with pinpoint pupils. I wondered if it was hungry, or if it wanted to stretch its wings and fly. Janie had stopped whining. She was going to howl next. Something bellowed in the bowels of the building. Janie’s mouth snapped shut. “There,” I said. “Look what you did.” If that got me cited, let it. It cut off Janie’s howl before it started. “They’ve got something big down there,” somebody said. “Probably the aurochs,” said somebody else. “Mammoths trumpet like elephants.” “Maybe it’s a T. Rex,” said a kid’s voice. “They don’t have one of those yet,” said the one who knew it all. “They’d need a bigger enclosure than they can afford to build, with a stronger perimeter field. So they’re bringing back later things, because they’re smaller.” “But if they’ve got the mammoths—” “Mammoths don’t have teeth as long as your arm. They don’t eat people.” Janie’s eyes were as big as they can get. I got her out of there before she decided she wanted to howl after all. Ice cream distracted her. So did a pony ride in the zoo’s park—the pony was a Merychippus, a handsome little dun that looked perfectly ponylike except for the pair of vestigial toes flanking each of its hooves. By the time we picked up our picnic and headed for the tables by the mammoths’ pit, I was starting to breathe almost normally. If you haven’t got your kid license yet, you can only imagine you know what it’s like to take | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP326: Flash Fiction Special | Poppies and Chrome by Sylvia Hiven Rabbi Aaron Meets Satan by Tim Lieder Fine-Tuning the Universe by Merrie Haskell narrated by Mat Weller, author Richard E. Dansky, and Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. Appropriate for teens and up due to erotic imagery and language. | 1/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 25 | Soundproof #15 | Click here to get the epub version. Dear Faithful Listeners And Readers— Happy 2012! It’s looking to be a very exciting year at Escape Pod, and we’re delighted you’re still hanging out with us! We had a lot of fun bringing you different things in 2011, from our first audio drama at the end of the year to the various story collections to our supporters. And thanks to your supporters, by the way. It’s amazing to realize we’re in our seventh year doing this, and we’ve operated in the black the entire time. We couldn’t have done that without you, so thank you. To be completely honest, it hasn’t been smooth sailing. We got behind in submissions this year, even with some time off to catch up. Authors got angry, as they should have done, and we’ve figured out where things went wrong and are working on fixing it. I won’t offer excuses, only that I’m responsible for this magazine and I let down our authors, and I’m very sorry for this. We’re closing our doors to submissions in January in order to get everything organized. Hugo voting is open, from now until March 31! I’ll have a blog post soon about what Escape Pod has offered that is eligible, and we’re appreciate a consideration if you’re eligible to nominate. Resolutions are promises to fail, so we won’t make any, but we do promise to continue to bring you weekly SF that will be fun. And lose those 10 pounds, of course. Have a safe and happy 2012. Be mighty, and have fun! Mur Lafferty Editor | 1/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP325: Bad Dogs Escape | By James Patrick Kelly Cast: Becca- AB Kovacs Sam- Pamela L. Quevillon Mel Gibson- John Cmar Discuss on our forums. An Escape Pod Original! All stories by James Patrick Kelly All stories read by AB Kovacs, Pamela L. Quevillon, John Cmar Appropriate for older teens and up due to erotic imagery and war criminal comeuppance. Bad Dogs Escape By James Patrick Kelly /SFX/ CLOCK TICKING, FADE TO /SFX/ DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE SAM: Like? BECCA: Like. SAM: (growls like a dog, sexy) BECCA: Like? SAM: Like. /SFX/ DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE BECCA: Lick? SAM: (giggles) Like. BECCA: (howls like a dog) /SFX/ DOGS BARKING CLOSER SAM: They’re busy today. BECCA: Man’s best friend. (SAM and BECCA laugh) MEL: (in distance) Help! SAM: Uh-oh. BECCA: Company. /SFX/ DOGS BARKING, CLOSER MEL: (outside) Open up. Help! /SFX/ PANICKY KNOCKING ON DOOR MEL: (outside) For God’s sake, let me in! SAM: Already with God. Leave him. BECCA: No, let’s take a look. I could use a laugh. /SFX/ FOOTSTEPS. WINDOW SLIDES OPEN. SAM: Good enough to eat? BECCA: You’re bad. /SFX/ DOGS BARKING MEL: I can see you in there. Hurry. Please. BECCA: Where’s the controller? SAM: You’re not letting him in? /SFX/ DOGS BARKING /SFX/ MORE KNOCKING BECCA: This’ll be fun. Is the taser charged? SAM: Let’s see. /SFX/ TASER ZAP SAM: Yep. BECCA: I bet nine minutes. SAM: Not fair. You can see him. /SFX/ GARAGE DOOR OPENING BECCA: Nine is my bet. Yours? SAM: Way too quick. Ten minutes. No, eleven. BECCA: Done. (calls to Mel) It’s an overhead door. You have to crawl. MEL: (outside) What? They’re coming fast. SAM: Crawl under! /SFX/ CRAWLING, GRUNTING MEL: Shut it, shut it now! /SFX/ GARAGE DOOR CLOSING MEL: Thank you, thank you, thank you. You saved my life. /SFX/ STANDS, MORE GRUNTS, DUSTS HIMSELF OFF MEL: But who are you? BECCA: Me, Becca. She, Sam. You? SAM: Mel Gibson, maybe. BECCA: Our road warrior. (SAM and BECCA laugh) MEL: (confused) No, my name is Fish. Robert Fish. You can call me Bob. SAM: Or I can call you Mel Gibson. MEL: I beg your pardon, but that’s not my name. My name is Bob. SAM: Mel. (beat) Gibson. BECCA: You’re bad, Sam. (beat) So Mel, you must be from the vault. MEL: The vault? BECCA: The big underground storage thingy. All the fatcats snoozing away. MEL: You mean the Cultural Preservation Facility? That was top secret back when … but I suppose you must know all about it by now. BECCA: Not all. SAM: Something about your old government. BECCA: You people wasted everything. And then millions died. SAM: Billions. MEL: We tried. We tried very hard. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t see what was coming. The droughts, tornados, the economy going south. But it didn’t happen all at once. Then the Raccoon flu, the antibiotics were useless. The wheat crop failed two years in a row. Then came riots, cities on fire, madness. When we lost control we gathered the best — scientists, economists, engineers, architects into the CPF …. SAM: CPF? MEL: The Cultural Preservation Facility. The vault. The Congressional Committee selected a hundred volunteers to enter suspended animation pods to sleep through all the disasters. Wait, how long has it been? SAM: Since when? MEL: I mean, what year is this? SAM: Pick one. They’re all available. BECCA: My mom never kept a calendar. Did yours, Sam? SAM: You met my mom. BECCA: Right. So anyway, Mel, you decided to snooze while the world went to the dogs. MEL: Everything was flying apart. We tried to save what we could. But something went wrong. SAM: You think? MEL: No, I mean in the CPF. The main power was rated for fifty years, then if nobody woke us up the backup was supposed to kick in. But for some reason, it’s only running at half power. Whole sections are shutting down. I was luck | 12/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP324: Long Winter’s Nap | By Catherine H. Shaffer Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. First published in Analog, 2006 All stories by Catherine H. Shaffer All stories read by Mur Lafferty Nothing objectionable in this episode, except it may not be appropriate for the younger folk, as the story does discuss Santy Clawr. Long Winter’s Nap by Catherine H. Shaffer “Eat,” said MooninMama, “You have a long winter ahead.” LittlestOne turned her head away as MooninMama lifted the spoon of raspberry pie dripping with honey and caribou fat. LittlestOne was sleepy, too sleepy, for what she planned. “I am already full,” said LittlestOne. Her stomach rumbled, giving away her lie. MooninMama shrugged and set the plate away. It was beginning to get cold in the cave as the crackling fire burned down to embers. Soon it would be time to sleep, time to dream of spring, when they would awaken, shivering, and find that Santy Clawr had visited them. MooninMama lay next to YediDaddy and pulled LittlestOne down between them, like a baby. All of the others had their own beds. The hardest part was lying still between MooninMama and YediDaddy without falling asleep. It wasn’t like going to sleep at night. There were no blankets to keep them warm, though they had soft beds. More than once, LittlestOne shook herself awake after accidentally nodding off. She wasn’t sure she could fight off the long sleep by simple force of will, not with the cold coming down into her bones. She peeked out from beneath her heavy lids and the cave was dark except for the thin, crackly lines of orange from the dying embers in the fire pit. The taste of sugar rose to her tongue and her hands and feet began to tingle. MooninMama was still, her breath coming softer and fainter each time. Her bright blue eyes were closed and her cheek as soft as a baby’s. Chestnut hair fanned around her shoulders. Her breasts rose and fell softly with her breath. YediDaddy wasn’t breathing at all. There was a faint beard of frost on his face, decorating the stubble on his chin. All around lay LittlestOne’s brothers and sisters, their children, her aunts and uncles and cousins, her grandparents, and all the other people of the tribe. In the summer, when the tribe slept, there were all sorts of sounds in the night. People coughing, snoring, and sometimes laughing, but here there was nothing but a deep silence. LittlestOne stood up and shook the tingling out. She felt a pang of longing looking at her parents hibernating, but it wasn’t enough to keep her with them. She turned to sneak out. She felt dizzy and stumbled several times as she tiptoed across the sleeping bodies of her tribe. Nothing would wake them now but Spring. LittlestOne crawled out of the cave and went to the summer house that YediDaddy had built. She lit a fire and crouched beside it. When she felt completely awake, she went out into the night. It was snowing softly, and there weren’t any stars. She had never been so alone. But she resisted the temptation to go back to the cave with her family. She imagined what they would say when she told them she had met Santy Clawr. They wouldn’t think she was such a baby, then! # The days were lonely for LittlestOne. It grew colder and all she wanted to do was go to sleep. Many times she woke herself just on the verge of hibernation , and had to get warm again so she wouldn’t miss Santy. She knew where to find food, even under the snow. MooninMama and YediDaddy kept caches of meat and potatoes underground, where they wouldn’t go bad. There were some nuts and berries left on the bushes, and she didn’t need to eat much, since she was so small. Digging through the buried boxes, LittlestOne wondered why there was so much food, with the feast that Santy Clawr would be bringing. To fight off the loneliness, she sat up on top of the highest hill and looked out over the water. The Hots had called it Saginaw Bay. The wind blew, raising ridges of white up out of the gray water. She cr | 12/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP323: Marking Time on the Far Side of Forever | By DK Latta Read by Josh Roseman Discuss on our forums. First published in Prairie Fire, 1999 All stories by DK Latta All stories read by Josh Roseman Marking Time on the Far Side of Forever by D.K. Latta I sit beneath the dark green sky, overlooking the valley that has changed much over the years. What was once a stream has swelled into a river while, to the east, lush vegetation grows where I think there was once a shallow lake. I can’t remember definitely. The information is stored inside me, filed, itemized; I’m merely unsure how to access it. It will come to me. Later, when a random search, an unrelated thought, cracks open the proper conduits and a pulse of electricity resurrects the knowledge, unbidden. Until then, I am content to wait. Below my knee, the dented brass-coloured metal becomes the red of a tree trunk, substituting as a shin and foot. Like an antiquated peg-leg, like a stereotypical pira…pi…pi- Pi is 3.1415926… The organic substance must be replaced occasionally, but the concept has served satisfactorily for almost two hundred years. It was easy to jury-rig. Not so my mnemonic core. I lack the appropriate tools and diagnostic programs. Yes. There had been a lake, teeming with the hoorah-thet fish. I call them fish simply to provide a basis of comparative orientation. Fish only exist on earth, and this is not earth. Earth is a long, long way away. “Gakha!” I turn my head left, but abruptly the joints seize up. The swivel mechanism has been malfunctioning for months. Fiffer comes bounding through the long red stalks that sprout to the height of a man. The sun is setting, and when night settles the stalks will curl up until the first rays of morning buss them with its solar kiss. I’m being florid. Dr. Fujiwama programmed me that way. She said it would make my information easier to digest for the scouting party. My left eye starts pixilating, turning everything into a multi-coloured grid. I slap my palm against my brow with a dull clang! and the image clears. Who is bounding toward me? Do I know him? Fiffer. He bounces along on his powerful tail, his four lower limbs atrophied to stumps. I’ve unearthed fossils indicating that his ancestors had well-developed hind limbs. I think the scouting party will be pleased with my report on paleozoology. There are some nice passages in it. Florid even. Fiffer calls me Gakha, which means ‘shelled man’. They do not comprehend refined metals. Fiffer’s people think I’m some sort of god. I’ve tried to disabuse them of that notion. Fiffer halts, his principle forelimb gesticulating. The limb is a tongue that has evolved through the chest cavity. I detail its evolution in my report on Comparative Anatomies of the Vertebrates of the Temperate Zone. It was my first completed essay. I’m proud to say my observations within it have not been contradicted by subsequent data collected in the ensuing years. I was very meticulous. “Gakha?” I focus, realizing I may have drifted. “Has a grubbling fallen into a well?” I rise, prepared to rescue the little creature. “No.” His tongue waves excitedly. “A shell has fallen.” My left eye pixilates momentarily. I ignore it. “What?” “A big shell. It was bright at its bottom as it fell from the sky. Then it landed and went dark.” “Shell?” Slowly, I consider: shell equals refined metals. “Show me, please.” * * * It’s a ship. I don’t recognize the design. I lurch toward it in fits and starts through the swamp. I have sent Fiffer back to the village, until I can ascertain whether the inhabitants of the shell — I mean, ship — whether they mean his people harm. It is important that no harm come to them. The scouting party will want to meet them. In the nightsky I recognize the purple glimmer of a planet that shares the sa[...] | 12/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP322: Chicken Noodle Gravity | By J. Daniel Sawyer Read by Paul Haring Discuss on our forums. An Escape Pod original! All stories by J. Daniel Sawyer All stories read by Paul Haring Rated 17 and up for language, and mild sexual situations Chicken Noodle Gravity by J. Daniel Sawyer I hate to start out this way, but before we get to the reason I’m standing on this stool with a fez on my head, in the middle of the night, in front of a double-cal-king bed in a furniture store—which, yes, Officer, I swear I’ll confess I broke into illegally—before we get to any of that, there’s something I have to tell you. I know it’s awful, evil, and just plain wrong, but there’s no way around it, and you won’t understand anything else unless I say this right up front, so here goes: Stephen was stoned. And when I say “stoned” I mean he’d eaten enough brownies and smoked enough pot to put the economies of five or six minor countries into a severe, long-term deficit crisis. It was okay. It helped him cope with the chemo. Mellowed him out. We didn’t have to fight over who got to hold the remote. He was better in bed too—not as neurotic. Didn’t complain about my mustache when I kissed him. Suits me right for shacking up with a clean freak. The weed was my revenge—well, the fact that the weed made it possible for him to eat. We had to grow our own—only way we could afford it, though I swear we probably spent as much on the electricity as we would have on the bud. Not a great climate for it, not in the winter. So, the revenge part—that would be his appetite. When he smoked, it came back. It was the only time it came back. And there were only two things he could handle: Brownies. And chicken noodle soup. The really rancid stuff that came in a red and white can. I swear, by all that’s good and holy and a bowl of Ex-Lax besides, that was all he could eat. And he hated chocolate almost as much as he hated the soup. Feeding him the soup and brownies was my revenge on him for getting sick in the first place. Not that I blamed him about the soup. A hundred forty years after it was invented, that stuff still smelled like salted famine and disease glopping out of the can. But after Stephen lost all his hair, for the third time, I got to love that smell. Not because it smelled any better, but because every time I smelled it I knew he’d be around at least long enough to eat it. Sometimes, a little bit of hope is all you need to keep going. When your life is filled with words like “pancreatic,” “stage four,” and “terminal,” you learn to live with what you can get. So we smoked like chimneys, screwed like carpenters, sang like sailors, and gambled like day-traders. I didn’t give much of a damn that the money wouldn’t last much longer than him. But he just. Kept. Lasting. He didn’t want to let me go any more than I wanted to let him go. First it was the money. Then it was the house. Then it was the car. But it didn’t matter. As long as I could keep growing the green, and opening those red and white cans. It went on like that all winter. When they diagnosed him, they said he’d last five weeks. We’d made it five months, and we weren’t going to make it much longer without changing—and whatever it was, we were going to have to get creative. I was still employed. My job at the casino paid enough in tips that we should have been okay, and my insurance covered all his doctor visits. But the meds killed us. Cancer drugs move so fast that the difference in survival comes down to what month you were diagnosed, now. That small-cell lung cancer you’ve got today will kill you, but the tumor your brother discovers in six weeks will be treatable, and the one your mom gets a month after that will be curable. If you can stay alive long enough, then you can stay alive period. That’s the deal. And that’s why every penny I earned in salary and ti[...] | 12/8/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP321: Honor Killing | By Ray Tabler Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. An Escape Pod original! All stories by Ray Tabler All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated 10 and up for blaster violence. Honor Killing by Ray Tabler You would think that after all the years I’ve spent schlepping cargoes around the galaxy I’d have learned not to get involved with the locals, especially when they’re not humans. You would think. A Yanuleen sat down across the table from me in a bar at the edge of the landing field outside of Yanult’s largest city. Yanuleen are furry little folk, bipedal and about a meter tall with six multi-jointed arms poking out at odd intervals around their middles. This one blinked beady, black eyes at me, “Greetings Sentient Being.” “Uh, greetings.” “Isn’t it a glorious piece?” My new buddy pointed an arm at the artwork on display in the middle of the bar. Yanuleen are a bit nuts for that type of thing. They have artwork, mainly sculpture, everywhere, even in a bar. To me it just looked like a three-meter tall bundle of twigs with pieces of broken pottery tossed in at random. “Very nice.” Being in a foul mood, I took a drink and stared at the Yanuleen. “Here is being Klonoon.” He pointed all six arms at himself, in the manner of his kind. “Might here also being Captain Anne Katya Shim, who is having a cargo of entertainment modules impounded by the Port Authority?” “Yeah, that’s me. What’s it to ya, shorty?” This twerp was starting to get on my nerves. “Great amounts of good fortune we are both having. Klonoon is searching many establishments near the spaceport for Captain Anne Katya Shim.” “Well, you found me. What next?” “Next is being Klonoon and Captain Anne Katya Shim discussing matters of mutual benefit.” “And just what matters might those be?” Klonoon is having much influence with the official in charge of impounding cargoes.” Suddenly, my old buddy Klonoon wasn’t near as annoying as a few minutes ago. Captain Anne Katya Shim is helping Klonoon and Klonoon is helping Captain Anne–” “Just call me Anne, okay? And get to the point.” Klonoon’s whole body wriggled, which I think meant he was laughing, or maybe getting ready to vomit. I hadn’t planned on being on that damned planet for more than a day or two, so I hadn’t studied the culture much. “Klonoon is getting assets unfrozen so Anne is getting paid for delivery of cargo.” “And what is Anne doing– I mean, what is it you want me to do in return?” “Anne is killing Klonoon’s cousin Jerbot.” It was my turn to blink. “Anne is what?” “Klonoon’s cousin Jerbot is needing to be killed. It is being a matter of honor.” “I don’t care if it is a matter of honor. Murder’s illegal and I don’t want to end up in prison.” “No. No. Yes. Yes. Murder is being illegal. Honor killings are being different.” Now, right here is when I should have stood up and stormed out. “If that’s the case, why don’t you just kill Jerbot yourself?” Klonoon pulled all three arms in on one side and stuck the others straight out. “Klonoon is not doing that! The one who is killing Jerbot is taking Jerbot’s dishonor on himself.” “Oh well, that’s logical.” “Yes, very. Off-worlders are having no honor. And, Humans are being particularly violent. Anne is probably killing sixes of sentient beings, perhaps sixes of sixes.” “What do you mean we’re violent?” “Humans are having many wars. You are having your War of First Contact, your Altair War, your War of the Outer Rift, your–” “All right, all right, we’ve had a lot of wars. At least we’re not as bad as the[...] | 12/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 31 | Soundproof #14 | Click here for the epub version. Hello everyone, You know that column you run into every now and then on how time always seems like it’s going faster as you get older? The one where you can kind of tell that the columnist suddenly realized he hadn’t actually written their weekly twelve column inches and was asking themselves how exactly Tuesday afternoon had arrived on them already (or a TV columnnist for that matter — the first time I ran into it I think I was 7 or 8 and my parents were watching 60 Minutes). Yeah, it’s kind of been like that lately. I think with Christmas/Hanukkah/[insert midwinter celebration of choice]/Festivus coming up and the rapid shortening of days ahead of the solstice, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, breed a feeling of loss at the time we had, but really would like to have again. Not quite nostalia, more like (part of me wants to write now-stalgia, but that would be a horribly disqualifying pun) the loss of the recent past that you really wanted to have accomplished more in. Time travel’s usually all about meeting your grandkids to the nth degree and playing with their cool new gadgets/seeing the future dystopia/utopia/stealing a book of sports statistics, or going back and killing Hitler. But commercial and commoditized time travel would probably just be a bunch of people trying to optimize the days that didn’t go horribly wrong, but didn’t approach the theoretical ur-day that modern days rarely meet. We’d all make our deadlines, but would be 90 years old after 35 calendar years. And with that, I’ll let you peruse our fine stories this month. For those of you who NaNoWriMo’d last month, I hope you’re recovering. —Bill Bill Peters Assistant Editor Escape Pod —30— | 12/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP320: Thanksgiving Day | By Jay Werkheiser Read by Paul Haring Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Analog All stories by Jay Werkheiser All stories read by Paul Haring Thanksgiving Day By Jay Werkheiser Kev’s stomach curled around emptiness, embracing it as a constant reminder that the colony’s Earth food was almost gone. Another three months, four at the outside. Then what? How will we die? He bent down to look into the nearest cage. “Maybe you’ll tell us why the food here is poisonous,” he said to one of the rats inside. It rolled its dull eyes listlessly toward him. Rust-brown clumps matted its fur, and the metallic odor of dried blood hung in the air. Is that how I’ll go, clutching helplessly at alien dirt, coughing up blood? His gut clenched tighter. “They are not going to tell you anything,” Ahmet said from across the toxicology lab. Kev looked up from the cage at the short, dark-skinned man walking toward him. His circular glasses, perched atop a narrow nose, reminded Kev of an owl. “I thought I’d stop by on the way home from the analytical chem lab,” Kev said. “One of the grunts said you were looking for me earlier.” Ahmet nodded. “I was hoping you could run some samples for me. Give me a clue what’s in them.” Kev frowned. “The biochem team has me running Bradford assays day and night, looking for alien proteins. Did you come up with a new lead?” Hope flared in his chest, then died with Ahmet’s reply. “I’m afraid I’m just grasping at straws. My subchronic rats keep developing the same symptoms — nosebleed, bloody stools, and ultimately internal hemorrhaging.” “Subchronic?” said Kev, quizzically. “My field’s spectroscopy.” “The subjects receive daily doses of an alien food source over ten percent of their life span, about three months for rats.” “Three months?” Kev said. “The hydroponics tanks are dying, Ahmet.” “Yes, I understand that. You’re not the only one living on short rations.” Anger flashed behind Ahmet’s glasses, but quickly dissipated. “Toxicology is a slow business. I don’t think we’re going to have results in time.” Ahmet seemed to deflate with his anger. “We came all this way, spent all those years on the ship, to fail before we even get started.” Kev put his hand on Ahmet’s shoulder. “We’re not going down without a fight.” Ahmet nodded, his eyes downcast. “I have learned that mycowood produced the most severe symptoms in the rats.” “Mycowood? They’re those mushroom-shaped tree things, right? Smell minty.” “Yes. The organic team tells me the smell comes from salicylate esters. All the local plants produce them.” Kev connected the dots. Salicylates. Aspirin. “Blood thinners?” he asked. Ahmet’s head bobbled up and down. “But only dangerous in quantities much larger than we find here. Still, I think it could be important.” “All right, send some of your mycowood samples over to the analyt lab. I’ll squeeze them in first thing in the morning.” “Thank you. Thank you!” Ahmet’s Turkish accent was normally muted, but it thickened when he was excited. “That will be most helpful.” “Save your enthusiasm for tomorrow.” A thin smile curled Kev’s lips, his first in a long time. “It’s nearly fourteen o’clock, time to head home for a few hours’ sleep.” The short walk across the colony compound felt longer because Epsilon Indi, settling low on the horizon at this late hour, cast bright sunbeams into his eyes. Two long shadows moved through the glare ahead of him. Kev shielded his eyes with his hand to see who it was — two grunts working[...] | 11/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP319: Driving X | By Gwendolyn Clare Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Warrior Wisewoman 3 All stories by Gwendolyn Clare All stories read by Mur Lafferty Driving X by Gwendolyn Clare Carmela wouldn’t have stopped if she had known that the kid was still alive. She spotted the body lying under a creosote bush, maybe ten yards from the road, and she hit the brakes. She grabbed the roll cage of the old dune buggy and pulled herself up, standing on the driver’s seat to scan in both directions along the unpaved road. A dust devil twirled a silent ballet off to the southeast, but hers was the only man-made dust trail in evidence for miles. She raised her hand to cover the sun and squinted into the bleached, cloudless sky–no vultures yet, which was good, since vultures attract attention. Minimal risk, she decided. The dune buggy itself wasn’t that valuable, but the newer-model solar panels powering it would be enough to tempt any sane person, and the carboys of potable water were worth a small fortune out here. Carmela swung out of the dune buggy and jogged over to check out the body. It was tall but skinny, with the not-yet-filled-out look of a teenager. Pale skin, a tint of sunburn, brown hair cropped at chin-length. The girl was lying face down in the dust, so Carmela rolled the body over and checked her front pockets for anything of interest. A month ago, she would have felt ashamed, but scavenging was the norm down here; after all, dead people don’t miss what you take from them. Carmela was rifling through the kid’s backpack–shaking her head about the nearly empty water supply–when she heard the girl moan. She froze, one hand still buried in the bag. She should gather up the loot and make a run for the dune buggy before the girl came around. The kid was probably a goner, anyway, she told herself. Instead, she leaned in closer, looking at the face plastered with sand and sweaty clumps of brown hair. The girl’s eyelids peeled back and stared up at Carmela with the glazed slowness of delirium. Her cracked lips parted and she said, hoarsely, “Mom?” Nobody had ever called Carmela that before. She slid her hands under the girl’s shoulders to lift her. # Swinging her legs, nine-year-old Carmela knocked her heels lightly against the side of the exam table. Mama sat in a plastic chair, flipping through a magazine the way she always did when she was getting impatient. Carmela’s test result had come in, and for some reason that was beyond her, Mama was really nervous about it. And the doctor was running late. Carmela didn’t know why Mama was all bent out of shape over the non-Mendelian genetic test. To be fair, she wasn’t entirely sure what “non-Mendelian” meant, except that it was something bad that your genes could be. Driving X was a chromosome that was bad that way, and pretty much everybody had it, and for some reason you had to get tested for it anyway. That’s what Carmela knew. Dr. Tanaka entered the exam room, holding a manila folder to her chest. ”Afternoon Ms. Perez, Carmela. Sorry to keep you waiting.” Mama dropped the magazine on the floor next to her chair and stood, fingers knotted together nervously. ”Well?” Dr. Tanaka opened the folder, took out a single sheet of paper, and handed it to Mama. Mama stared at it for a long minute, like she couldn’t quite see it properly. She made a choking noise. In her tight, mustn’t-cry-in-public voice, she said, “I’ll be right back.” She left the paper on her chair and hurried for the door. Carmela hopped off the exam table and picked up the sheet of paper. It had a lot of gobbledygook on it, but right in the middle, in bold, it read, “XDXD”. She didn’t understand what the big deal was. Pretty much everybody had the Driving X allele on at least one of their X chromosomes. [...] | 11/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP318: The Prize Beyond Gold | By Ian Creasey Read by Josh Roseman Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Asimov’s All stories by Ian Creasey All stories read by Josh Roseman The Prize Beyond Gold by Ian Creasey Three days before the race, when Delroy had finished warming down from a training run, his coach summoned him for a talk. Delroy could tell it was something big. Michito’s job — assisted by his Enhanced empathy — was to become exquisitely sensitive to his athlete’s mood, so as to help get the best out of him. The attunement sometimes became mutual, and Delroy now discerned a rare eagerness in Michito’s almost-natural face. “The weather forecast for race day has reached certainty,” said Michito. “Temperature: perfect. Humidity: perfect. Wind speed: just below the permissible maximum. Wind direction –” “Perfect?” said Delroy. “Behind you all the way.” Michito grinned in delight. “It’s the final star in the constellation. You’re in great shape, the weather will be ideal, we’re two thousand metres above sea level” — Michito made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the many other factors affecting performance — “and it all adds up to one thing.” “I’m going to win?” Delroy didn’t understand Michito’s glee: the weather would be the same for all the runners. “Yes, but never mind that. Forget winning — you have a chance at the record!” Michito paused to let it sink in. Records were something that athletes and coaches normally never discussed, because they’d stood so long that they were effectively unbeatable. The record for the men’s 100 metres had remained at 8.341 seconds for the past seventy years. A pulse of exhilaration surged through Delroy. His posture stiffened, as if already preparing for the starting gun. “Really? The world record?” “Yes, the one and only. The prize beyond gold.” Michito’s excitement spilled out, infecting Delroy, whose own excitement blazed in return and stoked a feedback loop. They were practically getting high on it. Indeed, this giddy rush was as close to getting high as Delroy had ever experienced. In his entire life he’d never once taken any kind of drug. The rules were strict on that, as on so many other things. Abruptly, Michito reverted to his habitual seriousness. “A chance, I said. A real chance. But only if everything’s as smooth as an angel’s feather. We need absolute perfection. There can be no deviations, no distractions.” This was standard rhetoric for any important race. Yet Michito’s demeanour indicated something beyond the usual rigorous regime. “I think it would be best if you stayed here at the training ground,” Michito went on, “instead of going back to the villa tonight. This is a more controlled environment, with much less risk –” “What could possibly happen to me?” “I want to keep you away from other people, and it’s easier to do that here. You’ll be in purdah, seeing no-one except your coaching team. I know it’ll be frustrating, but it’s only three days.” Delroy grimaced, though he didn’t argue. Michito knew what was best. Aside from the usual health and attractiveness tweaks, Michito’s main Enhancement was an uncanny empathy that let him predict Delroy’s responses, and thus determine the optimum conditions for success. If he felt purdah was necessary, then it must be necessary. It was only another line in the script Delroy had been following all his life. The script had two phases, as familiar as his two legs. Sometimes, when he rehearsed stride patterns out on the track, the script echoed in his head with every step: left, right; left, right — race, train; race, train…. Michito said, “This is[...] | 11/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP317: Boxed In | By Marc-Anthony Taylor Read by Barry Haworth Discuss on our forums. First appeared in British Fantasy Society Winter Journal 2010/2011 All stories by Marc-Anthony Taylor All stories read by Barry Haworth This one isn’t for the kids, because of references to sex workers and acts. Boxed In by Marc-Anthony Taylor My sister had me boxed when I was four. She said she would have had it done to herself but she didn’t want to risk losing me, that it was the only way. I think she just hated the idea of renting her body out to the rich folk in the domes. Don’t get me wrong, she did good by me, I didn’t have to work till I was nine and in that time she studied hard and became a data-pimp herself. It was the only way she could keep us housed and fed after mum and dad had died. It must have been hard for her, if mum and dad had made it she might have made something of herself. If she hadn’t have had to look after me she would probably be in a dome herself by now. She once told me she had big plans; that she wanted to make things better. My only plan was to make enough cash to get us both out of the business. I never noticed the tiny implant at the base of my skull, the nano circuitry must be some of the best though, the tattoo circling my right eye is almost perfect. Kara controlled who, what, when and where. She made sure we got paid, and that I didn’t do anything too bad. She was a clever cookie. My sister looked after me. She did good. * Black leaves hung limply from the trees, refusing to fall despite the time of year. We were lucky to have trees at all; there were places on the other side of the city that had nothing living, except perhaps the odd person. Or so I was told, I had never ventured that far out and thankfully none of my clients had ever requested it. Kara didn’t think it was right to use vehicles. Even if they were meant to be eco friendly now. We would only ever use them if it was an emergency, she said. Everywhere I went, I went by foot, and I had come to know the city just as well as the grubby little apartment that my sister and I shared. My boots left imprints in the fine black powder that coated everything. The sky ships were under way again, every six months they would come out for a week, their massive air scrubbers extracting the carbon from the CO², supposedly leaving us with fresher air. Most people believed they took the oxygen and pumped it into the Eden-domes. The carbon was probably used to construct whatever they needed. The dust was excess that happened to shake loose from the giant machines. Already a couple of people were out with their vacuum cleaners, sucking up what they could of the carbon to sell on the black market. One or two had even rushed out with brush and pan in hand, carefully shaking their winnings into plastic bags. Kara had never done that, she said once we started collecting that stuff, it wouldn’t be long till we started getting sloppy and before you know it our lungs would be coated in gunk, bringing us that much closer to death. My sister, always the optimist. The mask I was wearing was about three years old, long past its renewal date but Kara had kept it in good working order, another one of her many talents. She knew how to break the manufacturing codes so she could regulate the functions. She would probably have been some big-shot programmer or hacker back in the old days. Now, she was just a skin-flint. “We gotta save our cash kid. Money doesn’t fall from the sky, no matter what the carbon monkeys think. And besides, we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past Nate, that’s what got us all into this mess. Recycling is the way to go baby bro, and if I can fix it, you’ll use it. ‘K?” She was always coming out with stuff like that. It might have helped if I had gone to school like her, but they stopped taking boxed kids not long after I got mine. Bad influence supposedly. Still, I could feel a rasp starti[...] | 11/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 36 | Soundproof #13 | You can download the ePub version here. Hello everyone, and happy November! It’s NaNoWriMo month, and a lot of professionals don’t like it. They say it’s misleading to tell newbies that the career that pros have taken years to perfect can be achieved in 30 days. They say that December 1 marks the day that thousands of unedited, 50,000 word “novels” hit the desks of agents and editors. Some of them are just cynics who hate the excitement people get as November draws near, since they’re toiling on their own books. But I tend to think it’s a great thing. Writing well is difficult, yes. But writing is not. And most people just stop themselves at writing, thinking if their story isn’t flat out brilliant literature from word one, they will never improve, never learn, and never be a writer. NaNoWriMo tells people to turn off the horrid editor in our minds and just write- something that’s difficult to do. Pros know for a fact that there’s always a lurking voice saying, “This is crap, why are you wasting your time with tripe?” - they just know to tell that voice to shut up, that they’ll get their opinion once the story is done. Most of all for me, NaNoWriMo encourages people to write - and write every day. And at the core of things, I really can’t see what kind of ogre thinks this is a bad idea. Writing is a great thing. More writers means more stories. And last I checked, we still liked stories. So participate in NaNoWriMo. Write a 50,000 word story in a month. Then let it sit. Then edit it. Then edit it again. Learn from every step. In other news, I just returned from World Fantasy Con, which was my first. It was a fantastic meeting of industry professionals, and I met a lot of great authors and narrators that have appeared in Escape Pod, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. (To name a few: Cat Rambo, K. Tempest Bradford, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, M. K. Hobson, Vylar Kaftan, and several more.) During the Escape Artists’ meetup, we managed to discuss fanfic, Elmo, and the Escape Artists forums. In retrospect perhaps we should have served alcohol. Ah well. It was fantastic meeting people, and cons are over too quickly. The last two months of the year have some really exciting stories planned, and I can’t wait to bring them to you. Be mighty! Mur | 11/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP316: Site Fourteen | By Laura Anne Gilman Read by Mat Weller Discuss on our forums. First appeared in ReVISIONS from Daw Boooks All stories by Laura Anne Gilman All stories read by Mat Weller This one isn’t for the kids, because of language and heavy content. Site Fourteen “Nereus Shuttle Four to Gateway Station, you have control.” Robinachec nodded confirmation as though the pilot could see him. ”Roger that. Bringing you in.” Palming the flat-topped lever, I watched as he moved it gently back towards him, pulling the bullet-shaped transport into the shed, an external framework of metal beams just large enough to hold two minisubs, or one shuttle. Robinechec has nightmares sometimes about something going wrong here. Forget the fact that it’s the safest maneuver in the entire procedure; he still talks about waking up in a cold sweat because he screwed up. You’d never know it to watch him. When you’re six hundred feet down – well below the twilight zone, in the bathypelagic or ‘deep water’ zone– your perception shifts. Nothing as arcane as the chemical balance in your brain changing, although there’s some of that, too. No, it’s more the realization, slow sinking into your brain, that there’s not damn-all between you and dying but a duraplas shield and some canned oxy-blend. You realize that, really process the concept, and you’re okay. If you can’t, you get the screamin’ meemies and they cart you Topside where you spend the rest of your life on solid dirt, carefully looking anywhere but ocean-ward. Not everyone’s cut out to be an aquanaut. No shame to it. Even now, only about a third of the applicants make it into training, and more than half of them dry out before graduation. | 10/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP315: Clockwork Fagin | By Cory Doctorow Read by Grant Baciocco Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories Music by Clockwork Quartet All stories by Cory Doctorow All stories read by Grant Baciocco This one is a long one! This is considered appropriate for kids 12 and up – it’s a YA story with one murder. Clockwork Fagin By Cory Doctorow Monty Goldfarb walked into St Agatha’s like he owned the place, a superior look on the half of his face that was still intact, a spring in his step despite his steel left leg. And it wasn’t long before he *did* own the place, taken it over by simple murder and cunning artifice. It wasn’t long before he was my best friend and my master, too, and the master of all St Agatha’s, and didn’t he preside over a *golden* era in the history of that miserable place? I’ve lived in St Agatha’s for six years, since I was 11 years old, when a reciprocating gear in the Muddy York Hall of Computing took off my right arm at the elbow. My Da had sent me off to Muddy York when Ma died of the consumption. He’d sold me into service of the Computers and I’d thrived in the big city, hadn’t cried, not even once, not even when Master Saunders beat me for playing kick-the-can with the other boys when I was meant to be polishing the brass. I didn’t cry when I lost my arm, nor when the barber-surgeon clamped me off and burned my stump with his medicinal tar. I’ve seen every kind of boy and girl come to St Aggie’s — swaggering, scared, tough, meek. The burned ones are often the hardest to read, inscrutable beneath their scars. Old Grinder don’t care, though, not one bit. Angry or scared, burned and hobbling or swaggering and full of beans, the first thing he does when new meat turns up on his doorstep is tenderize it a little. That means a good long session with the belt — and Grinder doesn’t care where the strap lands, whole skin or fresh scars, it’s all the same to him — and then a night or two down the hole, where there’s no light and no warmth and nothing for company except for the big hairy Muddy York rats who’ll come and nibble at whatever’s left of you if you manage to fall asleep. It’s the blood, see, it draws them out. So there we all was, that first night when Monty Goldfarb turned up, dropped off by a pair of sour-faced Sisters in white capes who turned their noses up at the smell of the horse-droppings as they stepped out of their coal-fired banger and handed Monty over to Grinder, who smiled and dry-washed his hairy hands and promised, “Oh, aye, sisters, I shall look after this poor crippled birdie like he was my own get. We’ll be great friends, won’t we, Monty?” Monty actually laughed when Grinder said that, like he’d already winkled it out. As soon as the boiler on the sisters’ car had its head of steam up and they were clanking away, Grinder took Monty inside, leading him past the parlour where we all sat, quiet as mice, eyeless or armless, shy a leg or half a face, or even a scalp (as was little Gertie Shine-Pate, whose hair got caught in the mighty rollers of one of the pressing engines down at the logic mill in Cabbagetown). He gave us a jaunty wave as Grinder led him away, and I’m ashamed to say that none of us had the stuff to wave back at him, or even to shout a warning. Grinder had done his work on us, too true, and turned us from kids into cowards. Presently, we heard the whistle and slap of the strap, but instead of screams of agony, we heard howls of defiance, and yes, even laughter! “Is that the best you have, you greasy old sack of suet? Put some arm into it!” And then: “Oh, dearie me, you must be tiring of your work. See how the sweat runs down your face, how your tongue doth protrude from your stinking gob. Oh please, dear master, tell me y[...] | 10/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP314: Movement | By Nancy Fulda Read by Marguerite Kenner Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Asimov’s March 2011 issue All stories by Nancy Fulda All stories read by Marguerite Kenner Movement By Nancy Fulda It is sunset. The sky is splendid through the panes of my bedroom window; billowing layers of cumulous blazing with refracted oranges and reds. I think if only it weren’t for the glass, I could reach out and touch the cloudscape, perhaps leave my own trail of turbulence in the swirling patterns that will soon deepen to indigo. But the window is there, and I feel trapped. Behind me my parents and a specialist from the neurological research institute are sitting on folding chairs they’ve brought in from the kitchen, quietly discussing my future. They do not know I am listening. They think that, because I do not choose to respond, I do not notice they are there. “Would there be side effects?” My father asks. In the oppressive heat of the evening, I hear the quiet Zzzapof his shoulder laser as it targets mosquitoes. The device is not as effective as it was two years ago: the mosquitoes are getting faster. My father is a believer in technology, and that is why he contacted the research institute. He wants to fix me. He is certain there is a way. “There would be no side effects in the traditional sense,”the specialist says. I like him even though his presence makes me uncomfortable. He chooses his words very precisely. “We’re talking about direct synaptic grafting, not drugs. The process is akin to bending a sapling to influence the shape of the grown tree. We boost the strength of key dendritic connections and allow brain development to continue naturally. Young neurons are very malleable.” “And you’ve done this before?” I do not have to look to know my mother is frowning. My mother does not trust technology. She has spent the last ten years trying to coax me into social behavior by gentler means. She loves me, but she does not understand me. She thinks I cannot be happy unless I am smiling and laughing and running along the beach with other teenagers. “The procedure is still new, but our first subject was a young woman about the same age as your daughter. Afterwards, she integrated wonderfully. She was never an exceptional student, but she began speaking more and had an easier time following classroom procedure.” “What about Hannah’s…talents?”my mother asks. I know she is thinking about my dancing; also the way I remember facts and numbers without trying. “Would she lose those?” The specialist’s voice is very firm, and I like the way he delivers the facts without trying to cushion them. “It’s a matter of trade-offs, Mrs. Didier. The brain cannot be optimized for everything at once. Without treatment, some children like Hannah develop into extraordinary individuals. They become famous, change the world, learn to integrate their abilities into the structures of society. But only a very few are that lucky. The others never learn to make friends, hold a job, or live outside of institutions.” “And… with treatment?” “I cannot promise anything, but the chances are very good that Hannah will lead a normal life.” I have pressed my hand to the window. The glass feels cold and smooth beneath my palm. It appears motionless although I know at the molecular level it is flowing. Its atoms slide past each other slowly, so slowly; a transformation no less inevitable for its tempo. I like glass — also stone — because it does not change very quickly. I will be dead, and so will all of my relatives and their descendants, before the deformations will be visible without a microscope. I feel my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She has come up behind me and now she turns me so that I must either look in her eyes or pull away. I look in her eyes because I love her and because I am calm enough right now to handle it. She speaks sof | 10/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP313: Playing Doctor | By Robert T. Jeschonek Read by Josh Roseman Discuss on our forums. First appeared in PS Showcase #3: Mad Scientist Meets Cannibal All stories by Robert T. Jeschonek All stories read by Josh Roseman Playing Doctor By Robert T. Jeschonek The problem with having a crush on your mad scientist boss is, every day she doesn’t see how wonderful you really are seems like the end of the world. “This is all wrong!” says Dr. Hildegarde Medici, hurling the tray across her cavernous secret laboratory. ”You’re a complete imbecile, Glue!” Her words sting, but at least she’s paying attention to me. I’ll take what I can get from the woman I love. ”I’m sorry, Dr. M. Please let me try again.” “Everything is ruined.” With one arm, Dr. Medici sweeps notebooks and glass beakers from the table in front of her. ”Now I’ll never finish the doomsday weapon today!” As Dr. Medici throws her head down onto her folded arms on the table, I cross the lab and pick up the silver tray that she threw. I see myself reflected in its surface–thick glasses, big nose, bald head, pure geek…not her type. ”I thought you liked the crinkle-cut ones,” I say as I pluck chicken fingers and french fries from the floor and drop them onto the tray. “Steak fries,” says Dr. Medici without raising her head. ”How many times do I have to tell you, Glue?” She is such a drama queen, but what do you expect? Her line of work attracts a certain type of personality–passionate, temperamental, creative, flamboyant. To tell you the truth, it’s one of the things I love most about her. “I could run to the store,” I say, dumping the chicken and fries into a waste basket. ”By the time you’re done building your doomsday weapon, I could have hot fries ready for you.” Dr. Medici rolls her eyes like a disgusted teenager. ”I can’t concentrate on building a doomsday weapon on an empty stomach.” I know the feeling…the not being able to concentrate part, that is. Most days, I can barely focus on my work instead of Dr. Medici’s long black hair and bright green eyes. Once, I was so distracted by Dr. M that I cross-wired the brain of a giant robot, which proceeded to rampage at a garbage dump instead of an army base. If only I could tell her I love her. If only I could close that final mile that has always stood between us. If only I could finally set free the words that I’ve longed to speak, and she would turn to me and say the words I’ve longed to hear. “Don’t just stand there, you putz!” She spins away from me on her work-stool. ”Get me a TV dinner out of the freezer or something!” I don’t take it personally. I know it’s just the stress talking. She’s been having a rough time lately, just like the rest of the mad scientist community. Thanks a lot, terrorists. # In the good old days, mad scientists weren’t considered public enemies like they are now. They were tolerated, in fact, because the government loved getting its hands on their way-out inventions after their crazy schemes were thwarted. But not anymore. Not since the terrorists. What difference is there between a politically motivated insane genius and one who is motivated by greed? How can the government go after one group of people threatening to blow things up and not the other? It can’t. As a result, business has dropped off considerably. No one will negotiate in good faith with a mad scientist anymore. Instead of musclebound private citizen thrill-seekers coming after us, we get black ops Special Forces and heat-seeking bunker-buster missiles courtesy of Homeland Security. It’s a tough time to be a mad scientist. Lots of them have quit already and become street people or college professors. But not my Hildegarde. She won[...] | 10/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 41 | Soundproof #12 | You can download the ePub version here. This is the October issue, so I guess I should be sounding all spooky in the editor’s note, but That Holiday Which Must Be Feared is a month away, so instead why don’t we talk about reinvention. I’m not that great at waiting out long serialized stories, and honestly with longer book series where the author is know for long stretches between novels (Cough-George-RR-Martin-Cough) I usually stop one before the last one out so I can at least control when I’ll restart the story. So comics have never been an ideal form for me, except for when the storyline’s collected into a volume. Or, in the case of The Sandman, 10 volumes. But we’re a bit into DC’s reboot, and their reinvention means a bit more critical eye is being cast over their crop than would be if they hadn’t resorted to remaking themselves in the great American tradition. And while there are highs in the new crop, the lows have been getting most of the attention, because, well, while any reboot is going to lose you fans, it shouldn’t do this to young female fans: http://io9.com/5844355/ On a happier note, this is one-year anniversary of Escape Pod reinventing a bit of itself into a text product in addition to the audio coming into your ear canals every week. I think it’s been a success, but this is as good a point as any to stop and ask for feedback, so hit up feedback@escapepod.org with your suggestions for what we can do different/better in Soundproof. This Soundproof is bringing you Lavie Tidhar’s The Insurance Agent, Saladin Ahmed’s The Faithful Soldier, Prompted, and T. L. Morganfield’s Night Bird Soaring. So it’s a strong issue. Hope you enjoy it, —Bill P.S. SF Signal put together an awesome, awesome flowchart of NPR’s top 100 SF/F books. Go get lost in it here: http://www.box.net/shared/static/a6omcl2la0ivlxsn3o8m.jpg | 10/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP312: Night Bird Soaring | By T. L. Morganfield Read by Mat Weller Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Greatest Uncommon Denominator #3 All stories by T. L. Morganfield All stories read by Mat Weller Rated appropriate for 15 and older due to language. Night Bird Soaring By T. L. Morganfield On his sixth birthday, Totyoalli’s parents took him to the holy city to see the Emperor Cuauhtemoc, but the plane ride proved the most exciting part. He kept his nose to the window, taking in the vast lands of the One World, from the snow-capped mountains of his home in the northern provinces to the open plains of Teotihuacan. He marveled at the miniature cities and cars passing below. All his life he’d dreamt of flying, ever since the first time he’d seen a bird gliding through the air. From the airport, they took a cab to the royal palace on Lake Texcoco. Tenochtitlan, the single largest city in the world, sprawled around it for miles. The cab buzzed across one of the royal causeways, the water blue and shimmering in the hot sun. Inside the walled royal complex stood the Great Temple, meticulously maintained by a crew of thousands, its sacred Sun Stone keeping watch over the visiting crowds. At the palace, two genetically-engineered royal jaguar knights escorted Totyoalli’s family to the Emperor’s gardens. Totyoalli watched their tails swish behind them, fascinated. Their heads looked so soft he wished to pat them between the ears, but when he tried to talk to them, they bared their fangs and gripped their spears a little tighter. Ahead, a doorway opened onto a stone patio overlooking an expanse of grass and trees. Marigolds and birds of paradise choked the flower beds. Cranes stepped gingerly through the ponds while monkeys chattered in the trees. The Revered Speaker stood at the crest of the nearest hill, his hands behind him and his back to them. “Good of you to come, Totyoalli.” He didn’t turn. “Let me take a look at you.” Unafraid, Totyoalli hurried to him. His friends claimed the Revered Speaker was seven hundred years old, that he’d been emperor when the Spanish Devil Cortés tried to bring the One World to its knees. Some said Cuauhtemoc was the War God himself, or maybe the Fifth Sun incarnate, come to Earth to lead the Mexica through a thousand years of glory. Totyoalli had expected someone very old and wise. But in fact the Revered Speaker looked hardly out of his teens. He wore green robes with the sacred day symbols embroidered in gold and silver thread, and his long black hair was tied back in a complicated knot. Blue, red, white, and black tattooed lines formed the profile of an eagle on the right side of his face. Cuauhtemoc knelt and kissed the earth at Totyoalli’s feet, quoting dedications and blessing him. He then took the boy’s head in both hands and granted him the kiss of Divine Grace on his forehead. “Now that we have the formalities out of the way, walk with me.” Cuauhtemoc took Totyoalli by the hand and they moved down the hill, past the egrets, until his mother and father vanished from sight. They sat on a stone bench under a grove of willow trees. “So, how is calmecac?” Totyoalli shrugged. The Revered Speaker’s smile widened. “Haven’t much interest in studying?” “I like the learning part, but the other boys say I should go to the telpochcalli with the rest of the poor kids, and they pick fights.” “You haven’t told them you’re the Night Wind?” “Mother told me not to.” Cuauhtemoc nodded. “She’s not pleased with your destiny.” Totyoalli shook his head. His mother wished he weren’t the Night Wind; in fact, she’d gone to great lengths to plan a home delivery, so the priests and government augurs couldn’t record the exact time of his birth. His father had thought her ridiculous, but respected [...] | 9/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP311: The Faithful Soldier, Prompted | By Saladin Ahmed Read by Rajan Khanna Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Apex Magazine All stories by Saladin Ahmed All stories read by Rajan Khanna Special thanks to Hugo award winning Starship Sofa for allowing us to use Rajan Khanna’s narration that originally ran November 17, 2010. Rated appropriate for 15 and older due to language. The Faithful Soldier, Prompted by Saladin Ahmed If I die on this piece-of-s**t road, Lubna’s chances die with me. Ali leveled his shotgun at the growling tiger. In the name of God, who needs no credit rating, let me live! Even when he’d been a soldier, Ali hadn’t been very religious. But facing death brought the old invocations to mind. The sway of culture, educated Lubna would have called it. If she were here. If she could speak. The creature stood still on the split cement, watching Ali. Nanohanced tigers had been more or less wiped out in the great hunts before the Global Credit Crusade, or so Ali had heard. I guess this is the s**t end of “more or less.” More proof, as if he needed it, that traveling the Old Cairo Road on foot was as good as asking to die. He almost thought he could hear the creature’s targeting system whir, but of course he couldn’t any more than the tiger could read the vestigial OS prompt that flashed across Ali’s supposedly deactivated retscreens. God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will report for uniform inspection at 0500 hours. Ali ignored the out-of-date message, kept his gun trained on the creature. The tiger crouched to spring. Ali squeezed the trigger, shouted “God is greater than credit!” The cry of a younger man, from the days when he’d let stupid causes use him. The days before he’d met Lubna. A sputtering spurt of shot sprayed the creature. The tiger roared, bled, and fled. For a moment Ali just stood there panting. “Praise be to God,” he finally said to no one in particular. I’m coming, beloved. I’m going to get you your serum, and then I’m coming home. A day later, Ali still walked the Old Cairo Road alone, the wind whipping stinging sand at him, making a mockery of his old army-issued sandmask. As he walked he thought of home–of Free Beirut and his humble house behind the jade-and-grey-marble fountain. At home a medbed hummed quietly, keeping Lubna alive even though she lay dying from the Green Devil, which one side or the other’s hover-dustings had infected her with during the GCC. At home Lubna breathed shallowly while Ali’s ex-squadmate Fatman Fahrad, the only man in the world he still trusted, stood watch over her. Yet Ali had left on this madman’s errand–left the woman who mattered more to him than anything on Earth’s scorched surface. Serum was her only hope. But serum was devastatingly expensive, and Ali was broke. Every bit of money he had made working the hover-docks or doing security for shops had gone to prepay days on Lubna’s medbed. And there was less and less work to be had. He’d begun having dreams that made him wake up crying. Dreams of shutting down Lubna’s medbed. Of killing himself. And then the first strange message had appeared behind his eyes. Like God-alone-knew how many vets, Ali’s ostensibly inactive OS still garbled forth a glitchy old prompt from time to time God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will pick up your new field ablution kit after your debriefing today. God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will spend your leave-time dinars wisely–at Honest Majoudi’s! But this new message had been unlike anything Ali had ever seen. Blood-freezingly current in its subject matter. God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will go to the charity-yard of the Western Mosque in Old Cairo. She will live. Ali’s attention snapped back to the present as the wind picked up and the air grew thick with sand. As storms went, it was mild. But it still meant he’d have to stop until it blew over. He reluctantly set up the rickety rig-shelter that the Fatman had lent | 9/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP310: Flash Extravaganza | Another helping of flash! Jenna’s Clocks by T. F. Davenport (narrator Jean Hilde-Fulghum) Wetware Woes by J. J. DeBenedictis (narrator Mur Lafferty) End of the World or Not, I Still Have Feelings by Daniel Morris (narrator- Barry Haworth) The Best Cover Band in the Universe by Andrew Fazzari (narrator- John Anealio) – Honorable Mention for the Escape Pod 2010 Flash Contest! Discuss on our forums. | 9/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP309: The Insurance Agent | By Lavie Tidhar Read by Christian Brady Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Interzone, 2010 All stories by Lavie Tidhar All stories read by Christian Brady Rated inappropriate for seventeen and younger due to language and violence. The Insurance Agent By Lavie Tidhar The bar was packed and everyone was watching the Nixon-Reagan match. The fighters were reflected off the bar’s grainy wood countertop and the tables’ gleaming surfaces and seemed to melt as they flickered down the legs of the scattered chairs. The bar was called the Godhead, which had a lot to do with why I was there. It was a bit of an unfair fight as Reagan was young, pre-presidency, circa-World War Two, while Nixon was heavy-set, older: people were exchanging odds and betting with the bar’s internal gaming system and the general opinion seemed to be that though Reagan was in better shape Nixon was meaner. I wasn’t there for the match. The Godhead was on Pulau Sepanggar, one of the satellite islands off Borneo, hence nominally under Malaysian federal authority but in practice in a free zone that had stronger ties to the Brunei Sultanate. It was a convenient place to meet, providing easy access to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and, of course, Singapore, which resented the island’s role as a growing business centre yet found it useful at the same time. She wore a smart business suit and a smart communication system that looked like what it was, which was a custom-made gold bracelet on her left arm. She wore smart shades and I was taking a bet that she wasn’t watching the fight. She was drinking a generic Cola but there was nothing generic about her. I slid into a chair beside her and waited for her shades to turn transparent and notice me. ‘Drink, Mr. Turner?’ I liked the name Turner. It was Anglo-Saxon generic, a mid-level executive’s name, white as beige. ‘Call me James,’ I said. I liked James too. You could tell what a James Turner did just by hearing his name. The rest of me was tailor-made for the name, had been for some time: I had the kind of tan that suggested I had been East for just long enough to have acquired it, black hair that was short but not too short and had a decent but not overly-expensive cut, pale blue eyes behind shades that cost a lot of money to look like a knock-off. There was a suggestion of a smile in the corners of her mouth and she said, ‘I don’t think I will.’ ‘Mr. Turner, then,’ I said. ‘One name’s good as another.’ ‘Quite,’ she said. There was something dismissive in that single word. For the likes of you, was what it implied. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll have that drink.’ ‘Preference?’ she said. I said ‘Orange juice,’ wanted vodka. She didn’t say anything, didn’t have to. A moment later a waiter glided over and deposited the drink on the table, moisture condensing on the outer surface of the manifold that was the glass. I took a sip, put it down again into the ring of water that had immediately formed. Below, Nixon knocked out Reagan in the second round. I heard groans and shouts around me, tried to tune them out. ‘What can I do for you?’ I said. I couldn’t quite tell where she was from. She had pale skin carefully kept out of the sun, an Oxford-acquired accent and eyes I couldn’t see. She said, ‘I would like to buy insurance.’ ‘That,’ I said, possibly a little stiffly, ‘is why we’re here.’ ‘Quite,’ she said again, and I felt I won the round – she did not like to waste her words and by answering me she had already thrown out six. ‘Is this personal insurance or –?’ I said and she said, a little too quickly, ‘Personal.’ ‘Who’s the IE?’ I said. She frowned for a moment and I could almost feel her scanning some remote database. Then she relaxed and again I had the impression of an almost-smile. The next fight was announced, Lenin versus Ho Chi Minn. I’d heard a rumour the company behind the fights modelled Len | 9/8/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 46 | Soundproof #11 | You can download the ePub version here. Greetings dear listeners! I just returned from WorldCon where I met several listeners, thanks to everyone who came by to say hi! I was able to solicit stories from some pros and talk to some authors about their upcoming work – we’ve got an original piece from James Patrick Kelly coming up that I’m utterly thrilled about. But more on that another month… The Hugo awards were given out on Saturday, August 20, and the ceremony was a blast. Jay Lake and Ken Scholes brought their clever rapport to the stage and gave a good show with minimal hiccups (to my eyes, anyway. On Jay’s blog he talks about how frantic it was when script pages went missing, etc.) Extra special congrats to Mary Robinette Kowal, who took the prize for Best Short Story (remember you can find “For Want of a Nail” at http://escapepod.org/2011/06/09/ep296-for-want-of-a-nail/ ) and Clarkesworld, the Best Semi-Pro winner that allowed us to use Kate Baker’s fantastic narrations in our Hugo month! You can see the other winners at Escape Pod’s home page. Awards always serve to split people. While people covet awards, they still manage to convince themselves that the system is rigged, or undeserving works win, or people band behind their friends to skew the voting. I’ve read flat-out boring Hugo winners. I’ve wondered why fantastic stories didn’t make even a nomination. I’ve seen fandom get frothing at the mouth angry over things like websites and podcasts edging into their territory (SF fans afraid of technology and the future. Mind boggling….) This year the business part of WorldCon featured people that were so mad at last year’s Starship Sofa win (and nomination this year, not to mention the excellent Writing Excuses got a nod for Best Related Work) that they decided to create a new category called Best FanCast. While this does show that they are accepting that the podcast is a medium that will not go away, it’s somewhat sad that some people are now asking “are there enough podcasts to qualify?” Head, meet desk. What really worries me is that all podcasts will be pushed into Best Fancast just because of the medium. Escape Pod publishes stories and is a paying market (qualifying for Best Semi-pro Zine). Starship Sofa publishes stories and nonfic commentary/essays and qualifies (or qualified) for Best Fanzine. James Patrick Kelly’s podcast novella Burn is a Nebula winner. Writing Excuses talks about writing and the SF craft, and it’s done entirely by pro writers. Would all of these be pushed into the same category because of the podcast element? Why not put Blackout/All Clear, Asimov’s, and Chicks Dig Time Lords in the same category because they’re all on paper? I’m not a strong arguer, I admit. It’s not in my nature. But I believe I’m going to have to hit the business meetings next year in order to speak up for podcasts, else we’ll all be shoved to the kids’ table, the one with the rickety leg, just because of our medium instead of our content. See you in Chicago next year, and at DragonCon this weekend! —Mur | 9/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EP308: Kill Me | By Vylar Kaftan Read by Mur Lafferty Discuss on our forums. First appeared in Helix, 2007 All stories by Vylar Kaftan All stories read by Mur Lafferty Rated inappropriate for seventeen and younger due to language and violence. [Note- we do not have the ebook rights, but you can read it at Transcriptase!] Kill Me by Vylar Kaftan I’m sitting cross-legged on a rock in west Texas, somewhere north of El Paso, bleeding into the dirt. The pose feels like a meditation. I’m fascinated with the knife mark on my left thigh, a shallow slash from hip to knee. It’s surrounded by bruise clusters that look like flowers of broken skin. In the silent desert, I hear only the soft clicking of the car cooling down. Then his urine splashes against the rock behind me, and I hear his zipper when he’s done. The night breeze is icy on my back, drying the blood into clots. He did me well, I admit, glancing up at the full desert moon. If my body survived–which it wouldn’t–I would be scarred, possibly disfigured. The welts on my back throb like electricity, and everything–the moon, the desert, the wind–is alive with me. He walks in front of me. I look up at the man who brought me all the way from Denver. He looks like a black dog, matted and angry, and growls like one too. My eyes travel to the cluster of thick hair springing from his shirt neck. He folds his arms over his chest. “The night’s almost over,” I remind him. He scowls. “Get in the trunk.” I hesitate–he paid me to do the shy-girl act, a popular one–and he grabs my arm. He hauls me over the rear bumper into the trunk of his ’33 Axis. He slaps me once across the face–not as hard as I expected–and crumples me into the tight compartment. He slams the trunk closed, catching my hair in the door. I try to pull free, but it’s no use. I don’t think he meant that part, but he doesn’t seem to notice the long trail of hair hanging out of the trunk. The car door opens and the ignition starts. I tug on my hair once more and then relax, concentrating on where I hurt, where my body throbs with pain. As many times as I’ve done this, I still try to experience it all. Because it’s not every day you experience death. Only every three months. | 9/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 47 Episodes |
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