---

T-Rex Tex Mex

by Sarina Dorie

“Whoa! Hold on, partner!” the host of the party asked with his fake Texan accent. “What is that costume supposed to be?”

Of all the insufferable things, he was wearing a cowboy hat on his green, scaley head.

Dinosaurs did not wear hats.

Other costumed partygoers passed by the buffet table where I’d just placed my bag of candy, between a bowl of offensive kale chips and what smelled like mashed cauliflower. The humans at the Halloween barbeque apparently had no more intention of eating their offerings than I did, as they steered clear of the vegan display.

I couldn’t cook, which was why I had brought candy. Obviously.

“I’m a dinosaur,” I told my host. “Rarr.”

“Nah. That ain’t a dinosaur costume. That’s a Big Bird costume, except you got the feathers all wrong. They shouldn’t be blue and red—though that’s mighty patriotic of you.” The man chuckled and patted the distended belly of his costume. “This, here, is a real dinosaur costume. This is a replica of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.”

“You’re too small to be a Tyrannosaurus,” I said. “Even an evolved dinosaur that left your planet over seventy million years ago only to come back in a spaceship to find the planet overrun by sentient vermin intent on polluting the ecosystem would never resemble that. You look like a crocodile walking on two legs.” I eyed his insipid green costume with the disdain it deserved. “Your primitive science has proven that raptors had feathers, just like the birds descended from them.” Like me. “I cannot fathom why humans are so ignorant that they must hold onto such outdated beliefs.”

I waved my clawed hand over my gorgeous plumage. My arms weren’t as short as those of my ancestors – another reason why I was better suited for spaceflight than for preparing potluck items I had no intention of eating.

The host just chuckled again like everything I had said was a joke. He drained the last of his adult beverage of choice in its glass bottle and swayed, an expected reaction to the combined effects of alcohol and the sleeping powder I’d dosed him with.

Across the party I spotted my captain, chatting with a human woman dressed as a superhero. There wasn’t much fabric that would inhibit his meal. I, on the other claw, had chosen my intended dinner based on quantity. I suspected there would be a satisfactory amount of meat under his costume.

“Can I get you another drink?” I asked my host, reaching into the cooler under the table.

The plastic box full of ice was so archaic compared to what we had on our ship. Our refrigeration systems were efficient, fully-automated, and numerous enough to hold several human city’s worth of livestock. Though we did like to taste-test our free-range humans first.

Today was sample day.

My host accepted the drink I handed him. “That’s mighty kind of you. Hey, have you tried the chili? I made it myself.”

“The vegetarian chili?” I shrugged. “Sorry, I’m a dinosaur, and we’re strict carnivores. Rarr.”

He chortled again and slapped me on the back.

I laughed along with him. Potlucks were my favorite.

---

Mother Death Learns a Trick

by Addison Smith

When Mother Death foretold her own demise, nobody paid her much mind. The old AI was less a prophet and more of a doomsayer stuck on repeat, her body buried in the mess of tech detritus between the bakery and the retro VR shop. It wasn’t that she had never been right. She predicted deaths all day, so eventually something was going to stick. It was more that nobody cared. She was an ancient model in metallic skin, a third eye drawn across her forehead in purple paint. I passed her four times before I stopped to see what was going on, almost unsettled by not being warned of my death.

“Mother Death will soon perish,” the bot said, playing the tinny melody that always came with her predictions. She stared into the street as people walked past, not bothering to stop for the old bot.

I knelt in front of her on the pavement and looked into her eyes, but her sensors didn’t seem to engage. “What gives, MD?” I asked. “You stuck in a loop?”

I held a hand up to show my intent to touch her, then felt for the port at the back of her head. My fingers touched wet metal, and when I pulled my hand back, I saw the green dust of corrosion. I wiped it on my jeans and looked around the street.

“Mother Death will soon perish,” the bot said again, eyes unfocused.

I ran my clean hand through my hair and frowned. “Ah hell,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You mind if I unplug?”

Mother Death’s eyes clicked, apertures engaging and narrowing. Her sensors gave me a once-over, and after a moment she nodded.

“Mother Death will perish.”

“Let’s see if we can stop that,” I said, unplugging the corroded wires from the back of her head. She didn’t shut down. Her power source was internal, so there was no real risk of that unless things were even worse than they seemed. Whatever she was plugged into was just a mishmash of tech junk that she claimed was the source of her visions. As I hefted her into my arms, she looked longingly at the pile.

“Come on, MD,” I said. “You can crash at my place.”

---

Mother Death stared at me as I cleaned the port at the back of her head. The corrosion came off green and acidic as I worked my toothbrush over the pins with careful strokes. She was a strange relic of days past, when the world thought AI was new and exciting and provided the answer to every question. The answers weren’t correct, but they were answers. Decision making was hard, so some of us let them do it. Things got esoteric after that, hence Mother Death.

I dug the bristles deep into the port to clean out the corners. I tried making conversation with her, but all she wanted to talk about was her prophecies of death.

“Where do you get those?” I asked her. I gestured absently to the air. “The data, I mean. You observe data and spit out a likely response. But where’s the data come from?”

After a pause, Mother Death spoke. “The Pile,” she said.

I found the alcohol in my bag and prepped a rag to sanitize the port. “That old junk pile? Can’t be anything in there but old server garbage. And it’s so outdated, too. Those have been there for decades.”

Mother Death looked out the window into the green street beyond. Without her port access, she seemed to go into observation mode. The street view and my words were probably the first new data she had input in years.

She was about three feet tall, but proportionally the same as a human. She would never be a heavy lifter, but she had good hands and a solid, functioning frame. It was odd that nobody had repurposed her before this.

I imagined someone walking near her and hearing their own death foretold over and over. Maybe it wasn’t that odd.
I examined her fingers, wiping my alcohol rag over them to clean off the filth. Her joints were rusted, but it was only surface rust, not eating into the joints themselves. I could work with that.

I lifted her and set her on my kitchen table. “Let’s get the rest of you cleaned up,” I said, and went to work.
“Mother Death will soon perish,” she said, but I ignored the loop. It was built off old data, and unreliable to start with. I didn’t like the answer anyway, so I worked to prevent it.

“Can you raise your knee?” I asked.

Mother Death hesitated, eyes taking in the tiny kitchen. With a metallic creak, she followed my instruction.

---

“Mother Death will soon perish.”

“Nope,” I said. I had taken to responding every time she spoke the words, hoping new data would quash the habit. “Mother Death will be fine. Mother Death will not perish.”

She watched me from the table as I baked. The cookies were for my niece and her family. I recited the ingredients as I mixed and spoon-dropped them onto a baking sheet. Mother Death seemed anxious without her giant database, so I provided what data I could in cups and tablespoons and oven temperatures. It seemed to ease her mind, even if she didn’t show it.

I washed my hands in the basin below the window and turned back to my new project. I wanted to know what she knew, and I wasn’t much of a tech guy, so that meant asking her questions.

“Mother Death, when was America discovered?”

Mother Death recited the expected early 21st century answer, so I corrected her. She took in the data with urgency and added it to what she knew.

“Mother Death, what should I feed a Cordylus Cataphractus?”

Mother Death went silent. She didn’t know, so she didn’t answer. Likely she had a very basic foundation of general knowledge and everything else was specific to her function. I frowned and looked her over, taking in her nimble fingers. “Mother Death, how do you make peanut butter cookies?”

“Combine two cups peanut butter with one half-cup sugar…” she listed the ingredients and their ratios and how to prepare them with perfect clarity. She recited the position of my hand as I stirred the batter, the duration of my mixing. She told me things I hadn’t even realized I was doing when I prepared the cookies in front of her. Beyond that, there was life behind the words. This was something new to her. This was exciting. I handed her a wooden spoon and she gripped it in her hand.

“Want to try?”

---

The cookies piled on the table where Mother Death once sat, far too many for my family to eat. Through the long night we made peanut butter cookies and snickerdoodles, fudge brownies and lemon bars. We had a whole shop’s worth of baked goods just sitting there waiting to be consumed.

“Good job, MD,” I said. I held out my hand, and finally, after trying all night, she managed a high five. “Let’s pack them up,”

“1.25,” Mother Death said. “2.75, 0.99, 3.50.”

“What are those?” I asked.

“Prices,” Mother Death said. “Expected retail value of our work.”

I nodded and we packed the baked goods into bags. When we left the house, I listened for the creak in MD’s knees. It was still there, but much quieter than before. She walked easily, but it was hard to tell if servos were compensating for strain. People watched us as we strode down the sidewalk, skirting to the side when they saw the face of Mother Death and her little bundles.

When we got to Town Center, we unloaded the goods on a table that already held the fruits and vegetables of our neighbor’s gardens, along with mended and unused clothing. I whistled as we unloaded the bags.

“Cookies!” I yelled.

Kids came from all over Town Center, and soon they all had cookies in their hands. Parents, too, joined in conversation over coffee and snacks, catching up first thing in the morning.

Mother Death watched them, but did nothing. I could see the confusion in her eyes, but I let her take in the data herself. When the cookies were gone, Mother Death stared up at me with a look of soft pleading.

“The pile,” she said.

My heart sank as I registered her words. I ran my hand through my hair and tried my best not to show disappointment. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I can bring you back.”

---

We stood at the junk pile between the bakery and the VR store, and I lamented Mother Death’s return. She reached behind her head to the newly-cleaned port that would fill her with age-old data, obsolete and corrupted and breaking her mind. She could make her own choices, but it hurt deeply that she would choose this life.

She approached the tarp that covered the front of the pile, inspecting the nook where her own body had lain the day before. “Help me,” she said.

I stepped beside her, ready to plug in the wires that would destroy her. Mother Death would soon perish, I thought. It was a sad and bitter realization.

Instead, Mother Death gripped the tarp and pulled. I gripped it as well, and together we removed the tarp from the junk pile. When it was gone, I saw what lay beneath. A dozen machines with small and familiar bodies, all plugged together, creating a loop of prophecies and foretold death.

Mother Death reached to her side where she wore her own wooden spoon and pointed it at the pile of disused machines. She looked up at me with eyes wide and joyful.

“Teach?” she asked.

I smiled. “Yeah, Mother Death,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Together we assembled a cart and loaded the little machines onto it to be transported to my tiny apartment. When we finished, Mother Death tugged at my shirt and I looked down. Her eyes opened and closed their apertures, always taking in data, always learning.

“I am not Mother Death,” she said.

I grinned. “A new name then. Who do you want to be?”

The tiny machine considered, and then she smiled. I laid my hand on her shoulder, knowing whatever name she chose, it would be her choice.

---

Host Commentary

The thing I love about this, aside from everything, is that it so perfectly embodies one of my favourite kinds of science fiction. It’s the sort of story that, for me, was first given form by the second episode of The X-Files. As Mulder’s informant walks away, after the first of several hundred portentous speeches, Mulder says, “They’re here, aren’t they?”

His informant, and for those of you wondering why I’m not mentioning him by name, this is a Cast of Wonders story, turns to him and smiles so sadly and says, “Mr Mulder, THEY’VE been here for a long, long time.”

Storiws like that are Halloween candy for me without the empty calories. That lovely frisson of horror as suddenly the world snaps into focus and you aren't alone in the room. There’s a line in the original Men in Black that’s very similar. J tells K that the alien he chased down said the world would end and K, with that terrifyingly offhand, polite focus Tommy Lee Jones excels at replies, “Did he say when?”

The world is more rich and beautiful and strange and dangerous than we dare admit and dare perceive.

What happens when we do perceive it, and how we react, dictates where we land. Go for wonder, ask why they didn’t send a poet or tell a computer you don’t know if he’ll dream? Science fiction. Feel your mind fracture as the worldbreaker from ten dimensions up fold into space just to make sure you see it as it kills everything and everyone? That’s horror. Realize your kingdom has been infiltrated by demons with an unusual fondness for pottery? That’s fantasy. Pass the time at a barbecue thinking about the humans you’re going to eat? Well that’s Cast of Wonders. And delightful, thanks, friends.

But we’re not done. Oh boy are we not done! Our second story this week is “Mother Death Learns a Trick” by Addison Smith. Addison Smith (he/him) is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and
kombucha. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction.

Our narrator for this story is Andrew K. Hoe. Andrew writes speculative fiction in Southern California. His stories appear in Cast of Wonders, Diabolical Plots, Highlights for Children, and elsewhere. He is currently an associate editor at Podcastle.

So let’s go listen to Mother Death, because she’s learned a trick and it’s story time.

---

“The answers weren’t correct, but they were answers.”

What a beautiful, awful, tragic turn of phrase. Eight words encapsulate the desperate hope some people find in generative A.I. and the banal, empty truth of so much of it. The genius of it is how Smith manages to take the first tragedy of the A.I. age, that Analytical A.I. is overshadowed by the flashy, meaningless grey goo generators of generative A.I, and combines it with the second tragedy: the cross-spectrum disenfranchising of generations of individuals. Hope, and science fiction, lies in the third act, the transformation of a digital asset into an individual identity. Science fiction, as our founder likes to quote, is what people point at when they say, “science fiction”. It’s easy to just point at the latest shiny, uncanny piece of generative art and decry the technology behind it. It’s hard to look at the mechanism behind it and ask if it’s okay.

Smith does that extremely well here, finding not only redemption at the heart of this intensely, exhaustingly abused technology but also finding where we go from here. Individuality nurtured and reborn is still individuality, regardless of whether it’s found in a biological brain or a digital one. The future is built by all of us, one step at a time, and as this story closes, that future suddenly looks a lot brighter, and kinder than we dared to hope at the start. A community of individuals, diversity as unity. That’s a hell of a trick, Mother Death. Thanks to Smith, Andrew our narrator and Summer on production duties.

As is always the case, we rely on you to pay our authors, our narrators and our crew, and to cover our costs. We’re entirely donation funded and last year that changed in some very exciting ways with becoming a registered US nonprofit. We ran a great end of year campaign in 2023 to raise awareness about all the new ways you can help us out including the fact that if you pay taxes in the US, you might be able to claim a deduction. Check out the short metacast on escapeartists.net for more ideas, and how to get in touch if you think of something else that’s more meaningful to you.
 
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Join us next time for the first in a four part story. Code Switching is by Malon Edwards, one of my all-time favorite authors, it’s hosted by Valerie and produced by Adam and the first part is narrated by Dominick Rabrun. Then as now, it will be a production of the Escape Artists Foundation and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license and we leave you this week with this quote from classic Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man”:

How about you? You still on Earth, or on the ship, with me? Well, it doesn’t make very much difference because sooner or later we’ll, all of us, be on the menu. All of us.

See you next time folks, until then, have fun.