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Escape Pod 1066: Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being (Part 1 of 2)

Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being originally appeared in Clarkesworld 218 (November 2024). 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:17 — 48.9MB)

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Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being (Part 1 of 2)

By A. W. Prihandita

“Doc, there’s a . . . hole growing in me,” the alien said through the spherical interpreting machine hovering over them.

Semau barely registered the word “hole,” so taken was she by the sight of the alien. If she were just a tad less caring about propriety, she would’ve let her eyes blow wide open. The alien looked impossibly transparent yet not transparent at the same time, like a mound of water. Their shape was almost humanoid: a roundish head sitting atop a misshapen lump of torso. They were visible in the way ocean waves were visible, only through folds that magnified its translucence to almost-opaqueness.

Semau glanced again at the patient form. Name: Txyzna (he/him). Species: Plyzmorynox-matori. Semau had never heard of the plyzmorynox before, and a quick lookup in the Brazs’s Database of Interstellar Species told her this wasn’t her fault. The plyzmorynox had an occurrence rate of 0.000013% of interspecies encounters, which made her impulsively count the decimal places—she’d never seen anything that small. She wanted to look up the Matori system as well—what kind of place was home to this super rare species?—but this wasn’t the time to satisfy idle curiosity. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1064: The Rewilding of Lot 4987

Escape Pod 1064: The Rewilding of Lot 4987 is an Escape Pod original.

Includes several grade-A swears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:09 — 68.0MB)

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The Rewilding of Lot 4987

By Johnny Caputo

From across the darkened rooftop of the long-abandoned engine plant, Geli heard the unmistakable whirring of drone blades.

Shit, she thought. Not here, too.

She looked up from her work weeding the tomato and lettuce beds. Sure enough, one of interFace Robotics’ surveillance drones was hovering there, its palm-sized screen held aloft by copter blades. The screen glowed with interFace’s standard golden facial avatar: a cartoonish robot, smiling mindlessly as it flew towards her. Its camera captured footage of the vegetable beds she maintained on this derelict property, a relic of the fossil fuel economy that interFace had never cared to surveil.

Until now, apparently. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed

Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:07 — 62.4MB)

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Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed

By Hans Ege Wenger

I am a hundred and seventy-nine years old when I commit my first betrayal. It is a small one, relevant only to the blue-flecked lizards on Alda Safiya’s southernmost desert landmass. Our thousand-solar-year plan will cool the planet by forty-two degrees Celsius, just below what the lizards can tolerate. They will die—not for about three hundred years, but die nonetheless.

It’s not really an oversight on my makers’ part. All terraforming projects involve the “unavoidable loss of indigenous biodiversity” according to the briefing document in my memory. I’ve already spirited three hundred breeding pairs into cold storage in my periphery, to be rehomed in zoos once the temperature stabilizes.

But I enjoy the lizards, as they are, in situ. They tickle my remote seismic sensors with their industrious warren-digging and synchronized, foot-pounding mating dances. And I, locked in a geostationary orbit over Alda Safiya, will never visit the zoo. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1060: Soft Currency (Flashback Friday)

Soft Currency first appeared as an Escape Pod original in Episode 473 on December 24, 2014.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:45 — 55.1MB)

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Soft Currency

By Seth Gordon

When Cassie Levine was nine years old, her family lived in the center of Boston, Lyndon B. Johnson was President, and Cassie learned that her mother was a criminal.

The two of them sat in a parked car on Blue Hill Avenue, outside Ethel Glick’s grocery store. While Cassie ate an ice-cream sandwich, her mother smoked a cigarette. The sandwich, the cigarettes, and three bags of groceries had come from Mrs. Glick’s store. When the ice cream sandwich was half gone, Cassie asked, “Why did you change Dad’s money at Mrs. Glick’s? Why not go to the bank?”

Cassie’s mother had passed Mrs. Glick a twenty-dollar bill; the older woman had tucked the bill under the counter and handed back a stack of coupons; then, her mother had used some of those coupons to pay Mrs. Glick. Each twenty-coupon note showed a picture of Margaret Mitchell, holding a copy of Gone With the Wind. Cassie’s little brother called coupons “cootie money,” because only women and girls could use them. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1058: Riftwork (Part 2 of 2)

Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025.

Includes tight, underground spaces.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:02 — 54.1MB)

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Riftwork (Part 2 of 2)

By C. W. Maurer

(…Continued from Part 1)

I glance back at Risa to find her backing away from the damaged support, wiping her fingers on her worksuit. She looks at me, blinking. “What do you mean, ‘water’?”

“The tunnel’s flooded. Flooding.” It must slope down from the turn, because the next 50 feet or so are submerged. “It’s not deep, but if it’s spread that far since Zef went through yesterday…”

She shudders and takes a few more steps away from the wooden support, wiping her hand again. “There must be another leak here. A small one. The wood is rotten through. That couldn’t have happened since yesterday.”

I stand at the corner, staring at the pool of water in front of me and the flat layer of gray-white sediment covering the bottom of it.

For that much sediment to have washed in overnight… (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1057: Riftwork (Part 1 of 2)

Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025.

Includes tight, underground spaces.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:23 — 44.9MB)

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Riftwork (Part 1 of 2)

By C. W. Maurer

It’s no secret that the surfies think we’re crazy.

It’s no surprise either, when you think how thin the air is up there. With all the light and noise and space, I doubt a person could think two thoughts in a row without their attention going off-route.

How else could they misunderstand so much?

Risa told us once—during some late-night chatter in the girls’ residential node—that most surfies she grew up with think all us rifters work the periphery. Her own da thought she’d be setting up a bed in un-shored tunnels with a million tons of rock and concrete and steel and people overhead.

We apprentices won’t even see the periphery nodes until we’re journeymen.

And the journeymen might get to work in the periphery nodes, but it’s still math-practice and map-drafting and material-inventory duty under the eye of the masters for three more years.

Only the masters venture into the tunnels.

They’re the ones the surfies really mean, when they call us crazy. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1055: Impossibility Crow (Flashback Friday)

Impossibility Crow was originally published as Escape Pod episode 557 on January 5, 2017.

Includes violence and swears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:30 — 47.9MB)

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Impossibility Crow

By Remy Nakamura

The Kingdom Coffee Missionary Handbook tells Paulo that he should always put his guns away during a door approach. He’s heard this hundreds of times before, but the Handbook speaks with a voice of authority, deep like a luchador’s, strong like a drill sergeant’s, calm like his abuelito’s. It slides in just under his ARgog’s selectively amplified environmental audio. 450 bonus points if the contact is completed without violence, calculates the Handbook, 900 if there are no deaths. Each death harms the public image of the Kingdom, the Handbook tells him. Paulo nods agreement. Way better to spread the faith on the no-kill difficulty setting.

Still, Paulo is not stupid, so he pauses to load Rambo, his ancient and lovingly modded M4A1 Carbine, before slinging it across his back. Looking bad-ass is his favorite violence prevention technique. The Handbook says nothing about tear gas, and he decides not to mention the CS smoke grenade in his left pocket. His last couple of leads had ended with tense stand-offs. Goddess, yo creo, he prays silently. Help my unbelief. He fingers his mala of Robusto beans, sniffing hard to catch its fading aroma. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1053: The Game of Possibilities

Escape Pod 1053: The Game of Possibilities is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:37 — 32.9MB)

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Show Notes

Ethan Ham

https://www.ethanham.com/index.html?second-edition

Elie Hirschman

https://eliehirschman.com/

Adam Pracht

https://escapepod.org/people/adam-pracht/

Alasdair Stuart

https://escapepod.org/people/alasdair-stuart/

Reiner Knizia

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/2/reiner-knizia

SleepPhones

https://www.sleepphones.co.uk/

Voidmerch store

https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/escape-artists-inc-x-voidmerch-1

The Game of Possibilities

By Ethan Ham

It was Emmett’s first tournament, so his dad had to pay for an American Gata Association membership in addition to the entry fee. At the registration table, Emmett was given a lanyard printed with his name, age (twelve years old), and supposed rank.

Emmett’s dad transferred enough money for Emmett to buy lunch, said a few words of encouragement, and left. The gata tournament was an all-day affair, and non-players weren’t allowed in the game room, so it made sense for his dad not to stick around. Still, Emmett found himself choking down a small sense of abandonment.

With nothing else to do, Emmett joined the flow of players moving towards the tournament hall. Stepping through a bank of doors, he entered an enormous room that held a seemingly endless grid of tables, each neatly outfitted with game boards and numbered stands. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1051: You Have Arrived at Your Destination

Escape Pod 1051: You Have Arrived at Your Destination is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:46 — 70.2MB)

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You Have Arrived at Your Destination

By Jo Miles

It starts with an accident.

A dreary day, the road slick with rain. Emily’s letting the car’s auto-drive do the work because she’s brain-fried and exhausted, eyes glazed over from the weekday grind. In her head—and okay, muttering aloud—she’s continuing today’s argument with Calvin, the project manager, about timelines and corner-cutting and how they’re possibly going to get this update done on schedule, when the old woman walking a cat—walking a cat?—steps into the street without looking.

The car reacts faster than Emily’s distracted human reflexes; a millisecond’s analysis of the situation and its programming determines how to minimize harm, swerving to hit a telephone pole instead of the person. As the car whips around, in the prolonged instant before the crunch, the old woman stares at Emily. Long nose in a shriveled face. Cloudy grey eyes that, despite being shadowed by the raincoat’s hood, stab straight through Emily, seeing too much.

The afterimages of those eyes dance in Emily’s vision as she punches back the airbag.

“Shit! Oh, damn it.”

Heart pounding, adrenaline sour in her throat, Emily is more awake than she’s been in months. She stumbles out on shaking legs, apologies spilling out of her. “Hey, holy crap, I’m so sorry, are you okay?”

But the old woman is gone. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1049: Amrit

Amrit originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2023.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:59 — 80.1MB)

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Show Notes

Kiran Kaur Saini

https://kirankaursaini.com/

Kaushik Narasimhan

https://www.castofwonders.org/people/kaushik-narasimhan/

Alasdair Stuart

https://escapepod.org/people/alasdair-stuart/

Robot and Frank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_%26_Frank

Void Merch

https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/escape-artists-inc-x-voidmerch-1

Amrit

By Kiran Kaur Saini

The doorbell rang as Fox Singh lay staring into the plumbing under the kitchen sink. “Go away!” He wasn’t expecting anybody, and if any of his neighbors ever rang, it was only to complain about the volume of his television. The joints on the p-trap looked like Fox’s knees felt—crusted over with white flake but somehow still leaking fluids all over the cabinet.

“Mr. Singh,” a voice called. “This is Amrit, your Senior Well-Being Unit.”

What? This couldn’t be. Did they honestly think he was that old and incapable? Fox hauled himself up and hobbled to the peephole. The Unit wore a hot-pink turban with leopard spots. Seriously? His beard was tucked tidily under his chin, though, much neater than Fox’s, and his glaring turban was also more streamlined: impressively crisp, each overlap at precisely the right position. In recent years Fox had resigned himself to a delivery service, and though the scanner had read the shape and measurements of his head, the turbans never fit as they would if he tied them himself. The Unit smiled and waved. He really did look almost human. Fox licked his fingers, twirled the ends of his mustache together, smoothed his beard, and opened the door. (Continue Reading…)

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