Archive for EP Original

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Escape Pod 1012: Hot Bot Summer

Escape Pod 1012: Hot Bot Summer is an Escape Pod original.

Contains depictions of war violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:09 — 62.5MB)

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Hot Bot Summer

by J. R. Dewitt

“God, these bots are gorgeous,” says Sergei as he snaps another photo. And even though Aura’s just met him, she knows the guy means it.

She’s standing on one of Sergei’s beaches, her hair tied back in a loose bun, sandaled feet buried in a crest of white sand so freaking soft she can’t stop rubbing her toes in it. For the last hour since the auto-copter ferried her over from the mainland, the seventy-some Belarusian billionaire has been showing off his little bot menagerie he’s amassed over the years. “Robo sanctuary,” he calls it. A waste of a great island beach, Aura thinks. But she’s trying to nod and grin. Play the part of fangirl in the hope it greases the wheels a bit.

“And these?” she asks, pointing to more bots.

“Oh, yes, the old war models,” Sergei says as he raises the camera. “Are they not beautiful? The photos I publish don’t quite do them justice. Come, look, look. Get closer here. Don’t be shy.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite

Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:44 — 24.8MB)

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Grifting the Zaxonite

by Cooper C. Wilms

Of all the cons in his little black book, Trevor McKay liked his current grift the best. Small-fish stunts like his Spanish Doubloon gambit were always foolproof and reliable for a week of food and booze, but there was no challenge to it. His Slot Machine Repairman scam raked in the dough and let him flex his inner thespian, but the security at the casinos would inevitably recognize his face. But The Stranded Zaxonite, as he had come to know it, made him proud to call himself, not just a con man, but a con artist.

He twisted his cigarette into the bar’s ashtray and raised his bourbon to his lips. His mark had to be a particular breed of man. Isolated. Desperate. Willing to believe. He scanned the room and took short, silent sips. He passed over the trio of soldiers in flirtatious conversation with a waitress, and ignored the man by the turquoise-inlaid jukebox that clearly owned the black Sportster out front; but there, in the back, with the thick Buddy Holly glasses and the beat-up porkpie, was the perfect target.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1007: 35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma

Escape Pod 1007: 35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:56 — 47.1MB)

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35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma

By Hans Ege Wenger

Sandra loaded. Boxes and pallets, mostly. Full of avocados, computer chips, plastic toys, etc. All carefully placed by her rubber-faced grippers into the trucks that darted in and out of the warehouse bays.

On a good day, Sandra loaded something interesting. A heavy, oddly shaped package, requiring her to adjust her first person view goggles and sit forward in her chair, lips pursed in concentration. Or a tantalizing, vacuum-packed parcel bound for near Earth orbit. Once, an opaque tank, filled with flickering red-black fish. It brought a little variety to a day viewed through the cameras of a four-foot-tall, yellow robot. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1004: The Girl Who Came Before

Escape Pod 1004: The Girl Who Came Before is an Escape Pod original.

Child death and disease; grief.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:58 — 41.6MB)

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The Girl Who Came Before

By David von Allmen

When me and my family pulled into our driveway, my five best friends were waiting in our front yard, waving glittery poster-board signs that read “Welcome Home Sam!!!” and jumping around with full-on 13 year-old girl dorkiness.

It should have made me happy.

And it did. For the most part. It was all I’d wanted for the last year: to hang out with my friends somewhere other than a hospital room and go to school and talk without an oxygen tube in my nose.

But they weren’t my friends. Not really. They were her friends. The old Sam, the girl my body had been cloned from, the girl whose memories had been printed onto my brain. The girl whose life I was now supposed to live. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1003: Billionaire’s Tears

Escape Pod 1003: Billionaire’s Tears is an Escape Pod original.

Includes cursing, death by communicable disease (albeit not by the usual means).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:45 — 48.2MB)

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Billionaire’s Tears

By Vanessa Ricci-Thode

I wake up to the sound of screaming, and know I’m going to die.

I shoot out of bed, calling for my mother. First thing I’ve spoken clearly in two days.

“Maria!” My mother bursts into my room. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

“S-sorry, Mamma,” I whisper, frantically searching for the right syllables so I don’t trip over them and give it all away. I can’t let Mamma suspect I’m dying—or how soon it’ll happen. “Nightmares.”

Mamma’s smile is sad. The world’s finally getting better, but not for everyone. For us, still struggling, it’s like it’s only getting worse. Everyone in the family has been having nightmares. But when Mamma accepts my explanation and doesn’t seem bothered by the screaming that surrounds us and has not stopped, to me, anyway, that’s when I know. I have a week tops if I’m lucky. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1001: Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse

Escape Pod 1001: Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:03 — 54.1MB)

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Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse

By Ryan Cole

In the dark of her bed, curled up in her sheets, Susie tried to hide from the next few days and the reckoning they’d bring: of prom and graduation and the dozens of goodbyes she’d have to force herself to say, wishing she could follow. No college escape. Her applications rejected. Not to mention that she’d been bragging for months—to Piper and all her other refugee friends—about the fake acceptance letter from Delaware State, and the phony full-ride, and the lie that she’d be rooming with Piper in the fall, just like they’d always wanted, two peas in a pod.

Which made her want to run—like Dad always did. But she couldn’t be like him. Couldn’t leave when his only child needed him most. When the city they’d fled—along with half a million others—was buried in a thick layer of saccharine crust. A crust that devoured every street, every house, every skyscraper standing like a hollowed-out lollipop, that only kept spreading, kept crushing every straggler that lay in its path, as relentless as a river and impenetrable as stone. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1000: A Thousand Names for God and Infinite Mustard

Escape Pod 1000: A Thousand Names for God and Infinite Mustard is an Escape Pod original.

Contains some harsh language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:27 — 42.3MB)

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A Thousand Names for God and Infinite Mustard

by Matt Wallace

Kimo found God hiding out inside a dark nebula in the MACS0416_Y1 galaxy. He trapped God in an empty mason jar and duct taped the lid shut.

God was not happy about any of it. “I wasn’t ‘hiding out.’”

“What?” Kimo asked.

“In the nebula,” God said. “I wasn’t hiding.”

“I didn’t say you were hiding.”

“The asshole writing this story did, and I don’t appreciate the miscategorization.”

“What in the hell are you babbling about now?”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” God grumbled, then added as a bitter-sounding afterthought, “Omniscience sucks.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 994: Magical Girl Antifa War Machine

Escape Pod 994: Magical Girl Antifa War Machine is an Escape Pod original.

NSFW. Includes violence, death, mental health issues, global disaster, explicit sex, consensual BDSM, war trauma, a brief mention of COVID, and a brief mention of rape.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:59 — 49.9MB)

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Magical Girl Antifa War Machine

By Esther Alter

XYLIA

We were at the bottom of a hole, a new construction site that went deep into the bedrock. I was the first to touch the artifact, a thing that didn’t quite have shape or color. I grabbed it. My new consciousness slammed into my mind so fast that there was just enough time for only one last wholly-human thought: You’re a girl, you fucking idiot.

My new form was sleek. Mathematically perfectly curved. Hyperfeminine in the truest sense. Breasts extending into six dimensions. A tall, lithe, highly reflective body. A smooth face with eyes burning with seductive rage. And strength, immense strength. I flexed and felt a distant star flicker a warning. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 993: That Thing With Bob and the Crop Circles

Escape Pod 993: That Thing With Bob and the Crop Circles is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:13 — 42.0MB)

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That Thing With Bob and the Crop Circles

by T. Kingfisher

So last Tuesday, long about noon, I found myself down at the hardware store to buy chicken feed for the ladies.

I never gave much thought to keeping chickens, I must admit, but my niece Donna said I needed something to give me structure now that I’m retired. I had figured that going to the coffee shop every morning and reading up on my journals counted as structure, but apparently it does not, according to Donna. She came over in her little Subaru and set up a chicken coop and put three prime specimens of Gallus gallus domesticus in it for me.

Two of them are hens and one of them is a rooster who believes very firmly that it’s a hen, and since I respect everybody’s right to go through life in the way that suits them best, I call them all the ladies. And I have to admit that keeping chickens is soothing, whether or not you’re retired, since they make very nice little burble-burble-cluck noises and there isn’t a lot of angst to a chicken. Too many animals around now who are full-up on angst, if you ask me, which I blame on domestication gone a little bit too far. I met a dog the other day that was part Basset Hound and part Chihuahua and one look in that dog’s eyes was enough to make you reconsider a lot of life choices.

(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 991: After the Rain

Escape Pod 991: After the Rain is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:42 — 35.8MB)

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After the Rain

by P. A. Cornell

I love a heavy summer storm. I love it when the rain falls so suddenly there’s no avoiding it and you’re drenched in seconds, or when the drops hit the ground so hard they bounce right back up at you. I love the crack of thunder that precedes the rain, and the rainbows that come after. This was the kind of storm I was riding through, just returned to our village after one of my courier runs to the neighboring communities.

Racing through puddles, I didn’t mind the mud splashing up at me or that all this moisture was going to make a frizzy mess of my long curls. I spread my arms and raised my face to the clouds, relishing the coolness after building up a sweat over the miles I’d ridden. As I cut through our food forest, the tree canopy abruptly ended my impromptu shower, so I went back to focusing on my path, careful to keep my bike to the walking trails so as not to damage the ground cover plants.

Passing one of the lower bushes, several chickens taking shelter burst out, startled, clucking their displeasure. That’s odd, I thought. Someone must’ve left the coop open. I hoped no predators had gotten into it.

(Continue Reading…)

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