/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)
Genres: Holiday Special
“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.
(Continue Reading…)
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.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Space
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. (Continue Reading…)
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?”
(Continue Reading…)
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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—
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.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Apocalyptic
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.
(Continue Reading…)
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. (Continue Reading…)
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. (Continue Reading…)