Archive for 13 and Up

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Escape Pod 761: Jolene

This story originally appeared in Interzone 283, September 2019 (shortlisted for BSFA Award for Shorter Fiction)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:10 — 41.9MB)

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Jolene

by Fiona Moore

“I’ve got a case for you,” said Detective Inspector Wilhemine FitzJames. “It’s a country singer whose wife, dog and truck have all left him.”

“Seriously,” she said, after my unprintable reply. “The dog died and there’s nothing much you can do about the wife, but I thought you might be able to help with the truck.”

I leaned back in my reasonably-priced office chair so I could see the screen better. “So, you want me to try and patch things up between them? Bit outside my usual remit.”

The hand-lettered card under the buzzer downstairs read DOCTOR NOAH MOYO, CONSULTANT AUTOLOGIST, and I usually had to explain that to the uninitiated as “like a cross between a psychologist and a social worker, only for cars and other intelligent Things.” Wills, though, had been working for the London Metropolitan Police’s automotive crime unit for much longer than I’d been in practice, and was more likely to ask if you specialised in criminal, restorative, therapeutic or developmental autology, and if your clients were primarily cars, bots, or home appliances.

“Not sure you can.” On screen, Wills shook her mane of locs. “The truck has been ignoring all communications, and doesn’t seem likely to agree to mediation. I was brought into the case because the fellow turned up at the station reporting an automotive kidnap, but it didn’t take long to establish that the truck had left him and was working for a new user. Voluntarily.”

“As is his legal right,” I said, “Hers? Its?”

“Hers. Texcoco pickup. Name of Jolene.”

The name rang a bell, and, tediously, sparked an earworm. I told my inner Dolly Parton to get knotted. “If she didn’t violate the terms of her contract, she’s free to leave and work for someone else.”

“That’s what I told him,” Wills said. “But he’s having trouble coming to terms with it. Kept claiming she’d been kidnapped. Got upset when we repeatedly told him that the police can’t investigate a crime that isn’t a crime. I thought maybe you might be able to help. Either patch things up between the two of them, or help him understand and move on.”

“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t had many cases recently, and was also hoping to move on, to an office that wasn’t deep within an old industrial park and shared with a local construction and demolition company. Maybe print out some furniture that was more comfortable than it was reasonably priced. “Tell him my fees, give him my address and suggest he makes an appointment.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 760: Deepster Punks

This story first appeared in the anthology A PUNK ROCK FUTURE (October 2020)

Contains some harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:50 — 62.0MB)

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Deepster Punks

by Maria Haskins

Surface

The animated tattoos on Jacob’s skin glimmer in the dark water, words and images swarming over his skin, bright and luminous, before they fade away again.

“Don’t you dare die on me.” I’m holding his head above the waves, but his naked body is cold and slick and heavy in my grip. By now, I should be able to see the lights of the ocean platform, but there’s nothing, only darkness above and below, no horizon separating them. I unseal the mask of my thermal-suit so I can talk to him, even though I’m not sure he can even hear me anymore. “You’re one lucky bastard, you know. If the Company had sent us anywhere else in the system and you pulled this kind of stunt, you’d be dead already.”

It’s true. Beneath the icy mantle of Ceres, in the 10 K depths of Enceladus, he’d be dead for sure. In the sub-surface ocean of Ganymede, or in the tidal-flexing waters of Europa, he’d be dead-dead-dead. Dead like Petra. But he’s here, on Earth, with me, and he’s alive.

Stay alive, Jacob. Please.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 759: The Sun From Both Sides (Part 3 of 3)

The Sun From Both Sides was first published by Clarkesworld Magazine, in May 2019.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:09 — 80.3MB)

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The Sun From Both Sides (Part 3 of 3)

By R.S.A. Garcia

(Continued from Part 2 – Escape Pod episode 758)

“Grandmaster Lucochin.”

He started awake, his hand tightening on something. Someone.

The Knight hung motionless over him. He had it by the throat, his fingers digging into the soft flesh beneath the golden full mask and its red speaker.

A gold mask. A Knight of the Royal Sept Valencia. He released the Knight and it straightened, showing no sign that he had almost throttled it in his sleep.

His sleep. He’d fallen asleep.

He looked down at the empty sheets beside him and sucked in a breath. The Knight took a step back as he swung his legs onto the floor.

“Where is my wife?” he ground out, his voice harsh with sleep and fear.

“Grandmaster Valencia awaits you in the Audience Room.”

“Where is my wife?”

The Knight crossed its arms over bare breasts, the only outward reaction to his inexcusable rudeness.

“Grandmaster Valencia awaits you,” the Knight repeated. The rainbow colors of the three-dimensional dodecahedron crest of Sept Valencia covered most of its forearm.

His blood was ice in his veins as he swiftly pulled on his boots. There was no sign Eva had ever been there. Her shoes were gone, the trays of food had been removed and only one mask remained on the table. His heart stuttered when he laid eyes on it, his lungs refusing to draw air. Then he took a breath and let the old calm, the old watchfulness, settle around him. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 758: The Sun From Both Sides (Part 2 of 3)

The Sun From Both Sides was first published by Clarkesworld Magazine, in May 2019.

A few instances of cursing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:27 — 64.3MB)

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The Sun From Both Sides (Part 2 of 3)

By R.S.A. Garcia

(Continued from Part 1 – Escape Pod episode 757)

Once, a man left his home to find his home.

It was not an easy journey, but going home never is.

He gave up all that he was, and all he knew, to experience a great many things. Genuine smiles and thoughtless malice. Shared purpose and individual failure.

And one bright day, in the middle of a river, he found peace. The first true peace in his long life. He learned that a home could be shared, and that in finding his home, he’d become another’s. That was more than enough to bury the fears and chase away the memories. More than enough to keep the world and its cares far, far away.

Until the day he came home, and the world was sitting at their table, brushing invisible dust from white diaphanous trousers with immaculately trimmed and painted fingers. The Knight rose from the wooden chair it had been seated on, the smooth white surface of its full-mask catching the evening light. A pin-hole speaker made a glowing blue circle in the centre of the lower half of the mask, and tinted slits hid the Knight’s eyes. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 757: The Sun From Both Sides (Part 1 of 3)

The Sun From Both Sides was first published by Clarkesworld Magazine, in May 2019.

Contains violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:33 — 52.0MB)

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The Sun From Both Sides (Part 1 of 3)

By R.S.A. Garcia

Once, a woman loved a man, and a man loved a woman.

They lived in a forest, in a small stone-grey hut, set far enough back from a river to escape the seasonal floods. Every day, they woke on a too-soft mattress and turned their faces to each other before they opened their eyes. Her smile would curve her lips as she lay her hand on his cheek, and he would sigh and nuzzle her palm.

Then they would roll away and sit up on either side of the low bed and push their feet into their shoes.

Days were short and cool, or long and hot, but there was always something to do. Firewood to chop, the roof to repair, a garden to tend. They carried out their chores accompanied by his tuneless humming, and when she looked at him, he always knew. They would pause, gazes locked as they took a breath, hands wiping sweaty foreheads, or resting on bent knees, before they both went back to what they were doing.

Nights were for dinner, and fireside reading, and sitting with their shoulders touching on the wooden swing-bench outside the creaky front door as they stared up at the patches of sky visible between the swaying branches. He would use his legs to push them back and forth slowly while she sat with her knees drawn up. Sometimes she let her head rest against his neck, and sometimes he put his head in her lap. Other times, he would play his flute while she lay her hand on his chest and her head on his shoulder. If she fell asleep, he would carry her inside without waking her.

When they fought, with air sucked through teeth, hands on hips and narrowed eyes, it was usually over small things, like whose turn it was to clean up. But they made up quickly, with soft kisses, fingers interlaced as they walked, and bodies entwined at night. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 755: Consolidation

Escape Pod 755: Consolidation is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:06 — 67.9MB)

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Consolidation

By Langley Hyde

Lot 1796. Adult. Human. Female bodied. Standard limbs/digits. Immune/health function: class 7, can accommodate high-risk activity. Personality type: reactive/adaptive, ideal for customer service/high-level social interaction. Age: 0. Accident history: 0. Memory: N/A.

Sold.

Wake. Woken. Up. Upload. Connecting… connecting… Social/verbal package received. Movement package, received. Cognitive protocol, received. Download updates? Updating…

Installation complete.

I am. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 754: Where They Keep Their Promises

Escape Pod 754: Where They Keep Their Promises is an Escape Pod original.

References viruses and disease.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:46 — 37.2MB)

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Where They Keep Their Promises

By B. Pladek

I imagine you eating the chocolate bar.

It will arrive tomorrow, I hope, though the war has disrupted the medrunners’ routes between Chicago and London. It will arrive, though. I promise.

I imagine you unwrapping it, double-checking the forged postmark from your old orphanage, the forged note that says only happy birthday, since I never learned your real name. You’ll guess it’s chocolate, though it’s so expensive you’ve never tasted it before. Only copywrit people can afford chocolate.

The thought gives me pause. You believe I’m copywrit now, and I’m the only person who has ever bought you sweets. If you guess the bar is from me, you might throw it away.

Promise me, Fi. Promise me you’ll eat it.

I look up, away from the cartel’s sleek chemlab, and out over the Chicago skyline, hazy with sunset.

How dare you, you might reply if you were here. How dare you make me promise you anything. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 753: Chasing the Start (Part 2)

Chasing the Start first appeared in Strange Horizons (July 9, 2018)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:04 — 48.6MB)

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Chasing the Start (Part 2)

by Evan Marcroft

ͼ-Sa, this is a bad fucking idea-ͽ

Sa would die to admit it, but she must agree. This was perhaps a bit much for squashing a spider.

The air boils with radiation. The sky is all storm, great scarified burls of fulgurant cloud lumped into screaming faces. Mushroom clouds bloom all along the horizon where cylinders of pure, fabbed uranium have been dropped from outside the planetoid, blasting starry craters in its shallow atmosphere, to say nothing of its crust. Warships flounder in the firmament beyond, gnawed upon by flung gobbets of surface matter gone cancerous.

Sa takes it all in from the bellied-up keel of some leviathan war vessel bombarded into shapelessness, now a convenient straightaway. She has chosen her weapon a little too well.

ͼ-It’s okay to pull the cord. Everyone does it once-ͽ

Sa remembers this from her past, actually—the black day Pluto went mad. It had begun with a simple logic bomb smuggled into the tutelary software on which the planet operated, and there left to cook like a rat corpse in the wall. It was intended to kill off the demisapient processes that regulated everything from its hydrological cycle to its ecosystems. And while it had triggered a domino-chain of suicides among its pantheon, its programmer had been woefully illiterate in classical mythology. Patterns of atomic behavior that called themselves Neptune or Apollo decided, with horrific suddenness, to die as grandly as they deserved. What followed was a Titanomachy that left the planet dead down to its core, in her time a cold and cracked monument.

Sa would be ten or eleven right now, a mere five billion kilometer jaunt away. At this moment she exists in two places at once. Always an uncomfortable thought to fit in one’s head. She feels zero, subtracted from, negated by the contradictory fact of her younger self. The sensation stops being bowel-churning after the first few times, at least. It helps to believe that this is a strand where she was never born. Sa knows full well that nothing would happen should they meet. But it always felt like it should.

ͼ-Sa!-ͽ

ǂ Shut up. I’m sorry. I need to run ǂ

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 751: More Than Simple Steel

Escape Pod 751: More Than Simple Steel is an Escape Pod original.

A few curses

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:39 — 48.1MB)

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More Than Simple Steel

By Aimee Ogden

Micah misses the adults most when he wakes up each morning. Part of him is still waiting for the buzz of an alarm clock and the smell of toaster waffles to coax him up from sleep. But it’s been four years, and there is no mother to nudge him awake.

He sits up on his mattress and scratches crust from his eyes. The bedsheets smell like sweat and grass; is it laundry day today? He’s the closest thing to an adult under the roof of Grand Avenue Elementary, and if he says it’s laundry day, then it will be.

Clothes on, shoes on. Everyone has to wear shoes all the time. That’s the rule, ever since Marco got tetanus last year and they all thought he was going to die. It was the worst sickness they’d seen since the flops cleared out all the adults. Micah doesn’t know what he’ll do when something worse sweeps through.

The door of the teachers’ lounge–he can’t stop thinking of it as the teachers’ lounge, even though there are no teachers here and not much time for lounging–clicks quietly shut behind him. Then he moves down the hallway, opening doors, calling names. “Fabián, garden. Jack, laundry. Vee, babysitting. Carrie, fishing.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 749: Key Component

Escape Pod 749: Key Component is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:26 — 25.8MB)

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Key Component

By T. R. Siebert

The first thing you need to understand is that you don’t have a body. You are a body.

They pulled you from your mother, kicking and screaming, and you haven’t found silence since. You are too much.

Too much to handle, too much to hide. They tell you as much, with words and in a myriad of other ways. Too large to overlook, too obscene to see. You fold yourself into yourself and cannot escape the confines of it.

The ship wasn’t built for you like you were built for it. In most hallways you have duck to not hit your head on the ceiling. You avoid chairs with arm rests because you know you won’t fit. You haven’t slept comfortably in a bed since you were ten years old. Back then, you had nightmares in which you never stopped growing until you pushed against the hull of the ship, bursting through it into the never-ending void of space.

You move, and the world breaks around you.

(Continue Reading…)

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