Archive for 13 and Up

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Escape Pod 657: The Big So-So

The Big So-So originally appeared in Interzone no. 273, November/December 2017.

References to drug use and A-grade cursing.

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The Big So-So

By Erika Satifka

We’re both sitting on the rotting front porch one muggy July day when Dorcas asks me if I want to break into Paradise with her. I lace up my sneakers and we do the old huff-and-puff up Negley Avenue to the big Cygnian compound on the hill.

It’s dark, which doesn’t mean much. Most of the compound-heads are wired up to the pleasure-juice on a more-or-less constant basis, and who needs light when you’ve got that? Still, it only takes about three minutes until we’re spotted climbing over the semi-permeable barrier that separates the Chosen Ones from the Not There Yet. And it only takes eight minutes until we’re sitting in the bare-bones holding tank, waiting for an attendant to rouse one of the compound-heads from their ecstasy.

I look over at Dorky. She looks over at me. She mouths the words “play along.”

And I mouth the word “what?” because for the life of me I can’t figure out what the hell the point of this little stunt is.

The compound-head enters in a thick bathrobe that hides just how fucking skinny they all are. It picks up its slate and starts to write. The chalk squeaks.

Colorless ideas sleep furiously still.

“We want to stay.”

Sonic results spiral within documentation.

The Cygnians say they’re preparing the compound-heads for life on their homeworld, the real Paradise. For three weeks all of us were jacked up on pleasure-juice dialed to Max Effect, while the Cygnians ran tests to decide which of us got to live in the compounds. They shepherded their lucky few into one of the many squat nanofoam villages that dot the entire globe. Then they turned off the tap.

What happened next… well, at least some of us survived.
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Escape Pod 656: Into the Breach (Flashback Friday)

This story first appeared on Escape Pod as Episode 436 on February 22, 2014 and was first published in Expanded Horizons, Issue 40, July 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:25 — 42.7MB)

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Into the Breach

By Malon Edwards

I’m off my bunk and into my jodhpurs, knee-high leather boots and flight jacket the moment the long range air attack klaxons seep into my nightly dream about Caracara.

Muscle memory and Secret Service training kick in; I’m on auto-pilot (no pun intended) and a good ways down the hall buttoning up both sides of my leather jacket to the shoulder a full thirty seconds before I’m awake.

And just so you know, the ever so slight tremble in my hands and fingers is not fear. It’s adrenaline. I’m cranked and ready to put my foot all up in it.

A door to the right opens and Pierre-Alexandre falls in on my right flank, his steps brisk like mine. Our boots echo down the long hallway as we make our way from the underground bunker at Soldier Field to the bunker at Meigs Field.

What you think we got? he asks.

My reptile mind—that wonderful, hedonistic thing of mine—notices how lovely his make-me-jump-up-and-dance-like-I-just-caught-the-Holy-Ghost-in-church dark skin looks in the red emergency scramble lighting.

And yeah, I know. I’m going to hell for that.

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Escape Pod 655: And Then There Were (N-One) (Part 4)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” first published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15 (March/April 2017), with author interview

A couple f-bombs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:16 — 43.9MB)

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And Then There Were (N-One), Part 4

by Sarah Pinsker

Back in my room, I stripped my wet clothes off and replaced them with another T-shirt and boxer shorts. The whiskey didn’t do the job I’d hoped it would, so I spent the night in imaginary conversation with Mabel. The rain battering the window filled in her side of the dialogue. I walked through the order of events, everything I’d found. I had ideas, but they weren’t cohering. The timing was important, I knew that. Murder weapon would be lovely, but I didn’t expect a forensic report any time soon. As for suspects, for all the people giving me alibis and vouching for themselves and each other, it could still have been anybody.

I drifted away from the case itself. The host said she wasn’t the Prime, wasn’t the trunk of a branching tree, but she’d labeled us all in relation to her. We were all in close proximity. Even the most distant of us were still recognizable. Tiny differences. I hadn’t run into anyone who lived in a post-water shortage America, or post-flu, or post-oil. We all knew how to flush toilets.

What would it look like if we had radiated out from me instead of the host? Or if we had all radiated out from the hotel clerk, whom the quantologist had said was one of the farther iterations? There were other realities between these, ones she hadn’t chosen. N Sarahs, in N realities, where N was unknowable and constantly changing. Why had she chosen us and not others? Was I the most interesting of a string of insurance investigators, or the only one available this weekend? I had more questions than I’d had before I arrived.

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Escape Pod 654: And Then There Were (N-One) (Part 3)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” first published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15 (March/April 2017), with author interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:18 — 46.7MB)

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And Then There Were (N-One), Part 3

by Sarah Pinsker

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Escape Pod 653: And Then There Were (N-One) (Part 2)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” first published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15 (March/April 2017), with author interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:40 — 47.2MB)

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And Then There Were (N-One), Part 2

by Sarah Pinsker

Not me, my logic brain understood, even though some tiny part of me screamed something was wrong. I’d made it through the entire afternoon talking with people who were more like me than an identical twin would be, but the body was somehow more real. The others down at dinner all had stories to remind me I was still myself, that I could still be differentiated. Absent stories and quirks, absent a person talking at me to prove we were not the same, the vacuum came rushing in. Who was she? In what ways was she me, in what ways was she not? Who would mourn her? I tried to imagine the shape of my own absence from my own world. It was an impossible exercise.

I struggled to regain control over myself. “You know I’m an insurance investigator, right? Dead bodies aren’t my area of expertise.”

“You’re the closest thing we’ve got. None of us are medical doctors, and it’s too late for one anyhow, and I figured you investigate things. I couldn’t find any of the organizers, so I thought I’d look for you.” She must have had a good memory for details, if she managed to find me in that dining hall based on one short conversation. Maybe that was a thing we all had in common.

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Escape Pod 652: And Then There Were (N-One), (Part 1)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” first published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15 (March/April 2017), with author interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:00 — 38.0MB)

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And Then There Were (N-One)

by Sarah Pinsker

I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She listened, made suggestions; I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again.

“How do I know it’s not a hoax?” I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. “The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?”

“Look at it this way,” Mabel said. “Either you’ll be part of a ground-breaking event in human history, or a groundbreaking psych experiment. Someone benefits either way. And you’ve never been to eastern Canada, so at least you get to see someplace new even if you just end up standing in a field somewhere looking silly.”

She always had a way of making an adventure out of things that would otherwise stress me out. Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort hotel lobby swarming with Sarah Pinskers. At least two hundred of us by my estimation, with more straggling in.

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Escape Pod 649: Loyalty Test

Escape Pod 649: Loyalty Test is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:52 — 35.1MB)

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Show Notes

Visit The Drabblecast Reborn on Kickstarter here.

Loyalty Test

by Andrew Gudgel

When the intercom on his desk buzzed, Marc’s head snapped up, instantly awake. He’d been dozing in his chair. His finger stabbed the button that told the boss he was on his way. He stood up and straightened his rumpled gray suit before glancing at his watch. One seventeen AM. It figures. The boss tried to cut him as much slack as he could, but humans just couldn’t keep the same pace as the Vrith, who came from the sunny side of a tidally locked planet and didn’t sleep at all.

“Yes, Governor?” Marc said, even before the door to the boss’ office was fully open. Speaking before he could be seen did double duty: it showed that he was eager to be of service, as well as preventing the boss from seeing his yawn–the Vrith sometimes considered wide-open mouths a sign of aggression, and their claws could cut deep. Marc had a couple of scars on his forearms from when the previous Governor’s instincts got the better of them. It was an occupational hazard of working for the Vrith who now ran Earth’s government.

“Marc,” the translation box on the boss’ desk said. “Tell me about–doors.”

He walked across the rough, tile floor that the Vrith preferred to the side of the desk at the far end of the boss’ office, where he made his obeisance by looking down and crossing his arms at the wrists in a sign of submission. He spoke without looking up. “What would you like to know about doors, Governor?”

“You may look at me when you speak,” the boss replied. “Are doors always necessary?”

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Escape Pod 645: The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike (Part 2)

The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike originally appeared in Fireside Magazine, February 2017

A single f-bomb

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:29 — 51.0MB)

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The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike, Part 2

by Andrea Phillips

5. THE LAUNCH

Launch day came on a bright Tuesday, amid a flurry of reports that the executive office had pushed through a series of contracts requiring the president’s own hotel properties be the preferred vendor for all federal travel going forward. Another day, another straw that was somehow never the last one.

The first part of Corazon’s campaign was the manifesto. That would take about two weeks.

They seeded a few aspirational pieces of video right away, to model the kinds of things they were expecting from legitimate users. In one of them, a gay couple hugged on camera, and the shorter one said “I’m making a world where love is love is love.” In another, a child in a wheelchair looked at the camera with determination and said, “I don’t want to die.”

They also front-loaded the Beyoncé video, a beautiful declaration of strength and defiance. They had enough of those celebrity videos to release a new one every day for the duration of the campaign. It was going to be so amazing.

The press went wild. Beyoncé, treason, Nike, the Justice Department, hope, plus something small that people could do to feel useful? The clickbait farms didn’t even have to work at the story. It was a done deal from the start.

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Escape Pod 644: The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike (Part 1)

The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike originally appeared in Fireside Magazine, February 2017

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:52 — 62.6MB)

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The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike

by Andrea Phillips

1. THE BRIEF

Corazon clicked to the slide she’d been dreading: long-term trends for brand engagement. It was dire.

She focused on the smudgy mirror at the far end of the conference room, looking past her team to her own reflection. She pulled her shoulders back, like her grandmother had instructed. She tipped her head to the side, disarming but not too flirty. When she spoke, she was a breath apologetic, but not too much: “As you can see, we have our work cut out for us.”

She turned to face the projected line graph behind her. “Year on year sales are down, but we’ve been expecting that due to the current… economic climate.”

That was the euphemism to end all euphemisms. Everybody in that over-air-conditioned room knew exactly what she meant, though, because they were all living on the same rapidly sinking ocean liner. Gregoria, a junior art director, began to nervously shred the paper cup her morning latte had come in.

“The really bad part is this.” Corazon swept her hand along the line labeled Brand Perception, which had plummeted like a stone in the aftermath of the election. “And it’s not just us. The truth is, nobody gives a shit about brands right now.”

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Escape Pod 643: Disarm (Flashback Friday)

Disarm originally appeared in Abyss and Apex and first ran on Escape Pod on episode 295 on June 2, 2011

Mild sexual situations and descriptions of battle.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:32 — 47.6MB)

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Disarm

By Vylar Kaftan

Excerpt

We kept in touch through the war, when he messaged me about marching through upstate New York. He always started the same way: “Dear Ryan, Please come kick my commanding officer in the balls.” Then he’d tell me about the latest mess–cracks in their radiation suits, or toxic waterholes that were supposed to be clear. He never got in trouble for the messages; they needed him too badly. My epilepsy disqualified me from the draft, which probably saved my life. Pretty boys like me weren’t exactly Army material. By the time things were bad enough that they needed any warm body, there wasn’t enough human government left to organize a draft.

The ruins at Binghamton were where Trey got sick. By the time I got across the country to him, he’d recovered–well, as much as possible. I remember the doctor’s face as he says Trey will live, but he’ll be in pain.

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