Archive for 17 and Up

Escape Pod 304: Union Dues: Sidekicks in Stockholm

Escape Pod 304: Union Dues: Sidekicks in Stockholm is an Escape Pod original.

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for language and disturbing imagery

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:00 — 30.4MB)

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Union Dues: Sidekicks in Stockholm

By Jeffrey R. DeRego

Five of them at least, with submachine guns, body armor, and more dynamite than I’ve seen outside a Tom and Jerry cartoon. They all sound the same thanks to some digital vocal thing built into their black suits. They all look the same with black ski masks underneath a mesh sort of fencing helmet, black everything else right to the boots, and all about the same size, like someone took a picture of a terrorist and photocopied it.

This whole drama seems like it began a million years ago by now. I was scheduled to come here and open a convention of business leaders and up-and-coming corporate types. My speech, Good Corporate Citizenship, with examples of how The Union gives back to the communities it serves, is a two year old piece worked up and updated by Marketing and Promotions to accommodate a new administration in Washington, and some new economic stuff that I don’t really understand. I’d delivered only half of the text before these guys burst through the door.
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Escape Pod 301: Stone Wall Truth

Originally appeared in Asimov’s

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for adult imagery.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:50 — 44.0MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Nebula Award for Novelette, 2011

Stone Wall Truth

By Caroline M. Yoachim

Njeri sewed the woman together with hairs from a zebra tail. Her deer-bone needle dipped under the woman’s skin and bobbed back out. The contrast of the white seams against her dark skin was striking.

“The center seam makes a straight line,” Njeri told her apprentice, “but the others flow with the natural curves of the body, just as the Enshai River follows the curve of the landscape.”

Odion leaned in to examine her work, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Foolish boy, wasting his attention on her. Njeri set her needle on the table and stood up to stretch. The job was nearly done — she’d repositioned the woman’s organs, reconstructed her muscles, sewn her body back together. Only the face was still open, facial muscles splayed out in all directions from the woman’s skull like an exotic flower in full bloom.

“Why sew them back together, after the wall?” Odion asked. “Why not let them die?”

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Genres:

Escape Pod 298: The Things

Originally appearing in Clarkesworld

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for language and disturbing imagery.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:11 — 38.7MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Short Story, 2011

Thanks to Kate Baker and Clarkesworld for the audio!

The Things

By Peter Watts

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.  MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke ; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase.  I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

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Escape Pod 294: The Night Train

Originally appeared in Strange Horizons.

Rated R

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:09 — 29.7MB)

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The Night Train

By Lavie Tidhar

Her name wasn’t Molly and she didn’t wear shades, reflective or otherwise.

She was watching the length of the platform.

Hua Lamphong at dusk: a warm wind blowing through the open platforms where the giant beasts puffed smoke and steam into the humid air, the roof of the train station arching high overhead.

Her name wasn’t Noi, either, in case you asked, though it’s a common enough name. It wasn’t Porn, or Ping. It wasn’t even Friday.

She was watching the platform, scanning passengers climbing aboard, porters shifting wares, uniformed police patrolling at leisure. She was there to watch out for the Old Man.

She wasn’t even a girl. Not exactly. And as for why the Old Man was called the Old Man . . .

He was otherwise known as Boss Gui: head and bigfala bos of the Kunming Toads. She got the job when she’d killed Gui’s Toad bodyguards—by default, as it were. (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 290: Tom the Universe

Escape Pod 290: Tom the Universe is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG-13: sexual situations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:17 — 23.6MB)

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Tom the Universe

By Larry Hodges

I permeate this universe, which I’ve named Tom, and guard against its destruction. If someone had done that for the universe I came from, then Mary, my sweet Mary, would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have killed her and everyone else when I accidentally destroyed that universe.

And now I’m on the verge of destroying much more.

My name is also Tom. I was an undergrad in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that January in 2040 when I made the discovery that doomed us all. My field of study was cognitive science, the study of human consciousness. What makes us aware of ourselves? Is it just the biomechanical workings of the brain, or something else?

Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I spent countless hours in the lab eliminating the impossible, and there didn’t seem to be anything left, improbable or not. The interconnectivity required for human consciousness to exist was just too many levels beyond what was possible. By all rights, we should all be unconscious blobs of matter mechanically going about our business as directed by electronic impulses from the brain, with no more consciousness than a calculator. I suffered brain cramps in the lab trying to figure out what improbables were left.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 288: Future Perfect

Originally published in Ideomancer

Rated R: language, adult situations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:16 — 19.5MB)

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Future Perfect

By LaShawn M. Wanak

I saw you at a party once. You stood by the bookshelf, reading a tattered volume on Proust. You wore an orange and yellow XTC shirt beneath brown flannel. I bumped your elbow by accident and you looked up, your eyes startling green.

I smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Nina.”

“Hi. Eric.”

I trailed behind you for the rest of the party. You introduced me to your friends and I laughed at their jokes. Twice, our sleeves brushed against each other.

Around two in the morning, you left with your friends. An hour later, I also left. I crossed the empty campus, humming under my breath, wondering if I’d ever see you again.

The watch on my arm beeped.

“This experiment will measure how small changes occurring before a certain event affect its outcome positively and negatively.”

The chair is her creation. She bought the frame on impulse at a medical supply shop. The conical helmet, perforated with slender tubes, fits on top. Whenever she maneuvers her head beneath it, she thinks of the hair dryers at her mother’s beauty salon. All those bulky astronaut bonnets lined in perfect rows, vibrating air molecules to a feverish pitch. She likes this scientific homage to her mother extracting time from thin air.

“Recording of the control event complete. Setting a change in a condition set slightly in the past. The goal of this first jump is to see if this will change the outcome of the event to a more positive circumstance.”

She types on the laptop built into the armrest, then glances at the elaborate flowchart tacked upon the far wall of the laboratory. Written in
her own hand, neat and precise, equations and sums branch and connect like a roadmap of a probability highway.

She wonders which formula will have his lips pressing against hers.

“Test #1. Begin.” (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 281: The Notebook of my Favourite Skin-Trees

Originally published in DayBreak Magazine

Rated R: This story contains erotic imagery and sex.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:54 — 32.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • Feedback for Episode 273
  • Next week… You go to a coffee shop.

The Notebook of my Favourite Skin-Trees

By Alex Dally MacFarlane

BANANA

The best part of these are the fruits, growing on their fat stem, dangling down the person’s back or from their arm. I always bow and smile, asking, “Can I taste one of your fruits? Bananas from a skin-tree are so sweet.”

So sweet and so small, a single mouthful.

I also enjoy the place where banana tree meets flesh, roots curving over and into the person’s limb — pressing my lips there, my tongue — and the small shade cast by the leaves.

Kim Cuc saw advertisements everywhere she looked in the walking street market, but only on the leaves of the skin-trees: names of shops and cafés and restaurants spelled out, Thai or English or other languages, in the bright white veins. Aside from the occasional cry from stall owners or vendors — “I have the finest grilled bananas in Chiang Mai! Come and taste!” — no other form of promotion cluttered the senses.

That had always been the intent of the skin-trees’ engineers and earliest supporters. Kim Cuc smiled often, seeing the remains of once-garishly lit billboards, or walls that several years earlier would have been covered in paper.

No smiles on this night.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 274: Angry Rose’s Lament

First appeared in Abyss & Apex (read the text here!)

Rated R: for strong language and addiction discussion.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:16 — 25.7MB)

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Show Notes

 

Show Notes:

Angry Rose’s Lament

By: Cat Rambo

“Not one of the Big Three? Thought CocaCorp would want a piece of that.”

Rutter had wondered that himself. By all accounts, Solin was a plum piece of real estate, the kind one of the big companies like General M or Bushink would snatch up as an asset. Across the galaxies, they’d grabbed small systems every chance they got. Solin did have a native intelligent race tp be wooed, but there was a surplus of impoverished races deep in debt to the Companies. Very few, the ones who knew to hire themselves savvy (and expensive) legal counsel, managed to keep themselves free.

There was, Rutter figured, something out of the ordinary about Solin. Not out of the ordinary in a valuable way, but something tricky, something slippery or scandalous, some taint the Big Three wanted to avoid. He’d find out soon enough, he guessed.

Escape Pod 266: Kachikachi Yama

First appearing at Pendragon Variety Literary Magazine Podcast

Rated R: For sexual situations and violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:55 — 25.4MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • Feedback for Episode 258: Raising Jenny.
  • Next week… We leave earth for a new planet!

Creative Commons License

Kachikachi Yama by Michael R. Underwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at escapepod.org.

Kachikachi Yama

By Michael R. Underwood

The howl of the northbound train builds in crescendo as I stand on the ledge of the platform and hold the man above the tracks.  He flails at me.

The Shikoku station is far from empty.  Groaning bodies dot the otherwise hospital-clean platform. A group of fleshmodded Gothic Lolita girls watch us.  They look on with inhumanly white faces and void-black eyes.  Twig-thin arms down to their knees wave in the wind. He begs.

My _denkigami’s_ polite but insistent voice chirps in my head.  _“Yamagata-sama orders the target to be eliminated.”_ Spirit of the fleshware machine in my brain, my _denkigami_ is a constant companion, and keeper of my leash.

The roar of the train grows louder, and bells ring in the station.  The man pleads for his life.  The train’s lights appear from around the around the corner. (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 264: St. Darwin’s Spirituals

First appeared in Murky Depths

Rated R: For paranormal sexual situations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:40 — 27.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • Enjoy our Halloween episode, which mixes a bit of paranormal in with our science fiction. Hey, it’s a special holiday, and we’re apt to get a little crazy around here.
  • If listeners want some lighter Halloween fun, “Horrorworld,” DK’s short story collaboration with Kevin David Anderson, is running as a two-part special at Drabblecast this Halloween. If people have ever had a desire to see Yul Brynner fight zombies, that’s the story for them.
  • Feedback for Episode 256: The Mermaids Singing Each to Each.
  • Next week… A special election day episode!

 

Creative Commons License
St. Darwin’s Spirituals by D.K. Thompson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at escapepod.org.

Saint Darwin’s Spirituals

By D.K. Thompson

The ghosts wanted a threesome – the two of them in Lucy’s body. It wasn’t an unheard of proposition, or so Lucy had been told. Prostitutes considered psychic whoring one of the safest tricks on the streets. All the pleasures of intimacy without the messy clean-up.

Ghosts had a nasty reputation for vanishing the moment after, though, no matter the talisman around your neck or the potion drunk before sunset, and so payments were usually collected up front. Not that Lucy was worried about the money. Her husband was the only thing that concerned her.

She adjusted her brass and leather goggles, peering through the ethereal tinted lenses to examine the ghosts.

They looked like the average apparitions. Both female. One spiraled around Lucy, long and curly hair obscuring her face. Large black blotches covered her body, causing her skin to peel off in patches. The other hovered several feet above the cobblestones in front of Lucy. She had a noose around her throat and her neck was bent so her head hung to the left side. She crossed her arms and took several breaths. Or whatever passed for breaths in the afterlife.

How long had it been since they’d felt someone’s touch? Lucy wondered. She remembered something her husband had told her long ago, before the murders, before he’d disappeared. “Spirits linger in this world longing to be a part of it, to reconnect, to have some kind of physical, sensual experience,” Thomas had said. “Only a host can provide them that.”

Ghosts aren’t the only creatures haunted by the memory of a touch, my love, Lucy thought. And yet, despite being a devout spiritualist, she shuddered at the idea of the cadaverous spirits making love inside her. She’d never had a ghostgasm before, much less been paid for one. The ghosts looked sincere in their desire, not like dangerous murderers. Certainly not monsters. Still, lonely as she was, a ghostgasm wouldn’t help her find Thomas.

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