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Escape Pod 1013: Here Instead of There (Part 1 of 2)

Here Instead of There was originally published in COMMUNICATIONS BREAKDOWN, 2023, Jonathan Strahan, Ed.

Includes some grade-A cursing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:58 — 43.0MB)

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Here Instead of There (Part 1 of 2)

By Elizabeth Bear

Waking up sick in a punk house shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody so I don’t know why it always came as a surprise to me. My head throbbed so bad I couldn’t tell the difference between the hangover, my sinus headache, and Kai pummeling their drumset over in the yacht hangar.

The Kai part also wasn’t unusual. The Crash’s drummer is our early riser. That’s the Devil’s pre-Hell punishment on us all. But even hungover, I never woke up with a head this full of pain.

Henry must have seen me twitch, because five people racked out between me and the galley all said “Oof!” in a row. Suddenly my arms were full of wriggling beagle mutt and stank. At least the sov-cit types who left this pod a wreck before we squatted in it didn’t leave it full of fleas as well as trash and feces. (I choose to believe that the feces were from a dog rather than a toddler.) And there aren’t any ticks this far from shore. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 981: Joy

“Joy” was previously published in Interzone Digital (June 2023)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:15 — 39.3MB)

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Joy

by Dale Smith

Joy knelt on the promenade, shifting the rifle into her shoulder to get a steadier shot. She did her best to ignore the waves crashing against the seawall behind her. She had at least another thirty minutes before it was breached, and the saltwater flooded the seafront again. There was less and less time between high and low tide, the sea creeping closer with every passing month: some of the sand underneath her knee was still damp. It would leech the warmth from the joint, aggravate her arthritis and slow her down when there was something she needed to escape from. It might be an acceptable way for her to die, except that now she had foreseen it so it wouldn’t count. Not when she could easily do something about it. She shifted her knee onto drier ground and didn’t take her eye from the rifle sights.

The drone appeared as a little black dot: not one of the bigger ones, but maybe enough to keep her going for another couple of weeks. Last year they’d still been sending them in flocks of thirty or forty, but they seemed to have realised any idiot could wing at least one in a flock that size. Now they usually flew alone. Harder to hit, but in a way it was better: they’d sold their customers twenty-four hour delivery, and the fastest way to Ireland from the warehouses in Denmark was over what they still sneeringly called the former United Kingdom. Until they found a way to increase their range, speed or defences, they’d keep coming, regular as clockwork.

She took aim carefully.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 978: Oak Hill Lane

Escape Pod 978: Oak Hill Lane is an Escape Pod original.

Includes minor violence, homophobia, and swears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:20 — 60.0MB)

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Oak Hill Lane

By Alasdair Stuart

The day the world ended, Scotch picked a fight. Not that there was much choice. Two fellow Canary Detailers, heads full of redtop bigotry and guts full of Tesco beer, had jumped Scotch’s work partner Billy the previous week and put him in the Infirmary. Scotch was next. It was just maths. Very stupid maths. So, behind the bike sheds at the University none of them could afford to attend but all of them were good enough to clean, Scotch forced the issue.

Honestly, Scotch had rushed the issue; they let their guard down. “The readiness is all” becoming “Oh for fuck’s sake.” It was such schoolyard bollocks too. The bike sheds! The bike sheds for fuck’s sake! Scotch was only marginally surprised no one was making out back there. God knows they had a few times. But no, no such luck. Just clumsy alcohol punches and the angry relentless wave of hormones, homophobia, and homogenous men trying to pound the world into a shape whose familiarity didn’t terrify them. This wasn’t their first time behind the bike sheds either. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 950: Bad Dogs Escape (Flashback Friday)

Appropriate for older teens and up due to erotic imagery and war criminal comeuppance

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:05 — 26.7MB)

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Bad Dogs Escape

By James Patrick Kelly

/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)

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 941: The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy

Escape Pod 941: The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:30 — 65.7MB)

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The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy

By Andrew Dana Hudson

“This place is trash, garbágio, blechalicious,” Rocky Cornelius said appreciatively. “All we gotta do is, as they say, sublevel the vibe.”

“Really? You think so?” The greengrocer, Franklyn, wrung his hands—still caked with black soil from showing her the beet rows in aisle five—a sure sign that Rocky’s negging, one of the most reliable techniques in her consultant toolbox, was working.

They stood in the canned goods section of Primal, soon to be Westwood’s newest and hippest boutique bodega slash survival goods retailer. The paper labels on the tins had been artfully patinated by some design school dropout, ripped and torn to leave just a slash of Roma tomato picture here, a glimpse of fava bean logo there. The shelves looked half-caved in, but were in fact quite secure, welded into place at zig-zag angles. Simulated California sun streamed, dappled, through an ivy-frosted, hole-in-the-roof-shaped skylight.

The idea of this ‘concept shoppe’ was to make shoppers feel like they were looting an abandoned store in a post-apocalyptic, collapseporn paradise. Rocky quite liked the idea. No one wanted to be a “consumer” these days. People—especially Californians, who had lately been through so much—wanted to think of themselves as “survivors,” disaster-hardened protagonists in a return-to-their-roots story of rebuilding and social rejuvenation. It’s just that, if they could afford one of the new quake-proof condos springing up in Westwood, they wanted to do so without having to worry about tetanus, botulism, scurvy, or gluten. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 939: Variant Cover: Pantone Sunset

Escape Pod 939: Variant Cover: Pantone Sunset is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:16 — 47.5MB)

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Alternate Cover: Pantone Sunset

By Marie Vibbert

Stacey reads a comic book.  It’s about a robot lady, but not like her.  This robot lady has exposed gears and metal rods in her arms and wears a metallic bikini as she solves crimes.  The colors are otherworldly.  Sometimes the red ink bleeds sideways or the blue shifts toward the bottom of the page. Stacey loves the feeling that every image is made of transparent layers.  She imagines soft films of yellow, red, and blue gently wafting down onto the black and white.

Stacey isn’t supposed to be reading the comic book.  Her existence is devoted to the proper display and peddling of women’s casual separates for the upscale consumer.  When she isn’t in the window posing, she is assisting customers or straightening stock–which means undoing the chaos the customers do to the shop.  They do a lot.  The comic book itself had been left by a customer, on a pedestal displaying the new winter sweaters, with a half-drunk coffee and some cheese doodles. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 930: Fulfillment in Purpose

Escape Pod 930: Fulfillment in Purpose is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:04 — 55.5MB)

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Show Notes

Zima Blue

Zima Blue episode of Love, Death & Robots

Get Excited and Make Things!

Ezekiel’s speech from The Walking Dead Season 8 Episode 4: And Yet I Smile

Fulfillment in Purpose

by Jack Windeyer

Eland was resetting his mother’s balancing sculptures when Hexben ran in from the storage room. The robot tilted its long head down while still making eye contact, managing a look of consternation despite its rigid, expressionless face.

“What?” Eland snapped.

“You should be packing those into boxes,” Hexben said without inflection. “Our lease ends next week.”

“Exactly,” Eland said. “It doesn’t end today.”

Hexben deepened the tilt of its head so far that its chin touched its chest in a spot where the paint was well-worn away.

“One big sale could change everything,” Eland said, looking back at his work. “We could renew the lease for six months with a single sale.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 919: Emotional Resonance

Escape Pod 919: Emotional Resonance is an Escape Pod original.

Cursing and warfare

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:17 — 41.8MB)

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Emotional Resonance

By V.M. Ayala

Arbor’s favorite part of a mission was always the first view of a planet. Even after seven hundred years of being a giant robot, it never got old. Green and blue clouds churned over purple seas, imposing storms that flashed red with threads of lightning. Beautiful.

And they were sent to clear it of all human life. Courtesy of ExoPLENTI, Inc.! Ugh, that slogan clung to their digital psyche no matter how hard they tried to scrub it from their databases.

At least this part, floating in orbit, wasn’t so bad. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 899: Sounding the Fall (Flashback Friday)

“Sounding the Fall” is an Escape Pod Original, first published in July 2015.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:11 — 50.2MB)

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Sounding the Fall

by Jei D. Marcade

Sometimes, Narae can almost convince emself that the AI’s Voice was a dream. Some kind of minor stroke misremembered, a neurological glitch retroactively given recognizable shape.

But sometimes–less frequently of late, but still, sometimes–Narae wakes to find emself sitting up in the dark, jaw slack, a sustained, atonal note spooling from the back of eir throat.

Narae steps through the open archway of the southwestern gate, bare toes curling in the cool blades of real grass with which the temple grounds are seeded. The lotus-shaped lanterns hanging from the eaves go dim as the sun activates, and from its single-tiered pagoda at the top of the hill behind em, the morning bell tolls.

The alms left anonymously against the outer wall in the night include a couple bolts of inert grey fabric, some bags of rice, and a stack of real tea bricks. Upon hefting the rice, Narae’s eyebrows inch toward the shadow of eir hairline at each bag’s weight: not synthetic either, these. Something that is part bemusement, part nostalgia tugs at the corners of Narae’s mouth, and ey shakes eir head as ey piles the bags and bolts into the bottom of the wheelbarrow before turning to gather the rest.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 894: The Uncool Hunters

Escape Pod 894: The Uncool Hunters is an Escape Pod original.

NSFW Language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:59 — 36.2MB)

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The Uncool Hunters

By Andrew Dana Hudson

Before she settled down into publishing in Minneapolis, before she got taken for a ride by the Chicago AltNormLit scene, before she flared spectacularly out of Silicon Alley, and had her pilot shoot C&Ded by the City of Santa Barbara, and narrowly avoided cryptocollar prison in the floodzone formerly known as Tampa, Rocky Cornelius was a fucking uncool hunter.

She always said it like that, with the “fucking,” because it was important for people to understand how dangerous and difficult the job was. Anyone could hang out in Bed-Stuy, Kichijoji, or the 5th Arrondissement. Anyone could find dope shit, hot trends, hip sub-viral memeplexes. It took a different moxie altogether to trawl the dull edge of the economic machete and actually come to grips with the materiality of majoritarian modern life.

Way Rocky figured, the whole mid-21st century culturesensing apparatus had been fine-tuned to surface niche in-group productpractices that could be brought to masser markets. But inequality had metastasized, and societal fragmentation had reached a critical stage. Global capitalism was a bigass dinosaur with two distant brains. There was a major industry blindspot for what the hell was actually going on in the middle American consumer consciousness. In other words: what nobody was looking at was the stuff everyone was looking at. (Continue Reading…)

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