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Escape Pod 1023: Mackson’s Mardi Gras Moon Race

“Mackson’s Mardi Gras Moon Race” originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:38 — 45.3MB)

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Mackson’s Mardi Gras Moon Race

by David DeGraff

Turtles were built for short-haul Lunar prospecting, not treks across the entire face of the Moon, but back in 2043 João Silva Henrique, desperate to celebrate Carnaval, drove a turtle from Amundsen Crater at the south pole to Byrd Crater at the north pole. Unsanctioned celebrations of any kind were forbidden in the Chinese stations, but there were enough Brazilian workers at the north pole to make the risk of trekking across unexplored terrain seem worthwhile. Now that Brazil controls Byrd Station, it’s an annual race. And I’m going to win it. If I live.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1022: Butter Side Down (Part 2 of 2)

Butter Side Down originally appeared in Writers of the Future (volume 40) – May 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:42 — 77.1MB)

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Butter Side Down (Part 2 of 2)

By Kal M

 

(…Continued from Part 1)

 

INTERVIEW LOG 10023869-01-03

SUBJECT: SMITH, JOSEPH (HUMAN)

Captain Crab said humans have special abilities? Oh, sure, that’s true. It’s called sweat. It’s this biological function humans have to regulate our body temperature. You’ve heard of it? Yeah. It makes us great endurance athletes. We can also do this nifty thing called going into the alarm stage. Basically, in an emergency, our brains turn off our pain receptors and divert all energy into survival. So we’re kind of weak and slow, normally, but under duress we get this big burst of power. Sometimes you hear stories of humans managing weeks without food, or lifting several times our body weight, or cutting off our own limbs to escape a trap. An injured human can keep going for ages. That’s why, when things get dangerous, you want a human around just in case. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1021: Butter Side Down (Part 1 of 2)

Butter Side Down originally appeared in Writers of the Future (volume 40) – May 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:04 — 69.2MB)

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Butter Side Down (Part 1 of 2)

By Kal M

DEPARTMENT OF LAW ENFORCEMENT CASE FILE 10023869

UNITED INTERGALACTIC SPACE COUNCIL OF FREE SENTIENT PERSONS (PLAINTIFF) VS HUMAN JOSEPH SMITH (DEFENDANT)

CHARGE(S): THEFT OF FEDERAL PROPERTY, TREASON, BREACH OF CONTRACT, CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT MURDER, WARMONGERING, CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE

STATUS: DECIDED

VERDICT: GUILTY

SENTENCE: DEATH.

(Transcript begins).

INTERVIEW LOG 10023869-01-01

SUBJECT: SMITH, JOSEPH (HUMAN)

STATUS: DEFENDANT

It’s not such a crazy situation when you think about it. All I did was fall in love with a toaster and cause an intergalactic political incident. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. It could’ve happened to anyone, yeah? (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1019: Baron Quits The Payloaders

Escape Pod 1019: Baron Quits The Payloaders is an Escape Pod original.

Death of loved ones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:57 — 69.1MB)

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Baron Quits The Payloaders

By Renan Bernardo

This story starts with a gig. Half a million people from all corners of the galaxy, hands in the air, heads banging to our vibrant noise. You probably saw the venue on some feed already. It’s the Amplitude, our spaceship, stage #3, the one with an enormous radiation-shielding dome over our heads. Right now, the glass glistens with Marzanna’s tannish and gaseous massiveness outside.

This is also how the story ends for me. How I want it to end. With a blast and nothing more. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1014: Here Instead of There (Part 2 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: 34:21 — 47.6MB)

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Here Instead of There (Part 2 of 2)

By Elizabeth Bear

(… Continued from Part 1)

With the launch gone, there was just one rubber dinghy with an outboard motor stowed under the floor of the hangar, along with two kayaks, a sailboard, and a jet ski in an abjectly terrifying state of disrepair. There were twenty-three human souls on the pod, plus Henry.

Doc and her wife went up and down the steads alerting our neighbors that they needed to clear out. By the time they came back, we’d gotten the fugs organized into evacuation groups. We packed six people into Doc’s boat, in a space meant for four. Four more into the dinghy with one girl who was sober enough to steer and seemed competent to run the motor.

That left Kai, Miriam, Henry, me, and ten dirtbags. I didn’t even suggest that we give the Filth Is A Protest girl one of the kayaks and turn her loose, a level of self-restraint I was smugly proud of. (Continue Reading…)

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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 1009: The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary

The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary was originally published in Aurealis #167, Febuary 2024.

Wartime action and injury.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:32 — 43.8MB)

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The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary

By Arden Baker

Boot

Rookie pilot. See also – nugget.

You called us ‘boots’ when we turned up to the flight deck that first morning I laid eyes on you.

The halogen lighting shone down onto the makeshift parade ground with a harsh insistence matched only by your loud drill calls.

You looked the part. Milspec features matched with an impeccably pressed grey uniform. Hair shorn close to the scalp to fit the Z94-OptiGuard Quiklok Aerospace Aviation Helmet that you wore in combat. Broad shoulders and piercing eyes. Tall and built like a true Martian. Rust in your blood. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1007: 35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma

Escape Pod 1007: 35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:56 — 47.1MB)

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35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma

By Hans Ege Wenger

Sandra loaded. Boxes and pallets, mostly. Full of avocados, computer chips, plastic toys, etc. All carefully placed by her rubber-faced grippers into the trucks that darted in and out of the warehouse bays.

On a good day, Sandra loaded something interesting. A heavy, oddly shaped package, requiring her to adjust her first person view goggles and sit forward in her chair, lips pursed in concentration. Or a tantalizing, vacuum-packed parcel bound for near Earth orbit. Once, an opaque tank, filled with flickering red-black fish. It brought a little variety to a day viewed through the cameras of a four-foot-tall, yellow robot. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1004: The Girl Who Came Before

Escape Pod 1004: The Girl Who Came Before is an Escape Pod original.

Child death and disease; grief.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:58 — 41.6MB)

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The Girl Who Came Before

By David von Allmen

When me and my family pulled into our driveway, my five best friends were waiting in our front yard, waving glittery poster-board signs that read “Welcome Home Sam!!!” and jumping around with full-on 13 year-old girl dorkiness.

It should have made me happy.

And it did. For the most part. It was all I’d wanted for the last year: to hang out with my friends somewhere other than a hospital room and go to school and talk without an oxygen tube in my nose.

But they weren’t my friends. Not really. They were her friends. The old Sam, the girl my body had been cloned from, the girl whose memories had been printed onto my brain. The girl whose life I was now supposed to live. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1001: Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse

Escape Pod 1001: Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:03 — 54.1MB)

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Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse

By Ryan Cole

In the dark of her bed, curled up in her sheets, Susie tried to hide from the next few days and the reckoning they’d bring: of prom and graduation and the dozens of goodbyes she’d have to force herself to say, wishing she could follow. No college escape. Her applications rejected. Not to mention that she’d been bragging for months—to Piper and all her other refugee friends—about the fake acceptance letter from Delaware State, and the phony full-ride, and the lie that she’d be rooming with Piper in the fall, just like they’d always wanted, two peas in a pod.

Which made her want to run—like Dad always did. But she couldn’t be like him. Couldn’t leave when his only child needed him most. When the city they’d fled—along with half a million others—was buried in a thick layer of saccharine crust. A crust that devoured every street, every house, every skyscraper standing like a hollowed-out lollipop, that only kept spreading, kept crushing every straggler that lay in its path, as relentless as a river and impenetrable as stone. (Continue Reading…)

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