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Escape Pod 918: Conference of the Birds

“Conference of the Birds” originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January 2021)

Contains some harsh language.

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

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Show Notes

Theater of the Midnight SunThis episode is sponsored by The Theater of the Midnight Sun podcast, an anthology series of sci-fi/fantasy audio dramas.

They’re fun and thought-provoking stories with wall-to-wall music and sound effects that take listeners from the depths of Hell (under new management and with a cheery makeover!), to a bio-engineered fairytale world of ditzy dragons and chain-smoking unicorns, to a carbon-dating lab gone bonkers on the eve of the end of the world.

Though its audio plays do contain their fair share of drama and earth-shaking events, in the end Theater of the Midnight Sun is really just a big frothy cocktail of catastrophe, cliffhangers, and comedy. And it’s all ad-free.

You can find Theater of the Midnight Sun at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and other podcast directories.

Praise from Listeners:
“Check it out… it’s terrific. Great writing propels plots into conceivable fiction that will make you want more. Unpredictable and delicious.”

“My teenage kids and I have had a blast listening to Theater of the Midnight Sun on our half-hour commute to school. They ADORE it and so do I.”

Ben’s additional commentary
https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2021/02/02/embodied-and-empathetic-minds-in-conference-of-the-birds/

Blade Runner 2049 Interlinked scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRcpnM26nJM

Discussion of the (inter)link between Blade Runner 2049 and Pale Fire
https://www.reddit.com/r/bladerunner/comments/778vbg/significance_of_pale_fire_question/

Conference of the Birds

by Benjamin C. Kinney

No program-layer could predict what a human might do, but Surveillance Hub could see everything that mattered. Their bird-drones spread across the city, scattered on cables and rooftops and broadcast towers. Every camera hunted for Krina Viy, independent security contractor (AWOL from JoyCorp contact 5 hours).

A crow-drone spotted the target. Surveillance confirmed Krina’s identity and sent a brief reward signal to inspire the bird onward.

The drone switched from search to pursuit, redoubling its data collection as it chased the taste of reinforcement. So much joy and empty-matrix innocence in its response to a simple reward. Flockmembers were too simple to understand that reinforcement implied punishment, and no success would ever suffice for long.

If Surveillance could crack this case as the network desired, there would be rewards enough for everyone, drone and program-layer alike.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 917: Challenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown

Escape Pod 917: Challenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown is an Escape Pod original.

Includes cursing and physical abuse.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:49 — 46.9MB)

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Challenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown

By Uchechukwu Nwaka

The gear is too expensive.

Honestly. There isn’t enough competition in the market. The Immersion® console alone costs an arm and a leg. Ọmọ. You’ll sweat to even get a Nigerian-used console on Jiji or at Computer Village for less than 200k. And that’s just the console. We’re not even talking about the vests or the mats.

Or the chair!

For real though. How else does somebody experience the saddle—on dragon-back—if they can’t experience the full flex of the dragon’s powerful muscles under their thighs? I’ve seen the streams of American pro dragon-racers in full Immersion® gear—visor, suit, chair! The rich kids here are enjoying, on God! (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 915: The Confessionist

“The Confessionist” was previously published in the anthology: Community of Magic Pens, edited by E.D.E. Bell, released May 2020 by Atthis Arts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:07 — 26.7MB)

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The Confessionist

by Ava Kelly

Vemund pauses, standing on the wet sidewalk. Underneath the overcast sky, twilight stretches through the sloping city. Wealth lives here, in sterile houses carefully hidden behind designer bushes and fences. Not even petrichor feels natural this far across the megapolis. No stench permeates the air, no visible evidence of human misery, although Vemund knows from experience these walls hide just as many vile actions as the paperthin constructs at the other end of civilization.

The evening is chill enough that Vemund sees his breaths as he exhales. It fits this appointment, in a way; all day he’s been followed by a lingering impression that he’s about to trade his soul away. For almost twenty years, he’s worked as a confessionist. The only job he could ever take, young and untrained, but already buried under unbearable debt. Society needs you, they told him at recruitment. You’d be doing the world a favor. Vemund snorts quietly to himself. The only favor he’s been doing has been to ease abject consciences. Except for the children; sometimes he confesses children and their pain is almost always inflicted by others. They were all worth it, though rare enough to forget how it feels to actually help someone instead of simply dampening the guilt bred by one’s actions, consequences intended or not.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 911: Driftwood in the Sea of Time

Escape Pod 911: Driftwood in the Sea of Time is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:22 — 46.3MB)

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Driftwood in the Sea of Time

By Wendy Nikel

They’d warned us about the paradoxes, but humanity has always had a way of ignoring the things we don’t want to think about and disregarding the parts that don’t align with how we want the world to operate.

One minute, you’re a self-assured time traveler from the twenty-first century, flashing up and down along the timeline with your TimeBand™ on your wrist, and the next, you’re stuck here, bobbing among the driftwood. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 908: Harvest Moon

“Harvest Moon” was previously published in Solarpunk Magazine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:58 — 44.4MB)

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Harvest Moon

by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

“We cannot sustain the farm, Gozie.”

I don’t like the way the words fall easily from Iyeh’s lips, even though I know he speaks the truth. I don’t meet his eyes. I cannot. Instead, I focus on the germination drone I’m trying to repair. At least, this is something I can fix. I hope.

“We have to tell the others,” Iyeh continues. “They have to know and warn the entire community.”

I pry open a panel and look closer at the tangle of wires inside. Ah, there. A red wire that looks like it’s been burned. I trace the wire and nod. It’s the wire that connects the fan to its batteries. Without the fan, the drone had overheated and that was why it crashed.

“Are you even listening to me?” Iyeh says.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 897: Migratory Patterns of the Modern American Skyscraper

This story originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of Clarkesworld.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:33 — 24.6MB)

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Migratory Patterns of the Modern American Skyscraper

by Derrick Boden

They call it the pinnacle of architectural innovation. An affordable housing revolution. They call it Plexus, and it built this neighborhood in seven days.

It starts as a colloid, a nanoparticle superfluid, a pale blue sludge that erupts from the nozzles of a hundred carbon fiber tubes on a cold Wednesday morning in late February. It tumbles over itself in apparent disarray—though there’s nothing about the Plexus that isn’t premeditated down to the molecular level. By nightfall, the foundation is built. By morning, the ground floor. By the fifth of March, a half-dozen glittering new towers stab through the San Jose gloom. Twenty units per floor, zoned by income bracket. Primed to solve the latest housing crisis, to solve the influx of professional talent that pushed us off the Peninsula, to solve us.

And hallelujah, it works. We pack up our tents, unhitch our campers, roll off our cousin’s couch and straight into a forty-ninth-floor interior unit with molded cabinets and biometric locks, every inch of it Plexus-born. It’s hard to believe the hot water taps are made from the same nanoparticles as the door frames, and to be fair they aren’t exactly, but the details don’t bother us much because we’re home at last.

(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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Escape Pod 886: If My Body Is a Temple, Raze It to the Ground

If My Body Is a Temple, Raze It to the Ground originally appeared in The Reinvented Heart (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy), February 2022.

Includes sexual harassment.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:25 — 40.9MB)

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If My Body Is a Temple, Raze It to the Ground

By Lauren Ring

Thea helped me with my upload today. Decent response speed. Props to whoever designed her—so realistic!

— anonymous customer review for Acheron Uploads, four out of five stars

 

I know, I know. Don’t read the comments. But Charlie, my sweet Charlie, swearing at the circuits I’ve set on the fritz with my seething, you don’t understand what this feels like. I know you’ll never hear me, but even thinking the truth helps: I am not an AI. This isn’t some robot revolution or some uplifted pedanticism. I’ve never been anything other than human.

Surely by now you must suspect that. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 884: Zhao and the Flightless Crane

Escape Pod 884: Zhao and the Flightless Crane is an Escape Pod original.

Discussion of death and loss.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:32 — 53.4MB)

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Zhao and the Flightless Crane

By A. J. Mo

Quick sapphires danced over sun-silvered water. Soundless, they zipped and wheeled to the quiet rhythm of filtration pumps. Dragonflies, Zhao thought. Other winged jewels joined the flurry, some green as spring, others red as blood, wings iridescent.

“Good,” he said to himself. “Lake’s clean.”

“That is good,” echoed Ah Bak in their tinny voice. “Dragonflies do not breed in stagnant water.”

In the distance, the Pearl River curled east, having conferred upon the lake a small fraction of its life on its thousand-mile journey from the west. Zhao stared at the scene, taking in the collage of colours and contours when he noticed something in the sky. A plane. Almost imperceptibly small, it cut its trail across perfect blue. His stomach tightened, a light prelude to much greater agony. A memory forced its way to the surface, fingers ruined by fire, the rest of the hand lost. All they could find. All that was left of Chen. Zhao clenched his teeth and dragged his eyes over the white naked sun to blot out the image.

“Does Lei like dragonflies?” came Ah Bak’s tinny voice, their haematite beak unmoving. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 882: Hey, George

Escape Pod 882: Hey, George is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:50 — 44.2MB)

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Hey, George

By Elizabeth Guilt

“Hey, George.”

I remind myself that that is not my name; it never was. I will myself not to react, not to break stride, as I stroll along beside the beach.

Old habits die hard, and the best neuro-reset in the world can’t overcome years of routine. Whoever called out could, had they been watching closely, have seen my tiny hesitation. But they are not calling me.

I hear footsteps behind me, running steps, getting closer.

“George!”

I stop walking and take a deep breath. I assume a politely blank expression, and turn around.

And then I see her. (Continue Reading…)

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