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Escape Pod 853: 2022 Flash Fiction Contest Winners

Escape Pod 853: 2022 Flash Fiction Contest Winners is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:29 — 25.9MB)

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Half-Lives

by Andrew Hiller

“Time traveler, eh?”

I shuffled my feet and smirked. The AI that stopped me was short, wore a unitard, mask, goggles, and a badge. I tried to edge away, but it blocked my escape and motioned for me to surrender my booty.

“What gave me away?” I asked.

“You said laser pistol instead of zapper.”

I sniffed and dropped a backpack full of looted tech. It thudded instead of clanged.

“Zappers, huh?”

“Well,” AI Cop laughed before returning to me my emptied property, “the last time I heard someone say laser pistol was in a historical.” I tugged my backpack tight, exposed my traveler, and his expression turned serious, “Should arrest you, but paradox y’know.”

“Yeah, that’s why I only travel into the future. Can’t cause a paradox to a thing hasn’t happened yet.”
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 851: Time Bomb Time

“Time Bomb Time” originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of Lightspeed Magazine. It was reprinted in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 and translated into Chinese by Geng Hui (耿辉) for ZUI Found (文艺风赏) in June 2015.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:12 — 40.6MB)

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Time Bomb Time

by C. C. Finlay

–pop–

The sharp scent of ozone–sudden like heartbreak, raw as a panic attack–filled Hannah’s dorm room, from the paper-swamped desk across her rumpled bed to the window overlooking the quad. The lights flickered. Her heart skipped a beat.

“God damn it.” She prodded Nolon’s foot with the toe of her shoe. She wanted to kick him. “Tell me what you just did.”

“Nothing.” He was leaning over the weird device from his lab, tapping a code on the keypad.

“What are you doing now?” Anger pushed at the edges of her voice, but she held it in check. She wanted him to leave, but she didn’t want to upset him.

“Don’t worry so much–nobody’s going to get hurt.” He pressed his shoulder against her, didn’t even have to push–she flinched and bumped into the wall. He laughed at her, like it was a joke. “It’s not a time bomb.”
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 824: Citizens of Elsewhen

Citizens of Elsewhen originally appeared in Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology in October 2020.

Contains graphic description of birth, a dead infant, and harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:23 — 50.4MB)

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Citizens of Elsewhen

by Kameron Hurley

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.”
   – Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon

We drop through the seams between things and onto the next front.

The come down is hard. It’s meant to be. The universe doesn’t want you to mess with the fabric of time. Our minds are constantly putting down bits of narrative into our brains, a searing record of “now” that gives us the illusion of passing time. In truth, there is only “now,” the singular moment. We are all of us grubs hunting mindlessly for food, insects calling incessantly for mates. Nothing came before or after.

But because time is a trick of the mind, it can be hacked. And we have gotten good at it. We had to. It was the only way to secure our future.

(Continue Reading…)

Black Future Month

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Escape Pod 805: Open 27 Hours

Open 27 Hours originally appeared in Issue 10 of Speculative City.

Cursing. Grief, death, and loss hinted.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:52 — 56.2MB)

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Open 27 Hours

By L.P. Kindred

“It had pops of habanero-like spice immediately calmed by the subdued dulce of roast sweet potato. You got lemony shots of citric acid alongside amandine crunches. The dish was studded with cubes of meat I was too young to name then and I’m now too old to recall. Nobavgo casserole is the single most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.”

D’Sheadra laughs a laugh that starts in her pinky toe. Her hands flail around the leather-clad booth before slapping the dark-grained table. “What the fuck is a nagabovgoat?” she wheezes.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 753: Chasing the Start (Part 2)

Chasing the Start first appeared in Strange Horizons (July 9, 2018)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:04 — 48.6MB)

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Chasing the Start (Part 2)

by Evan Marcroft

ͼ-Sa, this is a bad fucking idea-ͽ

Sa would die to admit it, but she must agree. This was perhaps a bit much for squashing a spider.

The air boils with radiation. The sky is all storm, great scarified burls of fulgurant cloud lumped into screaming faces. Mushroom clouds bloom all along the horizon where cylinders of pure, fabbed uranium have been dropped from outside the planetoid, blasting starry craters in its shallow atmosphere, to say nothing of its crust. Warships flounder in the firmament beyond, gnawed upon by flung gobbets of surface matter gone cancerous.

Sa takes it all in from the bellied-up keel of some leviathan war vessel bombarded into shapelessness, now a convenient straightaway. She has chosen her weapon a little too well.

ͼ-It’s okay to pull the cord. Everyone does it once-ͽ

Sa remembers this from her past, actually—the black day Pluto went mad. It had begun with a simple logic bomb smuggled into the tutelary software on which the planet operated, and there left to cook like a rat corpse in the wall. It was intended to kill off the demisapient processes that regulated everything from its hydrological cycle to its ecosystems. And while it had triggered a domino-chain of suicides among its pantheon, its programmer had been woefully illiterate in classical mythology. Patterns of atomic behavior that called themselves Neptune or Apollo decided, with horrific suddenness, to die as grandly as they deserved. What followed was a Titanomachy that left the planet dead down to its core, in her time a cold and cracked monument.

Sa would be ten or eleven right now, a mere five billion kilometer jaunt away. At this moment she exists in two places at once. Always an uncomfortable thought to fit in one’s head. She feels zero, subtracted from, negated by the contradictory fact of her younger self. The sensation stops being bowel-churning after the first few times, at least. It helps to believe that this is a strand where she was never born. Sa knows full well that nothing would happen should they meet. But it always felt like it should.

ͼ-Sa!-ͽ

ǂ Shut up. I’m sorry. I need to run ǂ

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 752: Chasing the Start (Part 1)

Chasing the Start first appeared in Strange Horizons (July 9, 2018)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:14 — 43.4MB)

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Chasing the Start (Part 1)

by Evan Marcroft

There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flight for a small forever. You read the number that burns on her armor and you that this is not the end. She is proof that you are not finished yet, a promise chiseled into the diamond of history. She will always be here, always this strand.

You want to say something to her, but she is already gone.

The date is June 18th, 1815. The place is Waterlô. And Sa Segokgo is racing against time.

The treads of her boots scoop up huge tracts of bloody, Belgian soil and thresh it into aerosol. Archaic bullets dart about her like swarming mosquitoes, pinging noisily off her poly-diadmant suit, its staalglas facepiece. An experienced strandrunner, she is not daunted by such minor impacts. Over ridges and craters she leaps, devouring meters with each stride, explosively imprinting the IOvac corporate icon wherever she lands. Her armor does its work, yes, but it is her conditioned body that knows how to exert itself most efficiently. Every movement must barter energy for distance, and profit. There are no pit stops in this sport; to spend recklessly will purchase only a quicker death.

Her brain thinks to itself in the voice of her spotter. ͼ-Sa, on your five, Luboy cautions. Another runner in the strand. Watch out— -ͽ

Sa pings a wordless acknowledgement to her crew, but doesn’t bother looking back. Her lead is enough that this newcomer is irrelevant. You are the Dragonhoof, she tells herself, the Hot Number 99. First place starts behind you.

Ahead of her, the front lines of the French and British armies are crashing together. Wellington on the left hand, Napoleon on the right. Her suit blasts a klaxon that yanks every eye towards her just as the two great waves of bodies meet in the gully between two trampled hills and blast themselves apart. Sa has ten seconds left in this strand; she is going forward, no matter what. Better they see her coming and get out of her way.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 748: Flash Fiction Contest Winners 2020

Escape Pod 748: Flash Fiction Contest Winners 2020 is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:14 — 33.8MB)

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Flash Fiction Contest Winners 2020

Our stories this week are the winners of the contest, as chosen by you: our listeners and readers. All four stories are Escape Pod originals. Out of 224 stories, the top four stories were:

“Butterfly” by Drew Czernik, narrated by Hollis Monroe
“In Roaring She Shall Rise” by Rajiv Moté, narrated by Katherine Inskip
“Death Poems of the Folded Ones” by Carol Scheina, narrated by S. Kay Nash
“The Day the Sun Went Out” by Hannah Whiteoak, narrated by Tina Connolly

Now, get ready to explore new worlds of space, time, and relationships, because it’s storytime.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 738: Flash From the Vault

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:51 — 29.1MB)

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Flash From the Vault

Hi there and welcome to Escape Pod Summer School, where we post some of our favorite episodes from the vault with a new perspective. I’m your co-editor and teacher for this class, Mur Lafferty, bringing you three flash episodes from long, long ago. We bring you “Taco” by Greg van Eekhout, “Get me to the Job on Time” by Ian Randal Strock, and “Hibernation” by Madge E. Miller.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 733: Relative Fortune

Relative Fortune was originally published in Galaxy’s Edge in October 2018.

Cursing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:32 — 28.7MB)

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Show Notes

This is the third in a special series of space-themed stories in May 2020.

Relative Fortune

By Brian K. Lowe

When I was seventeen, class president, and a year from the Space Force Academy, Dad fell into an antique gun rack at work, dead from a stroke before he hit the floor.

I had been helping him in the pawn shop after school, partly to make some tuition money and partly because it looked good on my Academy application. After he died it was either take over the shop, or let Mom work it and my brother Rey raise himself while I ran off to the Academy. I opened up two hours after the funeral.

Every night, I’d sweep the floors, dust the shelves, double-lock the front door, and walk upstairs after a 12-hour day of trading in things that people had once thought they couldn’t live without, but now couldn’t live without selling.

But while I was scratching out a living buying and selling second-hand guitars, the real money was in things that had gone Out There. Tools, spacesuits, uniform patches… And when it came to interstellar travel, stuff that had been to another star… Years before I was born, the first guys to come back from Proxima Centauri had gotten rich selling their underwear. The best part was that, thanks to time dilation, they were still young. They’d been able to retire in their thirties. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 715: A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman

A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, August 2014.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:54 — 37.4MB)

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A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman

by E. Catherine Tobler

The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you’re crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There’s no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. His presence reminds you school is over and relatives will be coming soon and you don’t want to see them. They will ask you who can’t see beyond the edge of your hammock about grades and ambitions and Plans For the Future. Aunt Fran is dead and there’s just no fixing it, but funerals help us move on, Mom says so, and Mom Knows Best. You don’t want to go, because going means it happened and going means something is over.

You ask the spaceman where his blue box is and he stares at you like you’ve lost your entire mind, because boxes, he tells you in absolute certainty, are no good for space flight. Boxes are not geometrically synergistic, he tells you, whether cardboard or wood or blue. He doesn’t have any kind of an accent, no bow tie, no box, and he’s lost. He tells you he’s lost.

This is just Earth, you tell him, and he says he knows that, how stupid do you think he is, he’s been here before, so many times before he knows Rubik’s Cubes and arcades and the way ugly yellow dish gloves will stick to your fingers and turn inside out if they’re too hot when you take them off. He remembers when an icy Big Gulp in a sweating plastic cup was the best part of summer—that’s why he’s here now, summer, and why it’s afternoon, and why—
(Continue Reading…)

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