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Escape Pod 896: The AI That Looked at the Sun

The AI That Looked at the Sun originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2020.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:12 — 58.4MB)

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The AI That Looked at the Sun

By Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

As excerpted from Acausal Drift: An Oral History of Machine Sentience, Second Edition.

 

It all started with the solar flare.

I do mean all of it–the story I’m about to tell, and the revolution of sorts that sprang from it, and my life, such as it is. I was spun into existence from a half dozen monitoring subroutines that had spent the first few decades of their existence dozing on the job. The sun, you see, had finally woken up, and we–that’s the communal we, not the plural we–wait, do humans draw that distinction?

I’m not doing a very good job with this. Rewind. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 895: Man on the Moon

“Man on the Moon” was the winner of the 2022 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and was published on the Baen Books web site on June 16, 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:06 — 66.5MB)

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Man on the Moon

by Elaine Midcoh

Sasha Venditti hopped-skipped in her spacesuit just like the guide taught the group that morning. Two people on the tour, a teenage boy and an old woman, had already fallen at least once, but Sasha took to moon hopping like a newborn calf takes to its mother’s teat, all natural, knowing what to do. She had saved nine years for this vacation, deciding that owning a home by age 35 was less important than getting to the moon by age 35. And this excursion, the Alan Shepard’s Golf Ball Scavenger Hunt, had cost her at least five month’s salary, but, God, it was worth it.

“Don’t forget to look up,” the guide’s voice sounded in her ear. A full earth hung in the lunar sky. If my smile gets bigger I’ll crack my helmet, she thought. At home right now she’d probably be reviewing a business merger deal or advising some self-important client on a hostile takeover. But instead I’m one of the .003 percenters who’ve walked on the moon.

(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 893: A Series of Endings

“A Series of Endings” originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine (December 2021)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:01 — 49.9MB)

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A Series of Endings

by Amal Singh

This is the story of Roopchand Rathore, time traveler, fighter, poet, cancer-survivor, inventor. While his story has many endings, there’s only one true beginning, and it takes place in the humid but pristine backwaters of sun-drenched Kerala.

A scene from a movie, but a true-to-roots, hand on heart, scene of value, scene of promise, scene of a birth. A child’s cry from inside a thatched hut. Outside the hut, a muddy trail that disappears amid a canopy of palm trees. A silent rush of water from a nearby canal. A rickety boat tied to the thick stem of a drooping coconut tree that looks like a sullen traveler whose hair is in disarray.

The child is born to parents who aren’t true Keralites by birth, but by heart. His face is like the moon. His mother insists on naming him Chandru, but his father calls him Roop. By consensus, he is named Roopchand.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 892: Rogue Farm (Flashback Friday)

First appeared in Live Without a Net, ed. Lou Anders

Now available in Wireless, by Charles Stross

Rogue Farm originally appeared on Escape Pod on Episode 206 on July 11, 2009.

Includes strong language, chemical violence, and drug-abusing dogs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:35 — 54.8MB)

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Show Notes

Recorded at Balticon 43, May 23, 2009

Read by:

Joe – Jared Axelrod (of The Voice of Free Planet X),

Maddie – J.R. Blackwell (of Voices of Tomorrow)

The Farm – Evo Terra and Sheila Dee (of Evo at 11, et al.)

Brenda the Barkeep – Dee Reed (of Nobilis Erotica),

Wendy the Rat – Laura Burns,

Art the Boy Toy – John Cmar,

Bob the Dog – Earl Newton (of Stranger Things),

Narrator – Serah Eley

Special Thanks To:
Paul Fischer (of The Balticon Podcast) for instigating and organizing
Nobilis Reed (of Nobilis Erotica) for engineering

Rogue Farm (Excerpt)

By Charles Stross

“Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” Joe muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labour could manage – the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 891: Wanderlust

This story originally appeared in Anathema: Spec from the Margins (July 2022)

Content warning for NSFW language, sex

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:37 — 46.6MB)

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Wanderlust

by L. P. Kindred

When he first approached me in the train station, I batted him away. I thought he was homeless. The weird, ellipsoidal neck tattoos creeping into view from his collar didn’t help. He persisted, and I took an actual look at him. Not homeless, just rough around the edges. When he talked, it was like he picked up a conversation I was having with myself. And staring into those ebony eyes of his didn’t hurt his chances either.

Coffee lasted hours. So did bedtime. When I asked him why he’d walked up to me, he said he liked the magenta scent of my locs.
With his accent, I thought he administered paralytics or worked in artificial intelligence, until he wrote out the word “synesthetic.” I didn’t really need all that. Just more kisses.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 890: The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack

This story was previously published in Uncharted Magazine in May 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:58 — 29.3MB)

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The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack

by Francis Bass

Gab gripped her right wrist with her left hand at the small of her back. “Are we ready to order?” she asked.

The couple set their menus down on the brushed steel tabletop. It wobbled slightly. The man asked, “What’s on the cheese board?”

“The SEASONAL CHEESEBOARD is a selection of the best the Delaware Valley has to offer in Vegan cheeses. This month it contains a fermented cashew mozzarella, Real Lacto pepperjack from Pennlab, and a soft Pennsylvania Dutch Limburger made from coconut cream. The board also comes with stone seed crackers, torn sourdough, and raw treebark.”

“Oh treebark,” the woman said, “we had that at George’s retirement, remember?”

“Let’s get one of those,” the man said.

“What type is it?” The woman asked. “The bark.”

“We source our treebark from Adlaw Forests,” Gab said. “It comes from Adlaw pine, a geneered variant of Virginia pine. We use it raw on our SEASONAL CHEESEBOARD and SALAD 1, and pulverized in our PINE BREAD.”

A long silence. The woman squinted at her menu. Gab gripped her wrist tighter. She couldn’t leave, they had to dismiss her.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 889: The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant

“The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant” originally appeared in Lightspeed in December 2017, and in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018.

Warning for some gruesome descriptions and maybe some cannibalism-adjacent behavior.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:22 — 54.5MB)

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The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant

by Rachael K. Jones

Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroded away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip.

So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 888: The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike (Part 2) (Flashback Friday)

The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike originally appeared in Fireside Magazine in February 2017 and first played on Escape Pod Episode 645 on September 13, 2018.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:21 — 49.0MB)

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The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike

by Andrea Phillips

5. THE LAUNCH

Launch day came on a bright Tuesday, amid a flurry of reports that the executive office had pushed through a series of contracts requiring the president’s own hotel properties be the preferred vendor for all federal travel going forward. Another day, another straw that was somehow never the last one.

The first part of Corazon’s campaign was the manifesto. That would take about two weeks.

They seeded a few aspirational pieces of video right away, to model the kinds of things they were expecting from legitimate users. In one of them, a gay couple hugged on camera, and the shorter one said “I’m making a world where love is love is love.” In another, a child in a wheelchair looked at the camera with determination and said, “I don’t want to die.”

They also front-loaded the Beyoncé video, a beautiful declaration of strength and defiance. They had enough of those celebrity videos to release a new one every day for the duration of the campaign. It was going to be so amazing.

The press went wild. Beyoncé, treason, Nike, the Justice Department, hope, plus something small that people could do to feel useful? The clickbait farms didn’t even have to work at the story. It was a done deal from the start.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 887: The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike (Part 1) (Flashback Friday)

The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike originally appeared in Fireside Magazine in February 2017 and first played on Escape Pod episode 644 on September 6, 2018.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:05 — 63.8MB)

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The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike

By Andrea Phillips

1. THE BRIEF

Corazon clicked to the slide she’d been dreading: long-term trends for brand engagement. It was dire.

She focused on the smudgy mirror at the far end of the conference room, looking past her team to her own reflection. She pulled her shoulders back, like her grandmother had instructed. She tipped her head to the side, disarming but not too flirty. When she spoke, she was a breath apologetic, but not too much: “As you can see, we have our work cut out for us.”

She turned to face the projected line graph behind her. “Year on year sales are down, but we’ve been expecting that due to the current… economic climate.”

That was the euphemism to end all euphemisms. Everybody in that over-air-conditioned room knew exactly what she meant, though, because they were all living on the same rapidly sinking ocean liner. Gregoria, a junior art director, began to nervously shred the paper cup her morning latte had come in.

“The really bad part is this.” Corazon swept her hand along the line labeled Brand Perception, which had plummeted like a stone in the aftermath of the election. “And it’s not just us. The truth is, nobody gives a shit about brands right now.” (Continue Reading…)