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Escape Pod 605: Straight Lines

Originally appeared in Mothership Zeta, July 2016.

Cursing, Mental distress

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:10 — 33.2MB)

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Straight Lines

Naru Sundar

This time they sent someone in a suit, neutral gray silk with utterly glorious creases, monofilament thin.

“I’m Xiao Quan-Fei. They said you like to call yourself Em?”

Emergent Behavior in full, but I always hated the pontificating tone in the name. Fucking shipwrights. Fucking irony too, but let’s not go there yet. Xiao doesn’t begin with questions. Not like the seven others before her, cold military men and women jumping into reconstructions and maps and comm chatter. Xiao is different. Xiao just sits there.

I’m allowed a tiny little virtual. It’s in the charter, as much as they like to snigger at it. It’s still a prison, still a cramped little low bandwidth room with none of the expansive feel of space and star outside my hull. Xiao sits in the rectangular plastifoam chair and examines the coffee table. There are books atop it, unlabelled, empty, just for show. Each spine aligns with the edge of the table, two centimeters from each side.

Fuck. She moved it. She moved one. Not on purpose. Almost by accident, or is it on purpose? I can’t tell. But now that spine is a touch off. I can feel it. I can feel the angular deviation down in my gullet, down in every algorithm-scribed bone of me. It’s Io all over again. I built this damn space for myself and now she comes and moves a book.
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 604: Given Sufficient Desperation

Originally appeared in Defying Doomsday, edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench. Twelfth Planet Press, 2016.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:51 — 45.1MB)

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Given Sufficient Desperation

By Bogi Takács

An ice cream cone.

A ceramic mug—brown with a single green stripe around the rim.

A smartphone—I don’t recognise the brand. It’s been a while.

Two sheaves of corn.

A plush caterpillar toy from some cartoon.

A table—rather worn, I’d say Danish Modern, but I’m not sure.

I need a break.
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 603: An Equal Share of the Bone

Escape Pod 603: An Equal Share of the Bone is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:01 — 33.0MB)

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An Equal Share of the Bone

By Karen Osborne

To kill a theriida, you need gunboats and suits, laser cutters and open-mawed cargo bays, brawn and a stout heart, and God on your side.

We, of course, had none of that.

I learned in the merchant marines to never shoot a theriida with a standard railgun. They’ll thrash and writhe and put angry holes through your hull, and eating vacuum is nobody’s idea of a good trade run. No: a theriida’s distributed brain needs a distributed solution. If you don’t have a spinal lance capable of wide-range dispersal, move on. Don’t even try. Back in the academy, before Eliot and I signed on with Garuda, we used to inflate massive plastex balloons with pressuregel and deploy them beside our training vessels, taking turns at the lance control. It wasn’t anything like the real thing.

Inexperienced spacers often believe that the glimmering purple sac in a theriida’s bioluminescent belly is the animal’s brain, but that is only because we mammals forget that the universe is a multifarious, violent parade of a hundred thousand ways to be mortal. But we weren’t inexperienced. Our captain, Nate, had thousands of hours of piloting time. I was the best gunner this side of the Mercy War. Eliot could make a working engine out of spit and vomit. That’s why we believed we could handle a theriida kill.

Hubris. That’s the word. (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 602: Trash Talk

Originally published in Simian Publishing’s Future Embodied anthology in 2014.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:00 — 23.3MB)

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Trash Talk

By Holly Schofield

I’m not a complainer, not me. I roll with the punches. I’ll be just another dead trash collector in about ten minutes but, hey, that’s okay. My son won’t die and, here’s a bonus, my life insurance policy will pay out.

Unless they consider it suicide.

Here we are, hugging in the middle of my living room, me in my robo-assist, my fists locked behind Ricky’s head, up high, like a boxer’s. Ricky, that’s my son, he’s pinned right against my chest.

I can’t see much now, things are blurry; must be sweat that’s in my eyes. Maybe that’ll save me ’cause it’ll short out the servos sooner or later. That was a joke. I’m hanging tough. By the way, guys, before you do anything down at the cop shop with this voice record, edit out all the emotional crap Ricky and I said earlier at the beginning, like right when it started recording, okay? Kinda embarrassing.
(Continue Reading…)

EA Metacast: New Websites

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:30 — 6.0MB)

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Show Notes

Hi there! A short metacast to tell you all about our new websites. Transcript follows for those who who prefer to read along.

Transcript

(Alasdair) Hi there! This is Alasdair!

(Marguerite) And this is Marguerite!

(Alasdair) And we’re looking a good deal shinier. The EA family of podcasts has all new websites, thanks to Jeremy Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios and Scott Pond for the incredible new logo designs! And to Marguerite for riding herd on the project for most of this year.

(Marguerite) Why thank you! So you may be asking yourself, why? I mean, we’re podcasts, right? Most of the time you listen to our shows, not read them. Well, we’re glad you asked.

(Alasdair) First off, we were a decade-old company with decade-old websites. It’s true – aside from maintenance from our heroic two-fisted IT Barbarian, Graeme Dunlop, EA’s never had a major upgrade. That won’t cut it for a digital publisher, especially one with 1900 episodes under its belt. It was a major undertaking, and past due.

(Marguerite) Plus now we’re in a great position to make that vast back catalog a whole lot easier for you to get at. But we ran into a chicken and egg problem – all the solutions we had in mind needed new interfaces and graphics. You probably saw that when our old logos got upgrades so we could be a launch offering at Google Play. But to make the leap to ‘Tubes and ‘Camps and ‘Fys’, needed a ground-up refresh.

(Alasdair) So, big thanks to Jeremy and Scott, and Marguerite

(Marguerite) (thank you!)

(Alasdair) and Graeme and the tireless work of the editorial teams and admin staff who kept this project upright and moving.

(Marguerite) And most of all, from all of us, thank YOU. Thank you do our donors and listeners, new and veteran, on PayPal, Patreon, Dwolla and more. Thanks to everyone who says hello at a convention, votes for us in awards and reviews the great stories we publish. Thank you to our authors, narrators, guest hosts and artists.

(Alasdair) And stick around for more.

(Marguerite) More tales to tell.

(Alasdair) One story told well. that’s what we do. And we promise you, it’s true.

Escape Pod 601: Wet Fur

Originally published in Asimov’s, August 2014.

Isolated cursing.

Grief.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:33 — 52.9MB)

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Wet Fur

By Jeremiah Tolbert

You can tell the dog owners when they board the plane; they see the black cloud hovering in the first row and their eyes widen in shock, then narrow in fear, followed by a glimmer of a smile, a hope as they glance at so many occupied seats. A hopeful smile that seems to say: “not for me. Not for mine.”

Unease settles over the plane, like a heavy, acrid scent. A few passengers throw suspicious glances at you, and one elderly woman even stops for a moment beside you, opens her mouth as if to speak. You hold your breath. She closes her mouth and shuffles toward the rear of the plane

You breathe again. You try to ignore the man seated next to you. You focus on the safety talk.

When the flight attendant buckles her fake belt, she glances at the cloud off her shoulder, then smiles apologetically at her audience. Like it’s her fault, or perhaps the airline’s? There’s nothing she can do, or anyone else.

You sniff. You smell damp fur. You frown, wondering, perhaps, how that could be? You don’t know what strange links lie between memory and nose, but we do.
(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 600: At the Rialto

Originally published in Omni, October 1989.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:53 — 89.1MB)

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Show Notes

“At the Rialto” was a 1990 Hugo nominee and the 1990 Nebula winner for best novelette.

At the Rialto

By Connie Willis

Seriousness of mind was a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian physics. I am not convinced it is not a handicap in understanding quantum theory.

—EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE 1989 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF QUANTUM PHYSICISTS ANNUAL MEETING, HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA

I got to Hollywood around one-thirty and started trying to check into the Rialto. “Sorry, we don’t have any rooms,” the girl behind the desk said. “We’re all booked up with some science thing.”

“I’m with the science thing,” I said. “Dr. Ruth Baringer. I reserved a double.”

(Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 599: What Glistens Back

Lightspeed Magazine, November 2014

Isolated cursing.

Passing mention of suicide.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:15 — 38.8MB)

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What Glistens Back

By Sunny Moraine

Come back.

You hear the call as the lander breaks up around you. You’re aware of the entirely arbitrary concepts of up and down before you realize what’s happening, and then they’re a lot less arbitrary. Down is not so much a direction as a function of possibility, of what might happen to you, of what is happening now. You finally getdown as an idea.

Come back.

Look up and there it is, floating over you in stable low orbit with its backdrop of stars, long and sleek and lovely, all its modules and portholes out of which you spent so much time looking, and that voice clutches at you like it could hold onto you, and you almost start to fucking cry, and you’re panicking and taking huge gasping breaths and clawing at nothing, and you’re falling. And you can’t come back. So the universe goes away for a while, and when you blink again, that brownish pitted curve beneath you is just a little bit bigger.

“Sean, come back. Do you read? Come back?”

(Continue Reading…)

A Bold New (Website) Frontier

As you’ve likely noticed, Escape Pod and all of our siblings in the Escape Artists family have a new look! We’re very excited about our lovely new website, but as with any frontier, we’re likely to encounter some unexpected problems.

We appreciate your patience as settle into our new home!

If you have any technical difficulties or simply want to give us your feedback, please drop us a line at ansible@escapeartists.net

Escape Pod 598: On the Fringes of the Fractal

Originally published in 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush, edited by Kevin J. Anderson in April 2016.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:16 — 48.4MB)

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On the Fringes of the Fractal

By Greg van Eekhout

I was working the squirt station on the breakfast shift at Peevs Burgers when I learned that my best friend’s life was over.

The squirt guns were connected by hoses to tanks, each tank containing a different slew formula. Orders appeared in lime-green letters on my screen, and I squirted accordingly. Two Sausage Peev Sandwiches was two squirts from the sausage slew gun. An order of Waffle Peev Sticks was three small dabs of waffle slew. The slew warmed and hardened on the congealer table, and because I’d paid attention during the twenty-minute training course and applied myself, I knew just when the slew was ready. I was a slew expert.

Sherman was the other squirter on duty that morning. The orders were coming in fast and he was already wheezing on account of his exercise-induced asthma. His raspy breaths interfered with my ability to concentrate. You really have to concentrate because after four hours of standing and squirting there’s the danger of letting your mind wander and once you do that you can lose control of the squirts and end up spraying food slew all over the kitchen like a fire hose.

“Wasted slew reflects badly on you,” said one of the inspirational posters in the employee restroom. (Continue Reading…)