Escape Pod 351: 113 Feet

Escape Pod 351: 113 Feet is an Escape Pod original.

Rated 15 and up for explicit language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:58 — 34.4MB)

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113 Feet

By Josh Roseman

“This is a really bad idea, Elle,” Barry says.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he snaps. “Phil would kill me if I didn’t come with you.”

Barry is fiftyish, portly and gray-haired. Seeing him take off his shirt is an experience I wish I’d never had.

“I have friends with certifications,” I say. “It’s not like I couldn’t have asked one of them.”

“How many of them have actually been down there?” It’s almost a growl, and I’m actually cowed a little. “That’s what I thought.”

I sit on the hard bench, wood planks covered in thin, all-weather carpet, and fiddle with my regulator.

“How far away do you think we are?” he asks.

“Don’t know. Ask the captain.”

Barry looks up at the bridge, where Al — the captain — stands, driving the boat. Al is even older than Barry, narrow and hard and tanned almost leathery with decades of exposure to the sun. Instead of going up to talk to him, though, Barry goes around the cabin to stand by the bow, leaving me bouncing up and down on the bench as the boat zips across the water. The light chop makes the horizon rise and fall faster than is comfortable. I can take it, though, and if I get sick enough to throw up, at least I know enough to do it over the side.

My guess is that we’re ten minutes from the dive site. Maybe fifteen.

After waiting seven years to get my answers, fifteen minutes isn’t much of a wait at all.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 350: Observer Effects

Originally appeared in Diet Soap (2007)

Rated 17 and up for explicit language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:50 — 22.0MB)

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Observer Effects

By Tim Pratt

“Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t the problem. Asymmetrical ubiquitous surveillance is the problem.” The Liberator was playing Chinese checkers against himself and talking, talking, talking, like always. “Who watches the watchmen, after all?”

We were superheroes then. Celebrities, back when there were such things. It was a slow night at orbital headquarters, and Eye-Oh was sitting at the big screen, watching a couple of people fuck — consensually, or we would have done something about it — in an alleyway. The screen was green with night-vision enhancements, and Eye-Oh’s strange complicated face was perfectly placid and empty as he observed.

“The problem is that we can watch ordinary people, and they can’t watch us,” the Liberator went on. He looked at me longingly, searchingly, and I thought it might be nice to tweak the inside of his brain and get rid of his earnestness, give him a little taste of what infamous brain-damage victim Phineas Gage got when that iron bar slammed through his frontal lobe, a total personality turnaround, from nice guy to sociopath. Let the Liberator be selfish and impulsive and violent and mercurial for a while, so he could appreciate the way normal avaricious sneaky hungry desperate needy people felt.

But that was supervillain thinking, and I’d gone straight and narrow. In those days I cured neurological damage instead of inflicting it. I fixed people. (Except bad people. Those, I was sometimes still allowed to play with with.) I’d refused to give up my supervillain name though. The Liberator had wanted to call me “Dr. Neuro” when I joined his little boys’ club, but I’d insisted on keeping my maiden name, as it were. Doctor. Please. I was a high-school dropout.

“Do you see?” the Liberator said. “If ordinary people could see us, if everyone could see everyone else, it wouldn’t matter if there were no privacy.”
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Obsessed With Doing Something Else. ANYTHING Else.

Last Sunday, I took advantage of the fact that it was Father’s Day and (in the words of my daughter) “you should do whatever you want” to play about seven hours of Civilization V. I got the game a few weeks ago in one of those software bundles* never having played Civilization in any form. In fact, all I knew about it was that Brentalfloss made a song about it which includes these catchy lyrics:

So keep playing Civilization, take good care of your little nation
Start a war with ancient Egyptians, spread your equally valid religion
Win with science, culture, or napalm
Watch out, Gandhi might drop the A-bomb

This isn’t actually an article about Civ V, by the way. It’s an article about how some writers (like me) get obsessed with a thing to the exclusion of what we should be doing.

Perhaps you can relate.

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Film Review: Another Earth

Imagine that, a year or so ago, you saw a trailer for a film in which humanity discovered another planet Earth growing slowly closer. Humanity made contact with Earth Two, as they called it, and realized that each and every person on the planet could have a duplicate up there.

Then there’s some cuts of a young blond woman, a car accident, a relationship, and the chance for Our Heroine to win a trip to Earth Two. She seems all introspective; a Coldplay-like song runs in the background; the trailer ends.

Watch it yourself, if you like.

The problem, though, is that the movie I saw wasn’t quite the movie I was advertised.

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Book Review: “Railsea” by China Mieville

This review contains minor spoilers for “Railsea”, but does not spoil the ending.

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The review you’re reading now will be the third review I’ve written of a China Mieville novel. I’ve read all his books except for King Rat & Looking for Jake. Most of them have similar themes & tropes — the love of home, phantasmagoric settings & creatures, some form of transportation that’s central to the story, & an ending that leaves you wondering why you read the book if you’re going to be left empty when you’re done.

Note that I said empty. Not unsatisfied.

Well, Railsea broke the trend on at least one of them: I wasn’t empty at the end. But otherwise, we’re looking at pretty standard Mieville here.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 349: Origin

Originally appeared in Strange Horizons

Rated 13 and up for language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:58 — 29.6MB)

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Origin

By Ari Goelman

This is how I find out that I’m pregnant:

I wake up to find Carter standing next to my bed. The fire escape door is open behind him, so the rising sun silhouettes his body. A human silhouette, albeit a little crisper than it should be, as his body bends the light towards him, powering up. Always powering up.

“You’re pregnant,” he says. No particular emphasis on the words, which is as per usual, his voice being run through vocal cords that are not human, formed by lips that have blown hurricanes off course. It’s not that he doesn’t feel emotion, he tells me and anyone else who’ll listen. It’s just that he doesn’t have the same biologically hardwired ways of showing it. Usually I believe him.

“What?” I rub my eyes, push up on one elbow. “That’s not possible.”

He leans over me, and touches my stomach. “I was flying by your apartment, thinking about you. I heard the heartbeat.”

“You told me that was impossible,” I say.

He frowns and asks, “I told you it was impossible for me to hear the . . .”

“Conceiving, Carter,” I say. “You told me it was impossible for us to conceive.”

“I thought it was. I was wrong.” His frown deepens. “I could take care of it for you right now if you want.”

I push Carter away from me and sit up. “For me, Carter?! You mean for us, right?”

“Right. That’s what I meant.” A pause, then. “You’re freezing the bed, Margaret.”

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Genres:

Escape Pod 348: Nemesis

Escape Pod 348: Nemesis is an Escape Pod original.

Rated 13 and up for violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:08 — 30.4MB)

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Nemesis

By Nathaniel Lee

It was the middle of second-period Spanish when I felt my cell phone go off in my pocket. Three pulses, then two. That meant one of my alerts had hit paydirt. I’ve got newsfeeds filtered for keywords, pairing “emergency” and the names of every local school and business I could think of, plus I got Kenny from sixth period computer Science to cobble together a kind of hack on the actual first responders’ radio channels. If my phone had gone off, then there was trouble.

If there was trouble, then the city needed Atom Boy.

So where was he?

Well, if I was in Spanish, then he was in History. No, wait, he’d dropped the AP course. Did he have some kind of math now instead? Crud. I had no idea. I’d lost our hero.

“Miss Ramsey?”

“Ahem!”

“Uh, um, I mean, uh, Señora Ramsey?”

” Sí, Quentin?”

“Yo, uh, yo poder uso el baño?”

“Puedo. Y sí, se puede. Andale.”

I clapped a hand over my pocket to keep my phone-bulge hidden and ran out of the classroom, careful to turn to the right as if I were heading for the boy’s room. A couple of months ago, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea; I’d discovered Adam’s secret when I walked in on him trying to get out of his tights at the end of fourth period. Which he’d missed, by the way, and I’d had to cover for him and pretend like I’d gotten a text from his mom about an emergency dental appointment.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 347: Next Time, Scales

Escape Pod 347: Next Time, Scales is an Escape Pod original.

Rated 13 and up for violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:40 — 18.4MB)

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Next Time, Scales

By John Moran

“You’re too restless,” the lizard whispered into my brain.

“And you’ve been at the reactor fuel again.”

Marla slapped her prehensile tail onto the table, cracking its surface with her paralysing stinger and rattling the chess pieces. The blow echoed through the control room.

“I hate it when you do that, Steven.”

“Do what?”

“Think you can read me.”

I smiled. “Your underarm scales are pale, which means a supercharged diet or zero-gravity. As we haven’t been off-planet, it must be the
food. Plus, your breath stinks of sulphur and your claws have white rings.”

Marla pointed one crimson eye at the table, but kept the other on me.

“Your move,” she said.

“Give me time. Why do you think I’m restless?”

“Because you’ve spent the last three weeks researching Loris, and done each patrol fully armed.”

I glanced through the window, as if by chance I might catch our thief creeping up in plain view, but all I saw were two huge moons glowering over the ruined planet, its civilisation long-dead, part-excavated and full of secrets.

I couldn’t let Marla know the site had me spooked, though. Her people had been hunters for a thousand years, and, through a quirk of fate, she believed in me.

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“Smile Time”, or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust in Whedon”

The following article contains spoilers for the Angel episode “Smile Time”, and is fair game for spoilers of any episodes preceding it, as well as the entire run of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.

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When Joss Whedon and the Buffy team announced that they’d be doing a musical episode, people were skeptical. I mean, how can you make a musical about slaying vampires?

Oh we of little faith. “Once More, With Feeling” was one of the best hours of television made in the last quarter-century*.

As I began watching Angel a few months ago, I heard rumblings that there was an episode centered around puppets sometime in the fifth season. I finally got there and my tweet**, no lie, was: Oh crap… it’s the puppet episode. Now, I knew there were some big story pieces coming up — the arrival of Illyria, the coming apocalypse, and the series finale, just to name a few of the things to be crammed into the next eight episodes. I’ve just been waiting to get to that part. The one I watched prior to this was a World War II-era submarine story where Angel and Spike are caught on a captured U-boat, and it… wasn’t that great. So I didn’t have high hopes for “Smile Time”.

Should’ve learned my lesson from OMWF: trust in Whedon and his team, and he will never lead you astray.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 346: Hawksbill Station

Originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine

Rated 15 and up

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:45:41 — 72.7MB)

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Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

Barrett was the uncrowned King of Hawksbill Station. He had been there the longest; he had suffered the most; he had the deepest inner resources of strength. Before his accident, he had been able to whip any man in the place. Now he was a cripple, but he still had that aura of power that gave him command. When there were problems at the Station, they were brought to Barrett. That was axiomatic. He was the king.

He ruled over quite a kingdom, too. In effect it was the whole world, pole to pole, meridian to meridian. For what it was worth. It wasn’t worth very much.

Now it was raining again. Barrett shrugged himself to his feet in the quick, easy gesture that cost him an infinite amount of carefully concealed agony, and shuffled to the door of his hut. Rain made him impatient:. the pounding of those great greasy drops against the corrugated tin roof was enough even to drive a Jim Barrett loony. He nudged the door open. Standing in the doorway, Barrett looked out over his kingdom.

Barren rock, nearly to the horizon. A shield of raw dolomite going on and on. Raindrops danced and bounced on that continental slab of rock. No trees. No grass. Behind Barrett’s hut lay the sea, gray and vast. The sky was gray too, even when it wasn’t raining.

He hobbled out into the rain. Manipulating his crutch was getting to be a simple matter for him now. He leaned comfortably, letting his crushed left foot dangle. A rockslide had pinned him last year during a trip to the edge of the Inland Sea. Back home, Barrett would have been fitted with prosthetics and that would have been the end of it: a new ankle, a new instep, refurbished ligaments and tendons. But home was a billion years away, and home there’s no returning.
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