Posts Tagged ‘alien invasion’

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Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite

Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:44 — 24.8MB)

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Grifting the Zaxonite

by Cooper C. Wilms

Of all the cons in his little black book, Trevor McKay liked his current grift the best. Small-fish stunts like his Spanish Doubloon gambit were always foolproof and reliable for a week of food and booze, but there was no challenge to it. His Slot Machine Repairman scam raked in the dough and let him flex his inner thespian, but the security at the casinos would inevitably recognize his face. But The Stranded Zaxonite, as he had come to know it, made him proud to call himself, not just a con man, but a con artist.

He twisted his cigarette into the bar’s ashtray and raised his bourbon to his lips. His mark had to be a particular breed of man. Isolated. Desperate. Willing to believe. He scanned the room and took short, silent sips. He passed over the trio of soldiers in flirtatious conversation with a waitress, and ignored the man by the turquoise-inlaid jukebox that clearly owned the black Sportster out front; but there, in the back, with the thick Buddy Holly glasses and the beat-up porkpie, was the perfect target.

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Escape Pod 840: The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One) / Alien Invader or Assistive Device?

The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One) first appeared in Drabblecast in August 2021.

Alien Invader or Assistive Device? first appeared in Robot Dinosaurs in April 2020.

Crude language, violence, gore, and death.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:04 — 54.1MB)

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The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One)

By John Wiswell

Dinosaurs don’t want to kill you; they just don’t care that you’re there. More people have been sat on by brontosauruses than have been eaten by all the theropods combined. Since I joined security on the archipelago, 82% of dinosaur-related human casualties were from tourists who got too close during mating season. And the four times I’ve seen a deinonychus attack someone, they’ve always left them uneaten. Why? For the same reason bears and sharks tend to leave victims alive: because humans taste like shit. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 820: Tony Roomba’s Last Day on Earth

Tony Roomba’s Last Day on Earth originally appeared in Diabolical Plots, November 2020.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:15 — 40.6MB)

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Tony Roomba’s Last Day on Earth

By Maria Haskins

It’s Tony Roomba’s last day on Earth. After two years of working undercover as a vacuum cleaner bot on this boondock planet, he is finally heading home to the Gamma Sector, but his final day is full of challenges. He has to get out of the apartment undetected; has to reach the extraction point in time for teleportation; and he has to submit his intel-report to the Galactic Robotic Alliance (not that they’ll like it much). However, his most immediate and hairiest problem, is that he can’t get Hortense off his back.

“Hortense, listen to me,” Tony says firmly, but Hortense just twitches her fluffy tail, caressing the buttons on top of his wheeled, disc-shaped body, causing him to inhale several dust bunnies. “I have to get out of here for a bit,” he wheezes, “and you’re an indoor cat. You know you’re not supposed to leave the apartment.”

Neither are you, Hortense’s luminous, jade-green eyes seem to say as she purrs and gazes down at him while her lush posterior remains firmly planted on his back. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 793: A Little Bit of Kali (Part 2 of 2)

This story was originally published in The Expanding Universe 5: A Science Fiction Exploration

Contains some harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:57 — 59.5MB)

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A Little Bit of Kali (Part 2 of 2)

By Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and R.R. Virdi

I can’t tell you how long I wandered. A failed soldier going home when India needed us the most. I knew I should have gotten back to my parents—but truth be told I couldn’t make myself go back. I ditched my gear, worked odd jobs, mostly bicycle repair. India is a country of motorcycles, and every village and every junction, those days, had a dusty little shop with a pile of half-rusted bikes outside and three grease-covered men inside screwing something onto and engine. I was one of those nuts. I worked in a two-bit town so nameless that you couldn’t find it on a map even if you wanted to.

One day a man brought in a bike I instantly recognized—a Royal Enfield Bullet. An ancient design, built to jump out of planes in the second World War, left to India when the British withdrew; now a stolid, reliable workhorse of a bike, one of the few capable of handling everything India could throw at it. I spent a bit more effort than I usually put into it.

The man who came to pick it up arrived in a long white Chrysler, kicking up fine dust. A floral print shirt stretched over an ample belly. Gold chains glistened on his neck. Two thugs got out with him—one swarthy and sweating in the heat, one pale and thin and unafflicted. Both wore white.

“Bad customer,” said the owner’s wife, and bustled out of there as fast as she could.
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Escape Pod 792: A Little Bit of Kali (Part 1 of 2)

This story was originally published in The Expanding Universe 5: A Science Fiction Exploration

Contains some harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:09 — 58.4MB)

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A Little Bit of Kali (Part 1 of 2)

By Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and R.R. Virdi

Where do old gods go to die?

Not to Mother Ganga, no. Not for us the fire that strips our sins from our bones, turns our bones into ashes, turns our ashes into a constellation of dust on the holy river. They say Ganga once took the seed from the fire-god Agni, which would have otherwise burned this world to a cinder, and cooled it in her waters: but even she will not take our kind. Ganga only takes the flesh and blood. Leaves the metal behind.

They tried. The government of India lay one of us down in the waters—a prototype Vishnu, I think, ’20, maybe ’21. A thing too difficult to burn it, so they lit a ritual pyre and let Him slide into the waters. He lies there still, decades of human rot piling upon His frame. Sometimes His eyes light up, throwing mocking shadows at those who come to worship him from the dead river-banks, and those of us who know Him shudder, because underneath the ceaseless filth something still lives.

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Escape Pod 791: Rights and Wrongs

Rights and Wrongs was originally published in Intergalactic Medicine Show, February 2014.

Mentions death, murder and the death penalty.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:47 — 74.3MB)

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Rights and Wrongs

By Brian K. Lowe

“Tell me again who I pissed off to get this job?” Carefully unwrapping my roast beef on wheat, I used the paper as a holder to keep mustard off of my lap.

“I thought you wanted the job,” Rusty said. “I thought you were taking it as some kind of personal challenge.” Russ Becker and I ate lunch together almost every day. “Rusty” was another assistant district attorney, and we’d bonded over a mutual disdain for other lawyers. Things being what they were, though, sometimes we got drafted to work the other side, and I’d drawn the short straw here, with Rusty as my prosecutor.

“Hell, no, I didn’t want it! The Jan’i killed my parents, Rusty. I had to break into their house and found them on the floor, blood coming out of their ears. I couldn’t even bury them; they had to burn down the house with them still inside.” I stopped to pull myself together. “This is somebody’s idea of payback, probably Bertoli. She’s still mad at me because she thinks I screwed up the Andelson case.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 779: The Call of the Sky (Flashback Friday)

This story was originally published in the anthology When the Hero Comes Home: 2 and first appeared on Escape Pod episode 507 on October 22, 2015.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:24 — 50.5MB)

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The Call of the Sky

By Cliff Winnig

The army hospital’s underground floors reminded me of Pluto Base, a place I’d never actually been. I’d never even been off-world, but I remembered those claustrophobic beige corridors. Two years before, I’d synced with a bunch of my alts home on leave after basic training. Today for the first time I’d be meeting one who’d seen combat. More than that, one who’d become a hero, the only Teri Kang to survive the Battle of Charon.

We wouldn’t be syncing, though. Not this time. Not ever. Before she’d escaped the doomed moon — the moon she’d given the order to destroy — she’d been bitten. That’s what the G.I.s called it when Hive nanobots infected you: being bitten. Like it was a zombie plague or something.

Hell, it might as well be. Soon the only other Teri Kang in the universe would lose her fight with that infection, and the army docs would euthanize her. Under the circumstances, even coming home had been an act of courage. A lot of G.I.s who got bitten went AWOL rather than face the certain death of returning to base. Not for the first time, I wondered if I had such courage lying latent within me.

Flanked by MPs, I followed a nurse down hallway after hallway till we arrived at my alt’s room. Well, the room next to it, since she was quarantined. A smartglass wall separated me from the sterile chamber where the other Teri Kang would live out her last few hours.

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Escape Pod 742: Them Ships (Summer Flashback)

“Them Ships” first appeared on Escape Pod 510 on Nov 12, 2015, and in We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology

Contains much profanity.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:53 — 31.9MB)

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Them Ships

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Leonardo says that the Americans are going to fire some rockets and free us from the tyranny of the aliens and I say: who gives a shit. Lemme tell you something: It wasn’t super-awesome around here before the aliens. At least we get three meals every day now.

I used to live in a cardboard house with a tin roof and collected garbage for a living. They called my home a ‘lost city’ but they should’ve called it ‘fucked city.’

Leonardo talks about regaining our freedom, ‘bout fighting and shit. What damn freedom? You think I had freedom in the slums? Leonardo can talk freedom out his ass because he had money before this thing started and he saw too many American movies where they kill the monsters with big guns.

I’m not an idiot. The cops used to do their little “operations” in our neighborhood. They’d come in and arrest everyone, take everything. They weren’t Hollywood heroes out to help people. They were fucking assholes and I don’t see why they would have changed. As for American soldiers saving the day: You think they give a rat’s ass ‘bout Mexico City? You think they’re going to fly here in their helicopters and save us?

I say fuck that shit. I never had no freedom. Leonardo can go piss himself.
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Escape Pod 740: Women of Our Occupation (Summer Flashback)

This story first appeared in Strange Horizons in July 2006.

Slight amount of sexual content.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:55 — 29.2MB)

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Show Notes

Recorded live at LonCon3.

GoodReads page for the story (Note Hurley’s referenced comment about pronoun changes)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40060356

Escape Pod: 2020 Hugo Voting Packet (Best Semiprozine)
Alasdair Stuart: 2020 Hugo Voting Packet (Best Fan Writer)

Women of Our Occupation

by Kameron Hurley

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.]

Host Commentary

by Alasdair Stuart

Welcome back to Summer School, where for the next month we’re going to be using Flashback Fridays to explore some of the ways science fiction plays with its biggest toys. And what bigger toy is there than alien invasion?

Well, we say aliens.

This week’s story has a certain metatextual resonance even before we get to why it is like it is. This was originally recorded live at the first ever WorldCon I attended, back in London in 2014. Audio production back then was by Mat Weller, narration was by Mur Lafferty and hosting was by me. The story was, and still is, by Kameron Hurley who is, like Escape Pod and myself, a Hugo finalist this year. If you’re a voter, please consider voting for, well, all of us. The EP and my personal voter packet information links will be in the show notes.

Now, get ready because it’s story time.

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Escape Pod 657: The Big So-So

The Big So-So originally appeared in Interzone no. 273, November/December 2017.

References to drug use and A-grade cursing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:08 — 42.6MB)

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The Big So-So

By Erika Satifka

We’re both sitting on the rotting front porch one muggy July day when Dorcas asks me if I want to break into Paradise with her. I lace up my sneakers and we do the old huff-and-puff up Negley Avenue to the big Cygnian compound on the hill.

It’s dark, which doesn’t mean much. Most of the compound-heads are wired up to the pleasure-juice on a more-or-less constant basis, and who needs light when you’ve got that? Still, it only takes about three minutes until we’re spotted climbing over the semi-permeable barrier that separates the Chosen Ones from the Not There Yet. And it only takes eight minutes until we’re sitting in the bare-bones holding tank, waiting for an attendant to rouse one of the compound-heads from their ecstasy.

I look over at Dorky. She looks over at me. She mouths the words “play along.”

And I mouth the word “what?” because for the life of me I can’t figure out what the hell the point of this little stunt is.

The compound-head enters in a thick bathrobe that hides just how fucking skinny they all are. It picks up its slate and starts to write. The chalk squeaks.

Colorless ideas sleep furiously still.

“We want to stay.”

Sonic results spiral within documentation.

The Cygnians say they’re preparing the compound-heads for life on their homeworld, the real Paradise. For three weeks all of us were jacked up on pleasure-juice dialed to Max Effect, while the Cygnians ran tests to decide which of us got to live in the compounds. They shepherded their lucky few into one of the many squat nanofoam villages that dot the entire globe. Then they turned off the tap.

What happened next… well, at least some of us survived.
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