Posts Tagged ‘EP Original’

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Escape Pod 912: The Retcon Man

Escape Pod 912: The Retcon Man is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:01 — 32.1MB)

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The Retcon Man

by Cameron Fischer

Never look for evidence of your future self in the past. Doing so can close your mind to alternative plans if you think you see what you’re destined to do.

It was a hard rule for me to follow, especially when my client was half an hour late. It left me ample time to explore the storage facility, but apart from noting a security camera at the entrance, there wasn’t much to see: five lanes of asphalt with plowed snow mounds melting in the corners. Along both sides were rows of bright green roll-up doors matching the color of the City-Store logo. Many were still embedded behind packed snow.

The key card vending machine near the front had a listing of which storage pods were free. The crime-scene pod was unavailable, but I was more interested in the pods surrounding it. They were already owned. By who? By me? It was best that I couldn’t tell. This was where the don’t-look-for-evidence rule came into play.

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Escape Pod 911: Driftwood in the Sea of Time

Escape Pod 911: Driftwood in the Sea of Time is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:22 — 46.3MB)

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Driftwood in the Sea of Time

By Wendy Nikel

They’d warned us about the paradoxes, but humanity has always had a way of ignoring the things we don’t want to think about and disregarding the parts that don’t align with how we want the world to operate.

One minute, you’re a self-assured time traveler from the twenty-first century, flashing up and down along the timeline with your TimeBand™ on your wrist, and the next, you’re stuck here, bobbing among the driftwood. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 910: Tuesday, June 13, at the South Valley Time Loop Support Group

Escape Pod 910: Tuesday, June 13, at the South Valley Time Loop Support Group is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:34 — 52.1MB)

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Tuesday, June 13, at the South Valley Time Loop Support Group

by Heather Kamins

Each time, Jessica begins the meeting the same way. “Well, here we are again.” The same introduction, the same mild chuckles from the group in response. She is the leader of this support group for time loop survivors, a rare experience, yet there are a handful of us in the area. For this, we count our blessings as many of us once counted the days. It isn’t like there are guidebooks for this sort of thing. All we have is each other.

We sit in a circle of chairs in a musty church basement. Toni shares first. She is 58, though age is relative for us. She estimates she was stuck in her loop for several years in total. It was December, and from the way she describes it, she might as well have been Ebenezer Scrooge. “I was working as a manager at this tech company. Eighty-hour weeks and all that. After a while, you just think it’s normal. And I expected the same from the people working under me.” December. The holidays. “It didn’t matter. People wanted to spend time with their families, but I was too brainwashed to see why they should get to do that instead of supporting the company.”

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Escape Pod 909: Murder or a Duck (Flashback Friday)

This story originally aired as an Escape Pod Original in Escape Pod 545 (October 2016)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:56 — 42.9MB)

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Murder or a Duck

By Beth Goder

George called out, “Mrs. Whitman, you have a visitor.”

Mrs. Whitman strode from her workroom, her white hair skipping out of its hairpins. She straightened her work skirt, massaged her bad knee, then hurried down the hall.

“George, what’s happened to the lamp with the blue shade?”

“To which lamp are you referring?” George smoothed down a cravat embroidered with tiny trombones. Improper attire for a butler, but George had never been entirely proper.

Mrs. Whitman examined the sitting room in further depth. The blue lamp was gone, as were the doilies, thank goodness. An elegant table sat between the armchair and green sofa, which was infused with the stuffy smell of potpourri. Behind the sofa hung The Roses of Wiltshire, a painting that Mrs. Whitman had never cared for, despite its lush purples and pinks and reds. And the ficus was there, too, of course.

Mrs. Whitman pulled out a battered notebook. George’s trombone cravat indicated she was in a timeline where he was courting Sonia. A good sign, indeed. Perhaps, after six hundred and two tries, she’d finally landed in a timeline where Mr. Whitman would return home safely.

Consulting her charts, she circled some continuities and crossed out others, referring often to an appendix at the back. The notebook was worn, its blue cover faded. And it was the twelfth one she’d had since starting the project. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 899: Sounding the Fall (Flashback Friday)

“Sounding the Fall” is an Escape Pod Original, first published in July 2015.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:11 — 50.2MB)

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Sounding the Fall

by Jei D. Marcade

Sometimes, Narae can almost convince emself that the AI’s Voice was a dream. Some kind of minor stroke misremembered, a neurological glitch retroactively given recognizable shape.

But sometimes–less frequently of late, but still, sometimes–Narae wakes to find emself sitting up in the dark, jaw slack, a sustained, atonal note spooling from the back of eir throat.

Narae steps through the open archway of the southwestern gate, bare toes curling in the cool blades of real grass with which the temple grounds are seeded. The lotus-shaped lanterns hanging from the eaves go dim as the sun activates, and from its single-tiered pagoda at the top of the hill behind em, the morning bell tolls.

The alms left anonymously against the outer wall in the night include a couple bolts of inert grey fabric, some bags of rice, and a stack of real tea bricks. Upon hefting the rice, Narae’s eyebrows inch toward the shadow of eir hairline at each bag’s weight: not synthetic either, these. Something that is part bemusement, part nostalgia tugs at the corners of Narae’s mouth, and ey shakes eir head as ey piles the bags and bolts into the bottom of the wheelbarrow before turning to gather the rest.

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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 884: Zhao and the Flightless Crane

Escape Pod 884: Zhao and the Flightless Crane is an Escape Pod original.

Discussion of death and loss.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:32 — 53.4MB)

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Zhao and the Flightless Crane

By A. J. Mo

Quick sapphires danced over sun-silvered water. Soundless, they zipped and wheeled to the quiet rhythm of filtration pumps. Dragonflies, Zhao thought. Other winged jewels joined the flurry, some green as spring, others red as blood, wings iridescent.

“Good,” he said to himself. “Lake’s clean.”

“That is good,” echoed Ah Bak in their tinny voice. “Dragonflies do not breed in stagnant water.”

In the distance, the Pearl River curled east, having conferred upon the lake a small fraction of its life on its thousand-mile journey from the west. Zhao stared at the scene, taking in the collage of colours and contours when he noticed something in the sky. A plane. Almost imperceptibly small, it cut its trail across perfect blue. His stomach tightened, a light prelude to much greater agony. A memory forced its way to the surface, fingers ruined by fire, the rest of the hand lost. All they could find. All that was left of Chen. Zhao clenched his teeth and dragged his eyes over the white naked sun to blot out the image.

“Does Lei like dragonflies?” came Ah Bak’s tinny voice, their haematite beak unmoving. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 882: Hey, George

Escape Pod 882: Hey, George is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:50 — 44.2MB)

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Hey, George

By Elizabeth Guilt

“Hey, George.”

I remind myself that that is not my name; it never was. I will myself not to react, not to break stride, as I stroll along beside the beach.

Old habits die hard, and the best neuro-reset in the world can’t overcome years of routine. Whoever called out could, had they been watching closely, have seen my tiny hesitation. But they are not calling me.

I hear footsteps behind me, running steps, getting closer.

“George!”

I stop walking and take a deep breath. I assume a politely blank expression, and turn around.

And then I see her. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 880: A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Talking to Your Parents

Escape Pod 880: A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Talking to Your Parents is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:22 — 49.0MB)

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A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Talking to Your Parents

By Adriana C. Grigore

You have (3) unopened voicemails on your personal line. Last received 31 minutes ago, Aurea Minor Time.

> Read?

> No. Switch to broadcast.

> Engage deep space satellite?

> Yes. On, say…a five-sector perimeter.

> Live transmission upon connection?

> Sure.

“… and when I said that no, I didn’t order the pie, I made it myself, they said—they said, oh, you shouldn’t have made such a mess! And I, well, I, I cried.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s… it’s like the mess was all they saw, you know?”

“And you wanted them to see you.”

“Yeah… I mean, doesn’t everyone?”

Sam looked at the canopy of stars past the asteroid belt he was supposed to be mapping. None of them would’ve been visible from any of the planets he’d grown up on, but they felt familiar anyway. Distant and still, as his spacesuit ebbed and flowed. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 879: Triptych

Escape Pod 879: Triptych is an Escape Pod original.

Content warnings for gender dysphoria, and threats of gun violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:24 — 35.4MB)

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Triptych

by Avi Burton

Delaney didn’t have time to change before the men in suits came and bundled her into the car. Her dress fell crooked against her knees, and her makeup was half-applied. The sting of cold air brushed against her bare shoulders. They hadn’t let her grab a jacket, either.

The hasty exit and lack of preparation made her think this semi-willing kidnapping couldn’t be for a public appearance. Security always made her change back into men’s clothes for that, no matter how nauseous the suit and tie made her. She knew the Senator’s people didn’t approve of her aesthetic, or her, period, but they gave her the brief grace of dressing how she liked—as long as she stayed hidden. If she ever left the house, it was as Senator Marcus Delaney. She’d never been allowed out before as this disheveled, in-between creature.

Delaney sat rumpled in the back seat of the van—Janus Delivery Services, read the logo imprinted on the side—and twisted her hands in her lap. There was a guard on either side of her, and one in the driver’s seat, who was wearing sunglasses. They were all white, male, and had a military look. Maybe Marines, definitely bodyguards, and not her usual handlers.

None of them made eye contact with her. Lines of tension dragged down the shoulders and frowns of the security guards. Something unspoken fizzled in the air, like a live wire, or a fuse burning down.

“What’s going on? What do you need me for?” Delaney asked. Usually, she was allowed a briefing before they came to take her, but she’d been ordered to get in the car without any other information.

“Quiet,” said the guard on the left.

“Did something happen?”

“Look.” Sunglasses in the front sighed, twisting the wheel. The windows of the van were tinted, and Delaney couldn’t make out more than faint road passing by. “You’ll find out when you get there. Don’t panic.”

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