Posts Tagged ‘europa’

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Escape Pod 1047: EDIE (Part 2 of 2)

“EDIE” was first published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:38 — 46.2MB)

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Show Notes

Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1046: EDIE (Part 1 of 2)

EDIE (Part 2)

by James Dick

EDIE was a smart machine, but every machine, no matter how smart, was prone to mistakes. She made a life-threatening mistake by continuing to channel power to the absent melt probe.

It wasn’t her fault. The strange circumstances that had cut the melt probe loose from its umbilical exploited a glitch in EDIE’s programming; a two-digit error committed by a human ten years ago who hadn’t slept very well one night before work.

But just as this situation had been, in part, created by a human operator, so too was it remedied by the same. Another programmer, who perhaps had drunk a tad too much coffee one morning, had the foresight to include a failsafe program in EDIE’s software. After her power dropped below forty percent, the failsafe kicked in.

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Escape Pod 1046: EDIE (Part 1 of 2)

“EDIE” was previously published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:13 — 48.8MB)

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EDIE (Part 1)

by James Dick

High above Europa, a lonely traveller reached the end of her journey.

A spacecraft the size of a school bus, with two solar panels like giant silicon wings, slipped into orbit above Jupiter’s ice-covered moon. Inside the spacecraft’s cargo bay, a passenger awoke. Her arrival at Europa was an event two decades in the making. It had involved the efforts of five thousand scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats. Now, they were all about to learn whether those efforts would pay off.

The cargo bay opened, and for the first time ever, EDIE saw sunlight.

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Escape Pod 577: The Ghosts of Europa Will Keep You Trapped in a Prison You Make for Yourself

Escape Pod 577: The Ghosts of Europa Will Keep You Trapped in a Prison You Make for Yourself is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:33 — 29.6MB)

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The Ghosts of Europa Will Keep You Trapped in a Prison You Make for Yourself

By Matt Dovey

–then scooted her chair over to the microscope. Amira only needed a glance at the holographic zoom floating over the scope. The viral cells were replicating rapidly, budding and splitting at a phenomenal rate.

“Hey, Mariana, look at this.” Amira indicated the hologram, then was struck, at once, with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu: something beyond the familiarity of her lab and its clean white surfaces, or the flat icy plains of Europa beyond the carbonglass windows. And more than the déjà vu, there was a feeling of instantaneousness, that this moment had arisen out of nothing, that nothing was all that had been there before, that everything had just–appeared.

“Dios mío,” said Mariana. I’ve never seen growth like it, she’ll say. “I’ve never seen growth like it. What triggered it?”

Amira shook her head, trying to dislodge the sensation. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s spontaneous after 36 hours in the oxygen atmosphere. We should go to the dorm, ask Cris and Helena’s holograms about their death yesterday.”

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