Posts Tagged ‘exorcism’

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Escape Pod 1027: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 2 of 3)

Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:15 — 57.1MB)

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Show Notes

Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1026: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1 of 3)

What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 2)

by Aimee Ogden

Quiet is a rare commodity in the habitat. Hob takes a moment to bask in it after he’s shucked his suit into the first empty locker. A friendly electronic hum—from the air circulation fans, the water recycling system, the pair of cleaning drones—takes the edge off the silence. As does the occasional scuffle from the ever-expanding family of field mice that’s made a home under the northwest solar array. Hob really does need to take care of that too, at some point: another little undesired exorcism.

A few kinks linger in his back, all the muscles that clenched up in anticipation of his fall, which haven’t figured out yet that they can let go. While he massages the sore spot over his hips as best as he can reach it, he pulls up the latest download packet from HQ and flicks through it. Blink, a pay stub deposited in his account. Blink, the smiling faces of the latest set of new hires, terraformers and exorcists alike. Blink, a sample serving of news headlines. A blurb about rapid changes in Zethari weather patterns careens past him, and he double-blinks to dismiss the rest of the packet before the news has another chance to leave a mark.

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Escape Pod 1026: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1 of 3)

“What Any Dead Thing Wants” originally appeared in Psychopomp (February 2024)

Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:33 — 50.7MB)

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What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1)

by Aimee Ogden

The third week of a planetary exorcism is the hardest—at least if the planet in question has megafauna to deal with. Enthusiasm wanes even faster on worlds that never evolved past microbes. Hob’s crew always comes in like a team of intrepid explorers, swapping stories with the outgoing terraforming crew as they run down the handover checklist. But after ten, fifteen days, the work slows down, as the crew moves farther from the terraforming origin nexus. That’s where the ghosts are densest, the hauntings the most intense. Along the meridian lines that the crew follows around the planet to the secondary terraforming nexus, only the most stubborn haunts linger—the ones that won’t clear out at just the first reminder of their own recent mortality. The ones that don’t seem to give a shit that Hob and his crew are working to a strict deadline. Exo megafauna have, unsurprisingly, absolutely no sense of human decency.

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Escape Pod 618: All Profound and Logical Minds (Artemis Rising)

Escape Pod 618: All Profound and Logical Minds (Artemis Rising) is an Escape Pod original.

Contains a few A-grade curses. Peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:56 — 72.3MB)

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All Profound and Logical Minds

By Bennett North

The space station was silent in the way that a black hole is black; it was more than just an absence of noise. There was something physical to the silence, a force pulling in all sound and eating it. Hannah anchored her boots to the floor of the atrium, feeling the reassuring click as the magnets engaged. Emergency lights washed the atrium floor with a watery red light.

Taking a deep breath of her tepid suit air, Hannah unzipped her bag. An insulated thermos floated out. She left it slowly rotating next to her elbow while she rummaged around to find her keychain. It was a cheap one, made of injection-molded nickel, in the shape of a caffeine molecule. Stupid and gimmicky, yes, but she needed a symbol of her faith and as an atheist, it worked. Bethany had come up with the idea of doing the ritual as an exorcism. A real Catholic exorcism would take much longer, but the clients liked the concept, and Hannah’s abbreviated version worked.

A faint click in Hannah’s ear warned her a second before she heard her sister’s voice over the radio. “Ship to Missionary. Come in, Missionary.” Bethany’s voice was thin and staticky, more white noise than words, but it was like tasting cream after having nothing but water.

Hannah closed her eyes for a second, savoring the soft hiss, and then opened them again, shifting a glance to the heads-up display to trigger the radio to pick up her response. “This is Missionary. I’m in position in the atrium.”

“How’s it looking in there?”

Hannah looked toward the starboard side of the atrium. Six or seven bodies had collected in the awning of a cafe like a lost handful of balloons. They were dressed casually as if they’d been strolling through the park at the time that the station vented.

“Quiet,” said Hannah.

“Good.” Bethany’s voice had a laugh in it. “The longer it stays quiet, the better.”
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