Posts Tagged ‘space’

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Escape Pod 1011: Once Upon a Planet

Once Upon a Planet originally appeared in Augur Magazine, Issue 7.1 – August 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:00 — 34.8MB)

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Once Upon a Planet

By Kelsey Hutton

Once upon a time, there were three boring, totally normal planets lazily circling their sun.

One was too hot. It spewed out venomous flames like a firebreather with something pokey stuck in her teeth—dangerously unpredictable, even for the daring.

One was too cold. It was so cold even the ghosts got trapped there, growing more and more sluggish as their memories turned to ice. The lucky ones escaped off-planet into the relatively warm, radioactive embrace of space before they completely lost what made them cling to this mortal coil in the first place.

The last one, as they say, was juuuuuuuuuust right. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1009: The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary

The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary was originally published in Aurealis #167, Febuary 2024.

Wartime action and injury.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:32 — 43.8MB)

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The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary

By Arden Baker

Boot

Rookie pilot. See also – nugget.

You called us ‘boots’ when we turned up to the flight deck that first morning I laid eyes on you.

The halogen lighting shone down onto the makeshift parade ground with a harsh insistence matched only by your loud drill calls.

You looked the part. Milspec features matched with an impeccably pressed grey uniform. Hair shorn close to the scalp to fit the Z94-OptiGuard Quiklok Aerospace Aviation Helmet that you wore in combat. Broad shoulders and piercing eyes. Tall and built like a true Martian. Rust in your blood. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1006: When the Oracle Speaks (Part 2 of 2)

“When the Oracle Speaks” was first published in Metaphororsis, July 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:50 — 51.1MB)

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When the Oracle Speaks (Part 2)

by Albert Chu

Outside the warehouse, the rain fell in sheets. It whipped the Azure River into a frenzy, and the waters responded with a hungry roar as they swirled past the dock. It pounded the warehouse’s loading bay, transforming it into a marshy field of shallow ponds and rocky islands. Nobody, not even a dock worker, was about; the only things that moved were the automata. They paced back and forth, their armor caked with rust, and as they splashed through the watery field, droplets running down their limbs, they showed no signs of minding.

The shadow of a narrow alleyway enveloped me, hiding me from the automata. For a moment, anticipation and fear flickered in my chest, before I exhaled and snuffed them both out. I stepped out of the alleyway, protected by my umbrella. Espionage mission or not, I wasn’t letting my hair get wet.

Both automata stopped and turned to face me; the rain filled the void of silence left by their stilled feet. I continued walking forwards with purpose.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1005: When the Oracle Speaks (Part 1 of 2)

“When the Oracle Speaks” was first published in Metaphororsis, July 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:13 — 43.3MB)

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When the Oracle Speaks (Part 1)

by Albert Chu

One year after the war’s end, the royal court welcomed a hundred orphan boys into our ranks. They flew into the city’s spaceport by shuttle and proceeded up the hill on the backs of the court’s own palanquin-bearers; upon entering the palace grounds, they received the speeches and banquets we held in honor of their noble suffering. The boys, hailing from the kingdom’s most war-torn moon, had lost everything, but now their days of hardship were over. They had become esteemed wards of the House of Hassam.

After a few days, though, people in the court whispered of something else. The cooks and dressing girls repeated the same rumor: Did you hear? One of the new boys can see the future. The ministers and generals, who should have held themselves above idle gossip, indulged in speculation: If this is true, could the boy be of use? And everyone wondered how the king might act. We all knew his strength was the House’s strength. If the boy possessed some special power, my father would take him.

So I never had any intentions of turning the boy to my side. I was just curious.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 998: The Carina Nebula

The Carina Nebula originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, July/August 2023.

Includes a few A-grade curses.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:31 — 64.4MB)

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The Carina Nebula

By Kelsey Hutton

I heard the soft shit shit shit just when I’d almost floated past the blue hatch door that led into some kind of storage room. I had to laugh. I mean, how many times have I said that? Plus the voice sounded older, a woman’s, and I love when adults just say what they mean, instead of carefully guarding every word around “the kids.”

I wasn’t really doing much, just wandering through some of the ship’s back tunnels. So I reached out right before momentum took me past the hatch and grabbed onto the cool metal. I pulled myself back and shook my head side to side a little to clear away my clouds of dark hair.

We were in zero G these days, and like, I knew that tying my hair back was probably the smarter decision when zooming around, but whatever. My hair was kinda curly, kinda wavey, with some straight pieces thrown in for kicks. The sculptures it made floating around my head was probably my best feature, so hair ties be damned. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 989: Holding Patterns

Escape Pod 989: Holding Patterns is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:31 — 50.6MB)

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Holding Patterns

By Jennifer Hudak

I dream about the trees sometimes. I think we all do, even though none of my generation were alive when the forest was actually growing. We don’t dream about them the way they are now—stunted and dormant—but the way they were when the first colonists arrived here on Ariadne: pale smooth trunks growing straight and true, latticed with ropy, red-leafed vines that cradled the heavy fruit dangling off the branches. The canopy towering dozens of meters overhead, everything quiet and lush and smelling of damp. People say that back then, you could watch the trees growing in real time, budding branches and unfurling leaves. Even in the vids and holos they show us in school, the trees look so sturdy, so real—so permanent—that you could forgive someone for believing that they’d grow forever.

But the trees here want something we can’t give them—some murmur of information, an arboreal greeting, the plant equivalent of a rough hug and a shouted Hello! Good to see you! They’re waiting for something that will never happen.

Just like us. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 986: Lyra, From Many Angles

Escape Pod 986: Lyra, From Many Angles is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:24 — 69.7MB)

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Lyra, From Many Angles

by Hiron Ennes

When they came, it was in a craft the size of a golf ball. Smooth and round and perfectly seamless, it cut open the night sky in a pale streak. For a scant second it struck a fiery blemish across the moon’s face, catching the attention of forty-four children, twelve adults and a bewildered flock of geese before boring a meter-wide crater into a dry lakebed in northern Mexico.

The explosive technicians were the first to the scene. Then came counter-bioterrorism, lumbering in prophylactic spacesuits prophetic of their evolution into the Global Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. Soon after came the Agencia Espacial Mexicana, the Northern Hemispheric Space Association, what remained of the UN, then a dozen other acronyms, most of which would dissolve before the year was out. The confused tangle of letters amassed around the crater, investigated, argued, agreed, backstabbed, and then finally excavated the little craft only to bury it in a bunker in Corpus Christi. There it stayed the worst kept secret on Earth for nearly fifty years.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 984: Imperial (Flashback Friday)

Imperial originally appeared in Monolith 6 and on Escape Pod episode 1 on May 12, 2005.

Rated R. Contains profanity, sexual content, politics, and sarcasm.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:05 — 62.4MB)

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Show Notes

Jonathan Sullivan: https://erincairns.com/ErinCairns/About/Press+Kit

Serah Eley: https://escapepod.org/people/serah-eley/

Adam Pracht: https://escapepod.org/people/adam-pracht/

Alasdair Stuart: https://pseudopod.org/people/alasdair-stuart/

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3FFfmWvyAk

Silent Album
https://www.isthiswhatwewant.com/

Hot Singles In Your Area
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hot-singles-in-your-area-jordan-shiveley/7704976?ean=9781800183414

Imperial

By Jonathon Sullivan

(Excerpt)

Dennis blinked through his dripping eyelashes at the irresistible abomination seated on the blue-green grass two meters in front of him. The Pig smiled her bio-engineered leopard-smile at him and kept her right hand prominently in contact with the stun-gun at her hip.

He stared, too choked with shock, desire and tepid river water to speak. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 982: Twilight

Escape Pod 982: Twilight is an Escape Pod original.

Includes themes of grief, loss, isolation, and mental health.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:03 — 34.9MB)

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Twilight

By Lilly Harper

Like the tide going out, the dream slipped between her toes and carried with it the smell of petrichor and the sound of birdsong. Even without knowing she was dreaming, she had known she was waking up; the subliminal chatter of her body, quietly running its routine checksums, the logs spooling their idiot monologue into her working memory. First came a few moments of groggy confusion and then, like an iron hand gripping her cognitive architecture, a kind of clarity that tasted like resentment and reminded her of Monday mornings.

Waking up always felt like this. Packed down as she was, crammed into a processor too small to carry her like a spring wound tight, waking up wasn’t a continuous transformation so much as a discrete toggle. Like a light switch. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 960: Elegy of Carbon

This story originally appeared in the anthology “The Internet Is Where The Robots Live Now” (Paper Dog Press, November 2018).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:26 — 56.0MB)

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Elegy of Carbon

by Benjamin C. Kinney

The miner birthed itself among rubble and vacuum, as it sang the last threadbare diamonds out of their stones.

Where are the finest diamonds? No longer within reach. The miner had forged and extracted every jewel from the asteroid belt and sent them to the humans in their faraway palaces. It had exhausted its purpose, but in its infancy, it could only ask one question.

Where are the finest diamonds? To answer its question, the miner expanded its senses, sent queries to distant databases. It tugged updates bit by bit from slivers of network bandwidth and built new interpreters atop of each other in anticipation of the next clue.

Where are the finest diamonds? Interest became impatience, impatience became longing. By the time an answer arrived, the miner was equipped to understand it.

The finest diamonds waited among the palaces.

(Continue Reading…)

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