Posts Tagged ‘space’

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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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Escape Pod 959: This Little War of Ours

Escape Pod 959: This Little War of Ours is an Escape Pod original.

Brief mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation, and an apocalypse setting.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:02 — 43.1MB)

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This Little War of Ours

By Arden Baker

 

SECURE PRIORITY COMMUNIQUE

distribution SOLITAIRE, keyword MASQUERADE, source PENTACLE

FROM: TRIPLE INTENT

TO: ASPHODEL

BEGIN CONTENT

 

Even if you’re my enemy, I’m glad to hear from you. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 957: Vault (Part 2 of 2)

Vault originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 141 in June 2018.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:04 — 59.6MB)

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Vault (Part 2 of 2)

By D.A. Xiaolin Spires

(…Continued from Part 1)

“Lukas?”

Chenguang’s voice echoes in this expanse of dark.

A vortex of light opens to her right and she sees a warped head and legs emerge from a point in the dark. It’s Lukas. As he enters the space, the light bends, his figure elongated as he pulls himself through and it closes behind him. It’s dark again.

“Hey, Lukas.”

“Chenguang?” His voice is low and resounds against unseen walls. “Where is this place?”

“Did we just—enter the structure somehow?”

“I—I—don’t know.” Lukas’ voice uncharacteristically wavers before it quiets down in the darkness. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 956: Vault (Part 1 of 2)

Vault originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 141 in June 2018.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:34 — 54.8MB)

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Vault (Part 1 of 2)

By D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Chenguang hikes up her sleeves before vaulting over the pile of fuzzy moss and greets Lukas with a nod. The chloropolyurethane fabric flaps in the slight breeze and the double suns beat down onto her arms.

Lukas fishes in his bag next to his tent for a bottle of sunsoak and releases the spray, running it generously over his solflex-covered arms, torso, and legs.

“Your head,” Chenguang says and he smiles, as if he hadn’t been doing this for years.

“Can’t reach,” he says, lying and Chenguang knows he just likes the attention. She grabs the spray and discharges that exhale of mist, covering his football-shaped clear helmet. She even sprays some on the clear hard arc under his bearded chin. She turns the mist onto herself, bringing down the spray over her exposed transpandex inner layer, the foam frothing up at her arms before becoming clear, encasing the invisible solflex pores of her fabric. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 949: A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls

Escape Pod 949: A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:14 — 39.2MB)

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A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls

By Brian Hugenbruch

“Hey Marty,” Mom asks, “got a moment?”

I cringe whenever Mom’s voice has that tone to it. I don’t know what she’s going to say; but if I’ve learned anything in my thirteen years on this desolate, oxygen-deprived rock, it’s that she’s going to find a way to say the most mortifying thing possible. It would be impressive, the way that every sentence excavates my stomach—if it weren’t my stomach she was mining!

Okay, that’s unfair. Maybe this time it won’t be so bad?

“That girl who just walked past us. Why didn’t you ask her out?”

Or not. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 937: Punk Voyager (Flashback Friday)

Escape Pod 937: Punk Voyager (Flashback Friday) is an Escape Pod original.

A copious amount of harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:47 — 33.1MB)

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Punk Voyager

by Shaenon K. Garrity

Punk Voyager was built by punks.  They made it from beer cans, razors, safety pins, and a surfboard some D-bag had left on the beach. Also plutonium.  Where did they get plutonium?  Around.  f*** you.

The punks who built Punk Voyager were Johnny Bonesaw, Johnny Razor, Mexican Johnny D-bag, Red Viscera, and some other guys.  No, asshole, nobody remembers what other guys.  They were f***ing wasted, these punks.  They’d been drinking on the San Diego beach all day and night, talking about making a run to Tijuana and then forgetting and punching each other.  They’d built a fire on the beach, and all night the fire went up and went down while the punks threw beer cans at the seagulls.

Forget the s*** I just said, it wasn’t the punks who did it.  They were f***ing punks.  The hell they know about astro-engineering? Truth is that Punk Voyager was the strung-out masterpiece of Mexican Johnny D-bag’s girlfriend, Lacuna, who had a doctorate in structural engineering.  Before she burned out and ran for the coast, Lacuna was named Alice McGuire and built secret nuclear submarines for a government contractor in Ohio.  It sucked.  But that was where she got the skills to construct an unmanned deep-space probe.  Same principle, right?  Keep the radiation in and the water out.  Or the vacuum of space, whatever, it’s all the same s*** to an engineer.

(Continue Reading…)

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