Posts Tagged ‘Tina Connolly’

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Escape Pod 667: The Best We Can

The Best We Can originally appeared on Tor.com in July 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:28 — 36.8MB)

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The Best We Can

By Carrie Vaughn

In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, but peer review held it up for a year. News leaked—NASA announced one of their press conferences, but the press conference ended up being an announcement about a future announcement, which never actually happened and the reporters made a joke of it. Another case of Antarctic meteorites or cold fusion. We went around with our mouths shut waiting for an official announcement while ulcers devoured our guts.

So I wrote a press release. I had Marsh at JPL’s comet group and Salvayan at Columbia vet it for me and released it under the auspices of the JPL Near Earth Objects Program. We could at least start talking about it instead of arguing about whether we were ready to start talking about it. I didn’t know what would happen next. I did it in the spirit of scientific outreach, naturally. The release included that now-famous blurry photo that started the whole thing.

I had an original print of that photo, of UO-1—Unidentified Object One, because it technically wasn’t flying and I was being optimistic that this would be the first of more than one —framed and hanging on the wall over my desk, a stark focal point in my chronically cluttered office. Out of the thousands of asteroids we tracked and photographed, this one caught my eye, because it was symmetrical and had a higher than normal albedo. It flashed, even, like a mirror. Asteroids aren’t symmetrical and aren’t very reflective. But if it wasn’t an asteroid . . . .
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Escape Pod 664: The Day Girl

Escape Pod 664: The Day Girl is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:05 — 60.1MB)

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The Day Girl

by Rivqa Rafael

Mother never wanted me to take the meteorology job. “Those high fences and secret regulations,” she said. “There’s something shady about Rubens’ Medicines” —dear Mother’s tone was sarcastic when she wished it— “mark my words, Genevieve. Dull work, too, and why don’t they use automatons?” But it was that or go in as a governess or lady’s maid, and that would have been a bitter pill to swallow indeed.

I smile wryly at my little medicinal joke as I smooth down the page of the logbook. In any case, testimonials prove the worth of Rubens’ medicinal tonic above our competitors across Britain (to say nothing of the endorsement of Queen Victoria’s Surgeon): Worth every penny to save Da from consumption… Jarvis’ Elixir did nothing but Rubens’ saved her… The only cure, everyone knows it…

The hours are long, true, but the nursery is a pleasant place to work, with its high glass ceilings. I like seeing the tidy berry crops from my laboratory bench. Besides, it’s warm in winter, if a little stifling in summer.

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Escape Pod 661: A Fine Night for Tea and Bludgeoning

A Fine Night for Tea and Bludgeoning originally appeared in the anthology Little Green Men–Attack! in 2017.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:55 — 52.6MB)

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A Fine Night for Tea and Bludgeoning

By Beth Cato

Summer 1901

Upon my arrival at the Durham’s dance, it was quickly apparent to me that their daughter’s new purebred fiancé was not the evening’s star as gossip had foretold. Instead, a dashing green-skinned gentleman had garnered a pack of giggling admirers.

I had never encountered a person of such fascinatingly verdant coloration before, and yet I immediately had an odd pressure upon me to accept this man and not question his visage.

How peculiar.

I retreated to a far wall. My brow furrowed in thought; the motion hurt. My face was caked with powder adequate to make an elephant sneeze, all to obscure the final, yellowed vestiges of what had been a black eye.

Such a blemish would have been abhorrent to the flibbertigibbets filling the room, but then, they also had the mental acumen of chocolate éclairs. They prowled these parties for husband material the way big game hunters stalked moose, each seeking to bag something brag-worthy and best kept stuffed in a parlor. This green-skinned man was fresh meat, though it seemed no one else had noticed his greenness at all.
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Escape Pod 660: Hoping for Red

Escape Pod 660: Hoping for Red is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:24 — 44.0MB)

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Hoping for Red

by Adam Knight

Vixen had just one question for the doctor:
“Can you do it?”

Doctor Fizzwinkle smiled and patted the fur on Vixen’s neck. Outside of the office, the winds whipped furiously, as they did most of the time north of the Arctic Circle. In the office, though, the glow of fluorescent light and the smell of rubbing alcohol made Vixen feel secure and cared for.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “The procedure you heard about is simple in principle―I would take DNA samples of you and Mr. Vixen, then analyze the cells to see your genetic predispositions, and manipulate the chromosomes to produce the calf that you and your husband desire.”

“Then why not?” Vixen said, stamping her hooves in a little dance.

“Well, everything is simple in principle,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve never done it before.”

Vixen smiled and shook her antlers. She nuzzled against Doctor Fizzwinkle. All the reindeer, indeed all of the animals in the North Pole, loved the good doctor, the best veterinarian north of sixty-six degrees latitude.

“Have you and Mr. Vixen tried all of the techniques I presented? Did he take the pills I prescribed?”

“Yes, and yes,” Vixen replied.

“Give it time, and patience, and you can certainly have a healthy, normal calf.”

“But I don’t want a normal calf!” blurted out Vixen. The Doctor smiled sadly and shook his head.

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Escape Pod 659: Caesura

This story first appeared in Fireside Fiction, November 2017

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:54 — 44.7MB)

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Show Notes

Termination Shock
Termination Shock

TERMINATION SHOCK is a new roleplaying game from Greg Stolze, chronicling your adventures as an ordinary human rescued from hellish war by disorganized aliens. What will you do as a refugee in a strange cosmos? Cling to your past, or find a purpose among inscrutable aliens? Will you just get by, or will you redefine humanity in the eyes of a million extraterrestrials? The choice is yours in this new tabletop game, on Kickstarter now.

Caesura

by Hayley Stone

Priya begins by striking the words love, hate, heart, and feel from the computer’s vocabulary, and blocks the internet. It isn’t with malicious intent. She does it on a whim, as with most things: fixing herself tacos at eleven o’clock at night, taking a right instead of a left turn against the advice of her GPS, showing up to her brother’s funeral in bright pink and yellow leopard-print high-tops.

“Your shoes look like they’re wanted for the murder of a Lisa Frank poster,” Demetri said when she first bought them, after nearly shooting Pepsi through his nose.

“You’re just jealous because I look fly, and you’d get shot wearing these around the city,” Priya said.

“Fly? So you’re a little gangster now, huh?”

“More than you.”

He did get shot. But it wasn’t over shoes.

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Escape Pod 655: And Then There Were (N-One) (Part 4)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” first published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15 (March/April 2017), with author interview

A couple f-bombs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:16 — 43.9MB)

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And Then There Were (N-One), Part 4

by Sarah Pinsker

Back in my room, I stripped my wet clothes off and replaced them with another T-shirt and boxer shorts. The whiskey didn’t do the job I’d hoped it would, so I spent the night in imaginary conversation with Mabel. The rain battering the window filled in her side of the dialogue. I walked through the order of events, everything I’d found. I had ideas, but they weren’t cohering. The timing was important, I knew that. Murder weapon would be lovely, but I didn’t expect a forensic report any time soon. As for suspects, for all the people giving me alibis and vouching for themselves and each other, it could still have been anybody.

I drifted away from the case itself. The host said she wasn’t the Prime, wasn’t the trunk of a branching tree, but she’d labeled us all in relation to her. We were all in close proximity. Even the most distant of us were still recognizable. Tiny differences. I hadn’t run into anyone who lived in a post-water shortage America, or post-flu, or post-oil. We all knew how to flush toilets.

What would it look like if we had radiated out from me instead of the host? Or if we had all radiated out from the hotel clerk, whom the quantologist had said was one of the farther iterations? There were other realities between these, ones she hadn’t chosen. N Sarahs, in N realities, where N was unknowable and constantly changing. Why had she chosen us and not others? Was I the most interesting of a string of insurance investigators, or the only one available this weekend? I had more questions than I’d had before I arrived.

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Escape Pod 653: And Then There Were (N-One) (Part 2)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” first published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15 (March/April 2017), with author interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:40 — 47.2MB)

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And Then There Were (N-One), Part 2

by Sarah Pinsker

Not me, my logic brain understood, even though some tiny part of me screamed something was wrong. I’d made it through the entire afternoon talking with people who were more like me than an identical twin would be, but the body was somehow more real. The others down at dinner all had stories to remind me I was still myself, that I could still be differentiated. Absent stories and quirks, absent a person talking at me to prove we were not the same, the vacuum came rushing in. Who was she? In what ways was she me, in what ways was she not? Who would mourn her? I tried to imagine the shape of my own absence from my own world. It was an impossible exercise.

I struggled to regain control over myself. “You know I’m an insurance investigator, right? Dead bodies aren’t my area of expertise.”

“You’re the closest thing we’ve got. None of us are medical doctors, and it’s too late for one anyhow, and I figured you investigate things. I couldn’t find any of the organizers, so I thought I’d look for you.” She must have had a good memory for details, if she managed to find me in that dining hall based on one short conversation. Maybe that was a thing we all had in common.

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Escape Pod 649: Loyalty Test

Escape Pod 649: Loyalty Test is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:52 — 35.1MB)

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Show Notes

Visit The Drabblecast Reborn on Kickstarter here.

Loyalty Test

by Andrew Gudgel

When the intercom on his desk buzzed, Marc’s head snapped up, instantly awake. He’d been dozing in his chair. His finger stabbed the button that told the boss he was on his way. He stood up and straightened his rumpled gray suit before glancing at his watch. One seventeen AM. It figures. The boss tried to cut him as much slack as he could, but humans just couldn’t keep the same pace as the Vrith, who came from the sunny side of a tidally locked planet and didn’t sleep at all.

“Yes, Governor?” Marc said, even before the door to the boss’ office was fully open. Speaking before he could be seen did double duty: it showed that he was eager to be of service, as well as preventing the boss from seeing his yawn–the Vrith sometimes considered wide-open mouths a sign of aggression, and their claws could cut deep. Marc had a couple of scars on his forearms from when the previous Governor’s instincts got the better of them. It was an occupational hazard of working for the Vrith who now ran Earth’s government.

“Marc,” the translation box on the boss’ desk said. “Tell me about–doors.”

He walked across the rough, tile floor that the Vrith preferred to the side of the desk at the far end of the boss’ office, where he made his obeisance by looking down and crossing his arms at the wrists in a sign of submission. He spoke without looking up. “What would you like to know about doors, Governor?”

“You may look at me when you speak,” the boss replied. “Are doors always necessary?”

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Escape Pod 646: Subtle Ways Each Time

Escape Pod 646: Subtle Ways Each Time is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:18 — 28.8MB)

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Subtle Ways Each Time

By Y.M. Pang

A man loses a woman.

It’s happened a thousand times before and it’s phrased like this nine hundred times. A man loses a woman. As if she were car keys, an umbrella, a scraggly doll in the arms of a child. A literal and grammatical object to be lost. Let’s find a truer cliché. It takes two to tango. Let’s try again:

A woman discards a man.

Raised voices in a summer-boiled attic. Old records, lovingly collected, smashed up like jagged pieces of skyscraper windows. They’re in his mother’s house, gazing down at the familiar yard, the scent of peach blossoms wafting through the window. They’d played there on wobbly toddler legs, cussed out teachers as teens wearing cut-off jeans and crooked baseball caps, shared their first kiss in the shadow of the peach tree and afterward neither could say who initiated it or who was more surprised. Little fights dogged them throughout those nineteen years, but children’s minds are better at forgiving and worse at carving scars.

Only during that fateful day in the attic did they say things that couldn’t be unsaid, voice words their adult brains forgot how to forgive.
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Escape Pod 642: Oracle

Oracle originally appeared in Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:33 — 41.5MB)

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Oracle

By Dominica Phetteplace

The two biggest applications for predictive software are killing people and selling things. Rita was quite successful at the latter. She founded a nail-polish-of-the-month club that used an online personality quiz to determine customer preferences. Bold cremes for basics, chunky glitters for the outrageous, and dark, sparkly metallics for edgy, forward-thinking geniuses like Rita.  Sales skyrocketed.

She used her money to start other subscription services: whisky-of-the-month, miniskirt-of-the-month.  What had started out as an online quiz morphed into something larger and more complex: a search engine that searched the customer.  It had tapped into a pent-up demand. People loved acquiring material goods but they hated making decisions.  Rita wasn’t just selling nail polish or whisky or miniskirts, she was selling freedom from choice.

And it was just code, really.  She was able to adapt parts of it for use in her own life, to mixed results. She hoped her stock-picking software would take her from millionaire to billionaire, but instead her investments stalled out.  Her meal planning software did help her lose five pounds, but this wasn’t enough to get her down to a size two.
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