Posts Tagged ‘virtual reality’

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Escape Pod 873: The Hazmat Sisters (Part 2 of 2)

“The Hazmat Sisters” appeared in Asimovs in July 2021 and was a finalist for their Reader’s Choice award. It’s one of three novellas that appeared in the 2020-2021 window that are all set in the same universe as the novels Dealbreaker and Gamechanger; the other two appeared in Clarkesworld and F&SF.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:57 — 47.1MB)

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The Hazmat Sisters (Part 2 of 2)

by L.X. Beckett

Another sundown, another night on the quest. Mom’s check-in is perfunctory: hand out XP, confirmation of their route. No mention of abnormal battery use, so they got away, once again, with their secret confab. She seems distracted. Things must be getting hot at the Chicago call center.

The girls push Mule along in the refugee fast lane, passing slower-moving families with kids and the occasional masked elder. Some of them are dragging smartcases. The real unfortunates are chipping the wheels off actual antique shopping carts, mile by brutal mile.

There’s no sign of Baron.

Around midnight they are crossing a bridge when the border of their hex runs up against the fairhair family, Papa Bear and his baseball bat mace and baby makes three. They’re riveted, watching something downriver.

Fee calls a stop before they get too close. She activates the infrared in her visor and shares the view with the others.

It’s a firefight. A clutch of warm bodies sheltering under a trio of armored cars exchanges fire with a thick concentration of autonomous platforms hovering over the blackly glinting river. Spotlights, tracers, and of course machine guns all pour fire into the ground position.

“Can we tell who’s who?” Wilmie subs.

Tess has shut off her display, opting to instead keep an eye on the family on the bridge. “Who cares?”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 872: The HazMat Sisters (Part 1 of 2)

“The Hazmat Sisters” appeared in Asimovs in July 2021 and was a finalist for their Reader’s Choice award. It’s one of three novellas that appeared in the 2020-2021 window that are all set in the same universe as the novels Dealbreaker and Gamechanger; the other two appeared in Clarkesworld and F&SF.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:35 — 60.3MB)

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The HazMat Sisters (Part 1 of 2)

by L.X. Beckett

The runaway soldier comes upon their party days after they cross out of Oklahoma into Missouri, late in the afternoon when their Questmaster is on shift, as they camp in a culvert near a river somewhere near Grand Falls.

Wilmie drew last watch, shift at the end of day, through hot and humid afternoon and its build to an equally dense evening. She’s sliding in and out of a doze, heat-torpor amplified by her hay fever meds.

Pony pokes her with one of its sharps, a silent alarm that shoots Wilmie to her feet, adrenalized, raring and ready to wake the others… unless it’s a feral chicken, or a skunk. Pony’s supposed to know a coyote when it sees it, but it still flags every. Single. One.

“Unknown interloper.” Text from the bot scrolls across her augmented display.

She flicks the warning away with a gesture, linking to Tess’s Dragon and zooming with its cameras. It feeds a view of the brush direct to her goggles. No coyote this time. The man’s scrawny, but a man nonetheless. Not as big as Fee, but full grown.

He’s creeping toward them. Not blundering, not snuffling about for shelter, and moving superslow. Bidding to fool their motion detectors? Not good.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 869: Excuse Me, This Is My Apocalypse

Escape Pod 869: Excuse Me, This Is My Apocalypse is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:51 — 71.7MB)

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Excuse Me, This Is My Apocalypse

by Amy Johnson

It was a glorious day when she finally made it to the beach and fell to her knees, into sand unexpectedly soft and warm, and beheld the devastation. The sun smiled and the air danced with spindrift and in the water lay broken shipping cranes, gathered by the ocean’s currents into a jumbled breakwater, one atop another, too many pieces to know how many cranes had once stood intact. In their harbor bobbed the hulls of overturned ships, still buoyant with air long dead, enormous stepping stones, their way now lost.

She had tried to prepare herself for the desolation of this moment. But her preparations hadn’t worked. They never did. With each new discovery of emptiness and destruction, the truth of her aloneness hit her fresh. For as far as her eyes could see, there was no one. And there would be no one, no human, at least, to leave footprints on this sand, to taste the ocean’s salt in their mouth, no one but her. She let her anger, stiff and distant and enormous, unfurl, welcomed its magnificent warmth. She was the last of her kind—

Was that a guy in a bright orange t-shirt?

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 849: There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai

“There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai” originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine in May 2021.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:46 — 60.6MB)

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There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai

by Andrea Kriz

The day the dMods shut down Skeleton Caves, Esko put on her VR goggles and slipped into the Whukai space colony’s main chatroom to figure out what was going on. All the Whukains who made their living off the popular Terran MMORPG, d’Artagnan, had the same idea. Beside her, on top of her, avatars logged in—an absolute pandemonium of photorealistic, 8-bit, anime animals and humanoids and everything in between. The two main gold-farming clans had already started fighting among themselves.

“How many times did I tell you PKers,” the head of Esko’s clan screeched. “To leave the Terran players alone!”

“It don’t matter how many Terran players we killed,” leader of the rival HunterFam roared, “when you idiots kept giving us away by speaking Kainese! We. Must. Speak. Terran languages! That’s why all the Terran players reported us to the dMods!”

Esko tore off her VR goggles, tossing them onto her bunk. The interior of her sleeping pod, one toy block in a cluster of thousands, flooded back into view. A storm had kicked up outside, clogging her porthole with Whukai’s trademark scarlet soil. She didn’t have time to waste arguing over whose fault it was that d’Art’s most lucrative moneymaking method had been nerfed. She needed to come up with four hundred dollars for her parents’ chemo drugs. And this month’s rent.
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 723: How Did it Feel to be Eaten?

Escape Pod 723: How Did it Feel to be Eaten? is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:39 — 42.6MB)

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How Did it Feel to be Eaten?

By Amit Gupta

“I was an elderberry,” I announced, glowing with pride.

“How did it feel to be eaten?” he asked.

It seemed an odd question, but a response came unbidden, so I voiced it, “It was an honor.” My words surprised me, but they felt true.

“The Queen of England ate me,” I added. How did I know this? Who was he? My cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I didn’t feel like a berry. Did berries feel embarrassed?

“I didn’t know she was the Queen at the time,” I admitted.

“Yes,” agreed the man who I could not see and did not know. “Let’s try another.”

I was in again and felt immensely powerful. I sparkled in the sun. The land beneath me rose, I stood, and I felt a caress on my shoulder. A child. We danced. I rolled, crested, and rumbled; she banked and cut on her board, gliding gracefully along me, her speed blowing droplets of me right off her wetsuit. We became one.

We reached the shore, and I crumbled, making room for others like me, and others like her.

That was a short one.
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 641: Flash Fiction Contest Winners

Escape Pod 641: Flash Fiction Contest Winners is an Escape Pod original.

One top-level curse.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:28 — 36.5MB)

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The Toastmaster

By Kurt Pankau

“Burnt the Pop Tarts again?”

“Yes,” Toaster responded over wifi. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Blender whirred with sympathy.

“Owner was upset,” said Toaster. “She picked me up and looked at my underside to make sure everything was okay.”

“That’s odd,” said Blender. “There’s nothing there but your crumb tray, though.”

“I know, and so does Owner. I don’t know why she did it. It was humiliating.” (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 557: Impossibility Crow

Escape Pod 557: Impossibility Crow is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:14 — 42.4MB)

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Impossibility Crow

By Remy Nakamura

The Kingdom Coffee Missionary Handbook tells Paulo that he should always put his guns away during a door approach. He’s heard this hundreds of times before, but the Handbook speaks with a voice of authority, deep like a luchador’s, strong like a drill sergeant’s, calm like his abuelito’s. It slides in just under his ARgog’s selectively amplified environmental audio. 450 bonus points if the contact is completed without violence, calculates the Handbook, 900 if there are no deaths. Each death harms the public image of the Kingdom, the Handbook tells him. Paulo nods agreement. Way better to spread the faith on the no-kill difficulty setting.

Still, Paulo is not stupid, so he pauses to load Rambo, his ancient and lovingly modded M4A1 Carbine, before slinging it across his back. Looking bad-ass is his favorite violence prevention technique. The Handbook says nothing about tear gas, and he decides not to mention the CS smoke grenade in his left pocket. His last couple of leads had ended with tense stand-offs. Goddess, yo creo, he prays silently. Help my unbelief. He fingers his mala of Robusto beans, sniffing hard to catch its fading aroma.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 547: Ride the Dragon

Escape Pod 547: Ride the Dragon is an Escape Pod original.

Mild cursing, fantasy violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:46 — 41.0MB)

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Ride the Dragon

by Bojan Ratković

We were a band back then, in the bat-shit Wild West days of the game. We held our court at the Gentleman Boozer, the loudest pub on the big map. It was Haru, Flygirl, Black Boris, and me. And we had floaters, part-time comrades. Mostly kids who wanted to be like us, who did us favors. But Tony Rem was there too, the one that rode the dragon.

It’s hard to believe now just how big it was, when they launched True-Fantasy. It was the first MMORPG with MaTRiX immersion headgear―it jacked you in, made you really live it. Most of the players were funboys―kids who played for fun―and they paid the bills. But you could make RL coin if you were good enough―real life currency―and the rest of us wanted a cut.

Punchers punched the clock, putting in RL hours to work as barkeeps and innkeepers and helpdesk clerks. Gougers sold rare items for RL cash; there was a big black market and bigger gray area, and you could make a killing. We were glitchers―beta testers, top players. Exposing glitches in the game was our business, and admins paid top dollar to help them fix whatever bugs we could find. But it wasn’t about the money. All the top glitchers, the real cowboys, were after big scores. We proved ourselves by exposing the wildest glitches, the ones that got the map talking.

There was a group of mercenaries in the Boozer the day Tony came to us about the dragon. They sat across from us, up by the stain glass windows. They were the wrong kind of mercs, cutthroats. They helped the funboys on their quests, for a fee, but then they’d turn on them, cut their throats and take their items. And poof, back to beginner’s village. It wasn’t exactly legal, but they used proxies, rented avatars. Admins kicked them, they came back.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 468: The Law of Gravity

This story was first printed in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #56, June 2012.

Contains some adult language and references to road runner cartoons.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:38 — 21.8MB)

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The Law of Gravity

by Sam Ferree

That sunrise was the best they had made yet.  The air was cool, not cold, and the Termination was just the right shade of pomegranate red around the sun.  The light breeze smelled like oranges.  It reminded me of candy, not real fruit, just that imitation flavor that somehow tastes better than the real thing.

“I think Lauren’s dead,” Lukas repeated, his avatar’s young face contorted in disgust.  Lukas had chosen a runner’s physique, because, out there, he’d been a track star in college; why that mattered to him was beyond me.

“What do you mean you think she’s dead?” I asked.  We were sitting at Reel Café — a not-so clever pun, I thought — at the edge of the patio.  We had met there every Monday morning for years.

My coffee was cold and my cigarette spent.  Lukas had ordered his usual Earl Grey and a grapefruit, but he hadn’t touched either one.

Lukas shook his head.  “Her avatar is in Smith Field.  Just standing there, staring off at nothing.  It’s been doing that for weeks.  I spoke with a friend of mine, an administrator.  They’re shutting down her account because her fees are overdue.  She hasn’t been away from the Flat for more than two days in decades.  She’s dead, Noah.”

“So she’s been away for a few weeks.  That doesn’t mean anything.”

“But it’s a pretty good sign she isn’t coming back.”

The orange scent was fading and Lukas was silent.  I said, “Well, what do we do?”

“What?”  Lukas looked up.  Eventually, he shrugged.  “I suppose we arrange a funeral.”

I nodded, but said, “I don’t actually think she’s dead.”

“She is,” Lukas muttered.  His twenty-something avatar wore an old man’s bitterness.

I picked up my coffee.  The mug looked like it had been made by a five year old.  Everything about the Reel Café had that hokey-imperfection. When you sat in the chairs, you half-expected a distinguished looking gentleman to walk up and ask you to please not sit on the dadist art.

I dropped the mug. It shattered with a disappointing crack.  A nearby waiter started toward me, glowering and brandishing a towel like a gladiatorial weapon.

“Why did you do that?” Lukas asked.

“Just testing,” I said, knowing that Lauren would have been less than amused.   (Continue Reading…)

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