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Escape Pod 992: Nerves Into Circuits

Nerves Into Circuits was originally published by Heartlines Spec on November 30, 2023

Includes mention of chronic pain and suicidal ideation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:39 — 37.1MB)

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Nerves Into Circuits

By Lyra Meurer

Metal arms descend to press skin-soft conductor strips over my shoulders. The Neurasuit has been in warming mode for a few minutes–my overwrought senses accept the lines of heat like a gift. Despite my anxiety for the fight, my trapezius muscles relax, creaking in the silence. Released from the tension, my vertebrae settle into place with small snaps, one or two with each breath.

Wires snake through my hair, massaging the scalp pain I didn’t notice was there. More swirl around my neck, tickle between my toes, seeking the overabundant bristles of my nerves. The Neurasuit folds around me with a hiss and a click, shutting out the cold night air. Before the systems launch, before the fight begins, I have a moment of perfect comfort in a little space built for me. (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 991: After the Rain

Escape Pod 991: After the Rain is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:42 — 35.8MB)

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After the Rain

by P. A. Cornell

I love a heavy summer storm. I love it when the rain falls so suddenly there’s no avoiding it and you’re drenched in seconds, or when the drops hit the ground so hard they bounce right back up at you. I love the crack of thunder that precedes the rain, and the rainbows that come after. This was the kind of storm I was riding through, just returned to our village after one of my courier runs to the neighboring communities.

Racing through puddles, I didn’t mind the mud splashing up at me or that all this moisture was going to make a frizzy mess of my long curls. I spread my arms and raised my face to the clouds, relishing the coolness after building up a sweat over the miles I’d ridden. As I cut through our food forest, the tree canopy abruptly ended my impromptu shower, so I went back to focusing on my path, careful to keep my bike to the walking trails so as not to damage the ground cover plants.

Passing one of the lower bushes, several chickens taking shelter burst out, startled, clucking their displeasure. That’s odd, I thought. Someone must’ve left the coop open. I hoped no predators had gotten into it.

(Continue Reading…)

New Officer on the Bridge

“Change is the essential process of all existence.” Or so Mr. Spock once said, and who are we to argue with that logic?

Premee Mohamed is disembarking from our starship, and we wish her all the best as she journeys on to other spaces and times. She’s been an assistant editor here since 2021, helping to steer the associate editors and sort through submissions with her keen scientific skills. We have no doubt that she’ll continue to shine as brightly as the stars around us, and we’ll miss her.

We’re happy to announce that Phoebe Barton has accepted a promotion into the assistant editor post. Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer who has been an associate editor at Escape Pod for years. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, Lightspeed, and F&SF, and she is a Nebula Award finalist and Aurora Award winner. She lives with her family, a robot, and many books under a mountain in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

We can’t wait to continue exploring the final frontier with Phoebe on the bridge. Onward and upward!

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Escape Pod 990: The Malcontent (Flashback Friday)

“The Malcontent” was originally published in Escape Pod 50 (April 2006)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:53 — 41.5MB)

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The Malcontent

by Serah Eley

Finally Nicholas summoned his overseers and all other servants who were mobile to his chamber. “You are merely robots,” Nicholas said, “but I know you are not stupid. Doubtless during my withdrawal you laid plans to snare me again, to draw me against my will into a plot for my own happiness.”

“Harshly said, sir,” said the Overseer of Planning, “but essentially correct. We have found a young lady with whom we feel you will establish a more-than-satisfactory rapport, and taken measures to ensure that you shall not avoid her.”

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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 988: In the Palace of Science (Part 2 of 2)

In the Palace of Science originally appeared in Asimov’s May/June 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:58 — 59.5MB)

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In the Palace of Science (Part 2 of 2)

By Chris Campbell

(…Continued from Part 1)

B-Side

 

Track Five–

 

The automaton was unfinished, but even in a transitory state, it was a thing of marvel. In form, it was like a man. With two legs meant for bipedal ambulation and two arms with three-fingered hands meant for grasping. Although roughly, from the thickness of its fingers. The design of the machine differed most strikingly from the ideal human in the shape of its head and body, for it had no neck. Rather, a barrel-shaped torso attached directly to a head that was meant to be enclosed within the thick, vaguely egg-shaped glass dome sitting next to the machine.

The front piece of the barrel-shaped body was also set aside on a nearby table, exposing its chassis and internal mechanism. Peering inside, it became clear that filling the hole within this hollow man was the singular aim of much of the work I’d been doing for years.

“I call him Talos.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 987: In the Palace of Science (Part 1 of 2)

In the Palace of Science originally appeared in Asimov’s May/June 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:36 — 52.1MB)

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In the Palace of Science (Part 1 of 2)

By Chris Campbell

Track One–

 

If you’ve found this recording, two things can be said for certain. The first is that I have passed my greatest test as a man and, in doing so, have passed from this world. The second is that if this message entombed with me survives, a grave danger to humanity most assuredly survives with it.

To my listener, I urge you to lift the needle from the gramophone, return this plate to the hole where you found it, and dig no further into the ruins where once stood Professor Thomas Washington Kelly’s Palace of Science. (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 985: The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace

Escape Pod 985: The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:06 — 40.4MB)

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The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace

by Ryan Cole

So I’m sitting there with Bubbee—the two of us hunched over our empty paper play-cards, our fingers not yet bloody with magenta bingo marker—when the first rift appears.

It’s smaller than I’d expected. Little more than a paper cut in the space-time continuum. Only five inches long as it floats in midair beside the flimsy folding card table in the back of the ballroom, where the purple carpet flows into the heart of the Bingo Palace. As I watch, it starts to fold, slinky-style, over itself, ‘til the air turns hot and the rift starts to crackle and the paper cut rips into a three-foot-long gash, and before I can speak, before I can nudge Bubbee to warn the referee, there’s an arm poking out from the chasm in the air, then a chest and a face and a whole body slips from whatever dimension it decided to leave to fall into our own.

Bubbee sees it too. “Damn doppelgangers,” she says. “Can’t win at their own games, so they come to steal ours.”

(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…)