Posts Tagged ‘Aimee Ogden’

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Escape Pod 898: A Gentlemen’s Agreement

A Gentlemen’s Agreement was originally published in Kaleidotrope in January 2022.

Violence and peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:50 — 45.6MB)

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A Gentlemen’s Agreement

By Aimee Ogden

Heroes are such fragile things.

Sphinx takes in the scene from a distance, first, as is his custom. He makes a wide orbit around the pillars of smoke and the pathetic caution-tape bandages. The first responders are looking in the wrong place. The cones of searchlights angle away from the response team, leaving the darkness and smoke to swallow up the navy-blue uniforms. Yellow letters reading LAKESIDE EMS float, disembodied, in the air. Steel girders cut oblique angles through the top of the fog.

They’re searching in the foundations of the ruined RadioGenInc Labs building.

Moving slowly, too: either out of consideration for the structure’s instability, or the hazardous chemicals that may have been released by the bomb, or because they are (reasonably) concerned that Doc Diablo has left traps against the unwary would-be rescuer.

It may also be that the rescue team has access to information that Sphinx does not. This is a slender possibility, though, and it will not bear the weight of action.

The Cavalier will not be found here. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 751: More Than Simple Steel

Escape Pod 751: More Than Simple Steel is an Escape Pod original.

A few curses

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:39 — 48.1MB)

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More Than Simple Steel

By Aimee Ogden

Micah misses the adults most when he wakes up each morning. Part of him is still waiting for the buzz of an alarm clock and the smell of toaster waffles to coax him up from sleep. But it’s been four years, and there is no mother to nudge him awake.

He sits up on his mattress and scratches crust from his eyes. The bedsheets smell like sweat and grass; is it laundry day today? He’s the closest thing to an adult under the roof of Grand Avenue Elementary, and if he says it’s laundry day, then it will be.

Clothes on, shoes on. Everyone has to wear shoes all the time. That’s the rule, ever since Marco got tetanus last year and they all thought he was going to die. It was the worst sickness they’d seen since the flops cleared out all the adults. Micah doesn’t know what he’ll do when something worse sweeps through.

The door of the teachers’ lounge–he can’t stop thinking of it as the teachers’ lounge, even though there are no teachers here and not much time for lounging–clicks quietly shut behind him. Then he moves down the hallway, opening doors, calling names. “Fabián, garden. Jack, laundry. Vee, babysitting. Carrie, fishing.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 626: Fire Rode the Cold Wind

Fire Rode the Cold Wind originally appeared in The Sockdolager.

Sexual content.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:38 — 53.2MB)

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Fire Rode the Cold Wind

By Aimee Ogden

The brown woman came to Vrau from the sky, without a name of her own.

Piarcu knew that she was nameless, even though the women of his family only whispered it when they thought no one else could hear. It was they who had cared for her when her metal cage crashed down into the ice, they who had peeled her out of her prison and stripped her out of her strange silver suit and dressed her wounds. It was they who had seen her flesh bare of fur or wool, and noted the lack of name marked there.

Not that they would have dared to read that name, if their eyes had fallen on it. They were practiced in the healing arts, and healers did not linger on their patients’ most intimate matters. They took from her empty cups of spineweed tea and used bandages, not her privacy. Piarcu’s mind lingered there, though. He found himself thinking of the stranger’s unmarked skin, more often than he should: found himself distracted at land, at sea, stripped down to his leggings in preparation for a shellstar dive and seized with the notion that he might be the one to press his needleknife to her flesh and offer her the gift of a true name.

For her part, she did not seem concerned about her lack of name. When Piarcu visited her shelter, erected with ice in the lee of her shattered cage and lined with furs and blankets offered by the generous Vrauam, she only ever laughed and said, “My name is Isro Bascardan! That’s name enough for anyone, don’t you think?” And he did not know how to make her see that a use-name was not enough to have, no more than a man could say he had a coat and so had no need of his skin.
(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 589: Seb Dreams of Reincarnation

Escape Pod 589: Seb Dreams of Reincarnation is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:05 — 49.6MB)

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Thanks to our sponsor, ARCHIVOS – a Story Mapping and Development Tool for writers, gamers, and storytellers of all kinds!

Seb Dreams of Reincarnation

By Aimee Ogden

They unplugged Seb’s neurodes at the end of his ten-year tour of duty. He’d known it was coming, had been told before he ever signed the contract that if they left him in any longer his health would start to deteriorate. What they hadn’t mentioned was that his health would deteriorate anyway. Once, Seb had kept six hundred people alive, responded instantly to their needs, and their wishes too when those fell within his power. He had carried them all in his belly, made them part of himself. He thought he would implode under the emptiness of having lost them.

Today, though, his only job was to leave his apartment: something he hadn’t done since the first week he’d moved in. He had groceries delivered, the occasional takeout, odds and ends as he needed them. Supermarkets and corner stores might as well have been on another planet. If they were, he might have actually cared to visit them. He stared out his ninth-floor window while trying to summon up a reason to go out, let alone the will to do so. His fleet-assigned shrink had given him the task and called it homework. Which was of course the exact opposite of what it actually was. Out-of-home work.

(Continue Reading…)

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