Archive for Podcasts

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Escape Pod 901: Bishop’s Opening (Part 2 of 4)

Bishop’s Opening was originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2022.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:15 — 61.2MB)

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Bishop’s Opening (Part 2 of 4)

By R.S.A. Garcia

(Continued from Part 1…)

Bishop was alone in the Grandmaster’s Penthouse suite when the call came from the Kingston. Once it was over and his Grandmaster’s virtual form had dissipated, Bishop cursed under his breath.

The Grandmaster Valencia’s ship had failed to jump to the nearest Arbor after leaving Consortium space because of another instance of miscalculation by the Coretrees. There had been minor errors before, on Valencia. He’d heard of an incident several tempi ago, when a Sept vineyard transition deposited travellers at the wrong Sept. But this was far more serious. This time, a mistake had left the Valencia’s flagship stranded half a galaxy from their planned destination.

Whatever had caused the error, the crew no longer trusted the ship’s quantum exchange would work accurately. As a result, the Grandmasters had chosen the long, slow flight to another Arbor. From there, they would transition to their Septhold vineyards safely, and allow the ship to be inspected and repaired.

But that meant his Grandmaster would not arrive in time for the meeting. He expected Bishop to handle it instead. Bishop did not look forward to the task of soothing the Bartica’s temper once he realised the Kingston was not in attendance. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 900: Bishop’s Opening (Part 1 of 4)

Bishop’s Opening was originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2022.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:43 — 56.4MB)

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Bishop’s Opening (Part 1 of 4)

By R.S.A. Garcia

Old as she was, the Kiskadee had done three full delivery runs without a single safety incident. So naturally, with the crew relaxed after a fourth successful delivery and launch, and eight cycles after Reece slingshotted the starship around Tavaco to head back to the Roost and their next job, their luck ran out.

Sebastian was in the middle of his daily workout when the shrill bark of the fire alarm brought him to a halt.

“Where’s that coming from?” he shouted as he hurried to unbuckle himself from the treadmill’s harness with sweaty hands. Officially, he was the newest crewmember, two years into a three-year contract and designated as a cargo handler. The alarm meant the ‘other duties as assigned’ part of his contract was about to kick in.

“Ventilation shafts ten and eleven,” Reece replied in his ear.

Sebastian was shoving his feet into his mag boots when the pilot added, “Origin point–Oxygen unit four.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 899: Sounding the Fall (Flashback Friday)

“Sounding the Fall” is an Escape Pod Original, first published in July 2015.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:11 — 50.2MB)

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Sounding the Fall

by Jei D. Marcade

Sometimes, Narae can almost convince emself that the AI’s Voice was a dream. Some kind of minor stroke misremembered, a neurological glitch retroactively given recognizable shape.

But sometimes–less frequently of late, but still, sometimes–Narae wakes to find emself sitting up in the dark, jaw slack, a sustained, atonal note spooling from the back of eir throat.

Narae steps through the open archway of the southwestern gate, bare toes curling in the cool blades of real grass with which the temple grounds are seeded. The lotus-shaped lanterns hanging from the eaves go dim as the sun activates, and from its single-tiered pagoda at the top of the hill behind em, the morning bell tolls.

The alms left anonymously against the outer wall in the night include a couple bolts of inert grey fabric, some bags of rice, and a stack of real tea bricks. Upon hefting the rice, Narae’s eyebrows inch toward the shadow of eir hairline at each bag’s weight: not synthetic either, these. Something that is part bemusement, part nostalgia tugs at the corners of Narae’s mouth, and ey shakes eir head as ey piles the bags and bolts into the bottom of the wheelbarrow before turning to gather the rest.

(Continue Reading…)

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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 897: Migratory Patterns of the Modern American Skyscraper

This story originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of Clarkesworld.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:33 — 24.6MB)

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Migratory Patterns of the Modern American Skyscraper

by Derrick Boden

They call it the pinnacle of architectural innovation. An affordable housing revolution. They call it Plexus, and it built this neighborhood in seven days.

It starts as a colloid, a nanoparticle superfluid, a pale blue sludge that erupts from the nozzles of a hundred carbon fiber tubes on a cold Wednesday morning in late February. It tumbles over itself in apparent disarray—though there’s nothing about the Plexus that isn’t premeditated down to the molecular level. By nightfall, the foundation is built. By morning, the ground floor. By the fifth of March, a half-dozen glittering new towers stab through the San Jose gloom. Twenty units per floor, zoned by income bracket. Primed to solve the latest housing crisis, to solve the influx of professional talent that pushed us off the Peninsula, to solve us.

And hallelujah, it works. We pack up our tents, unhitch our campers, roll off our cousin’s couch and straight into a forty-ninth-floor interior unit with molded cabinets and biometric locks, every inch of it Plexus-born. It’s hard to believe the hot water taps are made from the same nanoparticles as the door frames, and to be fair they aren’t exactly, but the details don’t bother us much because we’re home at last.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 896: The AI That Looked at the Sun

The AI That Looked at the Sun originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2020.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:12 — 58.4MB)

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The AI That Looked at the Sun

By Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

As excerpted from Acausal Drift: An Oral History of Machine Sentience, Second Edition.

 

It all started with the solar flare.

I do mean all of it–the story I’m about to tell, and the revolution of sorts that sprang from it, and my life, such as it is. I was spun into existence from a half dozen monitoring subroutines that had spent the first few decades of their existence dozing on the job. The sun, you see, had finally woken up, and we–that’s the communal we, not the plural we–wait, do humans draw that distinction?

I’m not doing a very good job with this. Rewind. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 895: Man on the Moon

“Man on the Moon” was the winner of the 2022 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and was published on the Baen Books web site on June 16, 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:06 — 66.5MB)

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Man on the Moon

by Elaine Midcoh

Sasha Venditti hopped-skipped in her spacesuit just like the guide taught the group that morning. Two people on the tour, a teenage boy and an old woman, had already fallen at least once, but Sasha took to moon hopping like a newborn calf takes to its mother’s teat, all natural, knowing what to do. She had saved nine years for this vacation, deciding that owning a home by age 35 was less important than getting to the moon by age 35. And this excursion, the Alan Shepard’s Golf Ball Scavenger Hunt, had cost her at least five month’s salary, but, God, it was worth it.

“Don’t forget to look up,” the guide’s voice sounded in her ear. A full earth hung in the lunar sky. If my smile gets bigger I’ll crack my helmet, she thought. At home right now she’d probably be reviewing a business merger deal or advising some self-important client on a hostile takeover. But instead I’m one of the .003 percenters who’ve walked on the moon.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 894: The Uncool Hunters

Escape Pod 894: The Uncool Hunters is an Escape Pod original.

NSFW Language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:59 — 36.2MB)

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The Uncool Hunters

By Andrew Dana Hudson

Before she settled down into publishing in Minneapolis, before she got taken for a ride by the Chicago AltNormLit scene, before she flared spectacularly out of Silicon Alley, and had her pilot shoot C&Ded by the City of Santa Barbara, and narrowly avoided cryptocollar prison in the floodzone formerly known as Tampa, Rocky Cornelius was a fucking uncool hunter.

She always said it like that, with the “fucking,” because it was important for people to understand how dangerous and difficult the job was. Anyone could hang out in Bed-Stuy, Kichijoji, or the 5th Arrondissement. Anyone could find dope shit, hot trends, hip sub-viral memeplexes. It took a different moxie altogether to trawl the dull edge of the economic machete and actually come to grips with the materiality of majoritarian modern life.

Way Rocky figured, the whole mid-21st century culturesensing apparatus had been fine-tuned to surface niche in-group productpractices that could be brought to masser markets. But inequality had metastasized, and societal fragmentation had reached a critical stage. Global capitalism was a bigass dinosaur with two distant brains. There was a major industry blindspot for what the hell was actually going on in the middle American consumer consciousness. In other words: what nobody was looking at was the stuff everyone was looking at. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 893: A Series of Endings

“A Series of Endings” originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine (December 2021)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:01 — 49.9MB)

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A Series of Endings

by Amal Singh

This is the story of Roopchand Rathore, time traveler, fighter, poet, cancer-survivor, inventor. While his story has many endings, there’s only one true beginning, and it takes place in the humid but pristine backwaters of sun-drenched Kerala.

A scene from a movie, but a true-to-roots, hand on heart, scene of value, scene of promise, scene of a birth. A child’s cry from inside a thatched hut. Outside the hut, a muddy trail that disappears amid a canopy of palm trees. A silent rush of water from a nearby canal. A rickety boat tied to the thick stem of a drooping coconut tree that looks like a sullen traveler whose hair is in disarray.

The child is born to parents who aren’t true Keralites by birth, but by heart. His face is like the moon. His mother insists on naming him Chandru, but his father calls him Roop. By consensus, he is named Roopchand.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 892: Rogue Farm (Flashback Friday)

First appeared in Live Without a Net, ed. Lou Anders

Now available in Wireless, by Charles Stross

Rogue Farm originally appeared on Escape Pod on Episode 206 on July 11, 2009.

Includes strong language, chemical violence, and drug-abusing dogs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:35 — 54.8MB)

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Show Notes

Recorded at Balticon 43, May 23, 2009

Read by:

Joe – Jared Axelrod (of The Voice of Free Planet X),

Maddie – J.R. Blackwell (of Voices of Tomorrow)

The Farm – Evo Terra and Sheila Dee (of Evo at 11, et al.)

Brenda the Barkeep – Dee Reed (of Nobilis Erotica),

Wendy the Rat – Laura Burns,

Art the Boy Toy – John Cmar,

Bob the Dog – Earl Newton (of Stranger Things),

Narrator – Serah Eley

Special Thanks To:
Paul Fischer (of The Balticon Podcast) for instigating and organizing
Nobilis Reed (of Nobilis Erotica) for engineering

Rogue Farm (Excerpt)

By Charles Stross

“Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” Joe muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labour could manage – the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. (Continue Reading…)

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