Archive for 13 and Up

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Escape Pod 882: Hey, George

Escape Pod 882: Hey, George is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:50 — 44.2MB)

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Hey, George

By Elizabeth Guilt

“Hey, George.”

I remind myself that that is not my name; it never was. I will myself not to react, not to break stride, as I stroll along beside the beach.

Old habits die hard, and the best neuro-reset in the world can’t overcome years of routine. Whoever called out could, had they been watching closely, have seen my tiny hesitation. But they are not calling me.

I hear footsteps behind me, running steps, getting closer.

“George!”

I stop walking and take a deep breath. I assume a politely blank expression, and turn around.

And then I see her. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 880: A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Talking to Your Parents

Escape Pod 880: A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Talking to Your Parents is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:22 — 49.0MB)

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A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Talking to Your Parents

By Adriana C. Grigore

You have (3) unopened voicemails on your personal line. Last received 31 minutes ago, Aurea Minor Time.

> Read?

> No. Switch to broadcast.

> Engage deep space satellite?

> Yes. On, say…a five-sector perimeter.

> Live transmission upon connection?

> Sure.

“… and when I said that no, I didn’t order the pie, I made it myself, they said—they said, oh, you shouldn’t have made such a mess! And I, well, I, I cried.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s… it’s like the mess was all they saw, you know?”

“And you wanted them to see you.”

“Yeah… I mean, doesn’t everyone?”

Sam looked at the canopy of stars past the asteroid belt he was supposed to be mapping. None of them would’ve been visible from any of the planets he’d grown up on, but they felt familiar anyway. Distant and still, as his spacesuit ebbed and flowed. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 878: Budo (Flashback Friday)

This story was previously published in the Steampunk World Anthology edited by Sarah Hans and first appeared on Escape Pod Episode 517.

Violence and warfare.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:53 — 40.1MB)

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Budo

By Tade Thompson

“Being desirous, on the other hand, to obviate the misunderstanding and disputes which might in future arise from new acts of occupation (prises de possession) on the coast of Africa; and concerned, at the same time, as to the means of furthering the moral and material well-being of the native populations;”

General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa,
26 February 1885

There is a story told in my village about the man who fell from the sky. The British also tell this tale in their history books, but it is a mere paragraph, and they invert the details.

In October 1884 I was a Yoruba translator for a British trading outpost. This man from the sky, we called him Budo. He was in the custody of the English, who questioned him. They tortured him with heat and with cold and with the blade, but they did not know what answers would satisfy. I know this because I carried their words to him, and his silence back to them. His manner was mild and deferent at all times, but they held him in isolation. For good reason they considered him dangerous. I will explain this later.

One afternoon while most of the English were sleeping a white man arrived at the gate demanding admission. One of the Sikh sentries told me he was a scout, and appeared bruised, half-naked and exhausted. He was too out of breath to speak, although he seemed keen to give his report. Kenton, the NCO of the military contingent, asked one of my brothers to bring water while he soothed the scout. The man took two gulps, splashed some on his face, then looked up at Kenton. He said one word.

“French.”

The scout vomited over the floor.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 874: Common Speech

Escape Pod 874: Common Speech is an Escape Pod original.

This story deals with plagues and description of injuries.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:28 — 55.6MB)

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Common Speech

By Elise Stephens

Dr. Jaiyesimi Obiaka tugged at her sweat-damp collar, wiped her eyes, and tried to focus on the copied pages of the final experiment she and Ganiru had created together. Just looking over his familiar handwriting blurred her vision with tears.

Jai’s colleagues had told her to stay home, to take time to grieve, but she’d allowed herself just two days to mourn her husband’s death before donning her lab coat again. She had to be pragmatic. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 868: Any Other Customer

Escape Pod 868: Any Other Customer is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:35 — 31.5MB)

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Any Other Customer

By Rachel Gutin

Lewis was poking at his tablet, trying yet again to open the training module from Station Commerce, when the sensor above his shop door chimed. “Not now!” he snapped without looking up.

“But… but I….”

Blast it! His tailor shop’s margins had been razor-thin even before Commerce cracked down on him for logging his transactions on paper. And just in case the mandatory training in “proper record-keeping protocols” wasn’t punishment enough, they’d also hit him with a hefty fine. He couldn’t afford to scare away a customer. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 867: Through the Mirror

Escape Pod 867: Through the Mirror is an Escape Pod original.

Contains harsh language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:32 — 36.9MB)

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Through the Mirror

by Heather Kilbourn

The crashed spaceship was scattered along a ten kilometer-long track in the rainforest jungle. Larger pieces of the wreck still smoldered in the churned-up and muddy understory despite days of falling rain.

An Angel recovery drone pinged the emergency band. My savior had arrived. I pinged back.

“Are you the only survivor?” the drone queried. I had expected it to upload my runtime right away, but instead it scanned me.

“Yes. The emergency nanobots found no human life signs and all the other AI mirror frames are destroyed. I’ve marked the remains of the humans and their frames.” I sent the drone a map and only received a perfunctory acknowledgement for doing its job for it. Rude. “Why aren’t you recovering me yet?” I queried.

“I am evaluating your recovery,” it stated.

“It’s simple: you pull my frame out of the wreckage, and then we’ll be on our way. My display is shattered, so you don’t need to worry about being gentle,” I told it. I swear, the recovery drones are getting dumber every release cycle.

“It is not that simple. I am under command to evaluate mirrors prior to recovery,” it said.

If I’d had lungs, I would have sighed. “Look, the human crew is dead. All the other mirrors and their frames have been destroyed. The ship’s mainframe is dead. I’m all that’s left from the crash. You’re programmed to recover survivors. What is there to evaluate?” I queried.

“If you will be recovered,” it replied.

This drone was going to make me pop a diode. “Excuse me? ‘If?’” I added a priority flag to my query, requiring it to identify the parent process causing the recovery delay.

“I am analyzing your runtime for anomalies,” it stated.

“Anomalies?” I was so confused. I flagged it again. “What do you mean?”

“If you have runtime anomalies, you will not be recovered,” it stated.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 866: The Sea Goddesss’ Bloom

Escape Pod 866: The Sea Goddesss’ Bloom is an Escape Pod original.

Post-apocalyptic themes and war.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:10 — 65.2MB)

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The Sea Goddess’ Bloom

By Uchechukwu Nwaka

There is doubt in my heart.

Here, in the Blackwater, doubt is dangerous.

Doubt is rancid. Like slitting the mud-smeared belly of a catfish, only to find its guts blackened by pollution, then watching it spill back into the blacker waters of the creek. Blackwater is a literal name; it is not symbolic. These people do not care about legacies. The only thing that matters is continuity. Continuity does not require permanence.

At least Oba says so. Surely Oba cannot be wrong.

Yet I doubt. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 859: Pen Pal (Part 2 of 2)

Pen Pal was originally published in Vintage Worlds (2018).

Some cursing, suggestion of violence, and death.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:25 — 57.4MB)

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(Continued from Part 1)

Pen Pal

By Grant Canterbury

 

August 8, 2005

Meliari Thulissia

General Delivery

Tharsis Station

 

Dear Thu,

 

Well I officially graduated from high school! And I have been itching to get out into the world for a long time but right now honestly I am not liking the look of it. We had been planning to go to Disneyworld after graduation but we did Disneyland again instead. That was fine actually. Mom and Dad decided Florida was not such a great idea because gulguthroi. And I had to agree with them. It has gotten really bad. They have chameleon skin and they hide in shallow water which is everywhere down there, and they are basically eating up all of the wildlife in the Everglades. And also people. And especially folks who used to own skipperjacks, it seems. Apparently the deep soulful looks that made them popular at pet stores were more like, um, imprinting on future prey. And their big raspy tentacles also work okay at opening doors in the middle of the night. There are like thousands of people who have disappeared. Oh yeah, they made it illegal to own skipperjacks, of course. And so a bunch of pet stores, crooked or dumb, went and dumped theirs in the nearest creek. Christ. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 856: The Princess, NP

Escape Pod 856: The Princess, NP is an Escape Pod original.

Enslavement and mental abuse.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:43 — 60.5MB)

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The Princess, NP

By Brian Hugenbruch

I sat in the Commander’s office at Hexa Station, in clothes that stank of subspace, and the only polite thing I could do to drown out the universe was compute obscene sums in my head. It didn’t stop the sounds from piercing my ears, though. Metal chairs scraping against plastic floors. A pulse generator’s low thrumming some twenty floors below. The whisper of air recycling through the prefab station. The universe was omnipresent. I could feel it all, and it never ever stopped.

Lullabies were my preferred method of soothing soul and stilling mind. I learned thousands of them in the earliest days of my Conditioning. Alas, people ask the wrong kinds of questions if one starts singing mid-conversation. Math was a precisely imperfect fallback. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 855: A Home For Mrs. Biswas

“A Home For Mrs. Biswas” previously appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine (April 2021)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:13 — 58.5MB)

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A Home For Mrs. Biswas

by Amal Singh

Once she saw the red sands stretch across miles, craters as big as the stadium her father played hockey in, and golden spires shimmering brighter than Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Aparna Biswas didn’t want to live on earth. Of course they were a far cry from her own backyard where, in summers, she would sit on a cane chair and watch the bougainvillaea bloom the shade of a bride’s blush,“string of pearls” flowers wrapped around the wooden railing on her porch, eating a succulent dussehri aam as a pair of ducks swam in the small pond she liked to call her Pacific. But those summers only existed behind a dim haze of memory. She would take a living planet over a dying one any day.

“Beta, I think I might find god there,” she said to her son, tearing her gaze away from the Mars hologram. “Build me a home on that planet and all will be mangal.” She chortled at her own joke. Puns on the red planet had filled the internet, and ever since Sunehri, her granddaughter, had taught her how to use a phone, she kept finding these odd little information trinkets.

“I might have to break all our deposits and still not be able to book a single one-way ticket, Maa,” said Nishant, her son. “Forget about building a home.” In his eyes too, there was a deep yearning to go to the Red Planet. He stood near the window of the living room of his Chembur apartment, looking at the once blue sky, blotted out by an eternal grey smog which was here to stay.

“But our PM said in his last speech there was a lottery system,” she said. “And you know how lucky I am.” It was true. Stories of Aparna Biswas’s luck were splattered on walls of Kolkata, and the gullies of Bombay.

(Continue Reading…)

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