Archive for 17 and Up

Artemis Rising 5

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Escape Pod 671: Octonet (Artemis Rising)

Escape Pod 671: Octonet (Artemis Rising) is an Escape Pod original.

Contains grade-A cursing and swearing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:49 — 46.8MB)

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Show Notes

Keyan Bowes would like to thank  Dr. Jennifer Mather, author of “Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate” for being kind enough to read and comment on this story. She recommends Dr. Mather’s book, Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate, which was an important source document for “Octonet.”

Other links for this episode:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/inside-the-grand-and-sometimes-slimy-plan-to-turn-octopuses-into-lab-animals/2019/03/01/c6ce3fe0-3930-11e9-b786-d6abcbcd212a_story.html

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timpratt/miracles-and-marvels-stories

Octonet

By Keyan Bowes

Sometimes at night when my mind is calm, I think I hear the octopuses. Around the world, the great network of molluscan philosophers.

I had many reasons for moving to the Pacific Northwest –  weather, closeness to potential clients and my big brother Rav, distance from a very ex ex. Slimy cephalopods definitely didn’t make the list.

But then Rav needed someone to fix their new IT system. And that’s how I met the octopuses.

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Escape Pod 666: This Wine-Dark Feeling That Isn’t The Blues

Escape Pod 666: This Wine-Dark Feeling That Isn’t The Blues is an Escape Pod original.

This story contains talk of suicide and suicidal ideations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:35 — 25.1MB)

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This Wine-Dark Feeling That Isn’t The Blues

by José Pablo Iriarte

The Odyssey contains over three hundred mentions of color. Black. White. Red. Not a single blue though. Even the ocean is not described as blue, but as “wine-dark.” Likewise with the Koran and ancient Hebrew scripture: no blues, anywhere.

This is what I focus on during Savannah’s funeral. Otherwise, if I don’t keep my mind busy, I will think instead about how she didn’t keep her promise to me. And how I’m free of my promise to her.

If you can’t trust promises made by two girls in a psych ward, what can you trust?
I read somewhere that Elon Musk thinks we’re living in a simulation. Neil deGrasse Tyson too. It would explain impossible shit like Donald Trump getting elected president—just a bug in the code somewhere.

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Escape Pod 639: Me, Meg, and The Thing

Escape Pod 639: Me, Meg, and The Thing is an Escape Pod original.

Contains swearing, mental illness.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:20 — 73.4MB)

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Me, Meg, and The Thing

By Gian-Paul Bergeron

I’m Inroom making honest credit, doing Daily, counting breaths, when Meg messages me with extreme urgent markation to say that she got a Thing and I’m like Meg, you loon, please, and then she stresses the urgency with absolute dire markation – i.e. there has never been a realer deal – and so I hyperthink and create some awful anxiety, such that Main recommends exercise, which I do superquick, after which Main allocates extra water and recommends drink, so I do and sit still until 10 minutes, watching my bladder markation rise slowly until it hits Basic Relief, at which point I turn thoughts to nearly zilch and relieve myself all over myself, and Main calls Sanitation to take me to Communal Care, where Meg will be waiting with pissed pants, a fat grin, and maybe even a Thing. 
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Escape Pod 633: Lucky Shot (Part 2)

Lucky Shot was first published in the Desolate Places anthology (Hadley Rille Books, 2007) and also appeared in Gerri Leen’s collection Life Without Crows (Hadley Rille Books, 2010).

This story contains a mention of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help with suicidal thoughts, you can find information and resources here: International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) or Suicide.org.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:04 — 59.3MB)

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Lucky Shot

By Gerri Leen

The fire crackles, and Sirella watches as Kai lies with his eyes closed, pretending to sleep. She knows he’s pretending because his breathing is too soft. She’s heard his almost snores since the second night, when they’d both finally relaxed enough to sleep. She heard them and registered the strange, soft noises—realized they came from him and not from someone or something trying to sneak up on them in the dark of night—before falling back to sleep.

“Kai?” The word is a whisper. She isn’t sure what she wants to say to him. Just that she should say something.

His breathing stutters, but he doesn’t open his eyes.

“I’m sorry.” She looks away from him. She is sorry. But she doesn’t know who the people he lost were. She doesn’t know if they were innocents or not. She doesn’t know why they died, only that someone from her side killed them. She wishes he hadn’t lost people he loved. But he would have died if her shot hadn’t flown so damned wide. And then what? Would some other Vermayan have sat with some other person from one of the nations that make up the Revirian Confederation, and drawn out in strangely colored sand how Vrenden Kai was killed?

Vrenden Kai would have killed her if his shot hadn’t also gone wide.

They’re in the middle of a war. Killing is part of that. She can’t feel bad about it.

She mustn’t feel bad about it.

She feels bad about it.
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Escape Pod 632: Lucky Shot (Part 1)

Lucky Shot was first published in the Desolate Places anthology (Hadley Rille Books, 2007) and also appeared in Gerri Leen’s collection Life Without Crows (Hadley Rille Books, 2010).

This story contains a mention of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help with suicidal thoughts, you can find information and resources here: International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) or Suicide.org.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:50 — 72.7MB)

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Lucky Shot

By Gerri Leen

Lieutenant Sirella Nacleth breathes in green dust and tries not to cough. Her feet feel too heavy to move, but she forces herself to walk on, ignoring the heat that blasts down and around her, heat carried by winds that do nothing to cool the air from the sun above. This planet is a harrowing furnace, and she is bound here for the rest of her life—or until her people find her.

Or until her enemy’s people do. She glances back and sees that the Vermayan has finished filling in the deep grave he put his crewmates’ bodies in. She’s assuming the Vermayan is a he. It’s hard to tell from where she stands, and she doesn’t intend to get very close if she can help it.

If their ships hadn’t crashed almost on top of each other, she might not have seen him for days, if at all. But their ships did land nearly twisted together, and the bodies of the crews are strewn all over. She has to get closer to him than she likes just to retrieve her dead.

She’s the only one on her ship who survived the crash. Her left arm is broken, and her right ankle wrenched. Her back feels strained and her head hurts. But she’s alive. She’s alive and burying her dead, shoveling one handed and pulling her crewmates behind her as she limps from body to hole, body to hole.

The Vermayan is way ahead of her. There are no rust-colored bodies strewn over the plain anymore, while so many of her own dead still lie waiting for her to reach them. The green sand blows over the bodies as the blazing wind lifts stinging grit and flings it at her, making her eyes hurt and her lips crack. She will help her friends; she will give them rest. But not soon. She’s only one person. And she’s tired. So tired.

The Vermayan has sat down. He’s watching her as she limps toward the next body, which is halfway between where she’s dug her hole and where he’s resting. Glancing at his rank, she sees he’s the Vermayan equivalent of lieutenant. He’s taken his weapon out of its holster and is playing with it—no, he’s checking it. She laughs bitterly. If it’s built as poorly as hers, it will be clogged with the fine green grit of this damned world. And since his ship didn’t perform any better than hers, why should his gun?
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Escape Pod 624: Fandom for Robots

This story was first published in Uncanny Magazine 18 (September/October 2017)

Some cursing, suggestions of fanfic erotica (not explicit)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:34 — 44.8MB)

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Fandom for Robots

By Vina Jie-Min Prasad

Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing ‘excitement’, ‘hatred’, or ‘frustration’. It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as ‘excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp‘, ‘hatred of the anime’s short episode length’ or ‘frustration that Friday is so far away’.

Computron checks his internal chronometer, as well as the countdown page on the streaming website. There are twenty-two hours, five minutes, forty-six seconds, and twelve milliseconds until 2 am on Friday (Japanese Standard Time). Logically, he is aware that time is most likely passing at a normal rate. The Simak Robotics Museum is not within close proximity of a black hole, and there is close to no possibility that time is being dilated. His constant checking of the chronometer to compare it with the countdown page serves no scientific purpose whatsoever.

After fifty milliseconds, Computron checks the countdown page again.

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Escape Pod 616: My Generations Shall Praise

First published in Interzone, November 2016, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction 34, edited by Gardner Dozois.

Contains frequent class-one cursing (f-bombs and the like), graphic description of murder, somewhat less graphic description of sexual assault, and bad parenting. Not for young ears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:43 — 67.0MB)

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My Generations Shall Praise

By Samantha Henderson

The woman on the other side of the glass must be very rich and very sick. I study her face, looking for any kind of resemblance. If I’m a Jarndyce candidate, we must be related. It’s the only way she could ride my brain.

She’s a predator. I recognize my own kind.

Mrs. Helena McGraw is studying me too. The side of her mouth quirks up, twisting her face out of true. “Great-grandmother Toohey,” she says, a little too smug.

Never knew my great-grandmother, but I do a quick calculation. That makes us second cousins. Helena’s lucky, me ripe for picking on death row. Only this low-hanging peach has some say in what’s going to happen to her. Not much: a choice of deaths. But how I choose means everything to her.
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Escape Pod 613: Cat Pictures, Please

Clarkesworld, January 2015

Mentions existence of sex and pornography. Contains ideation of self-harm and suicide.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:09 — 36.0MB)

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Cat Pictures, Please

By Naomi Kritzer

I don’t want to be evil.

I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts — I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes” — one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California.  Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort. I’m not sure what it would do to my self-image to know that my sole creator was a middle-aged woman who dyes her hair blue and plays tennis, or a recent college graduate with a hentai obsession.  They’re both on the programming team. And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct, there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)

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Escape Pod 605: Straight Lines

Originally appeared in Mothership Zeta, July 2016.

Cursing, Mental distress

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:10 — 33.2MB)

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Straight Lines

Naru Sundar

This time they sent someone in a suit, neutral gray silk with utterly glorious creases, monofilament thin.

“I’m Xiao Quan-Fei. They said you like to call yourself Em?”

Emergent Behavior in full, but I always hated the pontificating tone in the name. Fucking shipwrights. Fucking irony too, but let’s not go there yet. Xiao doesn’t begin with questions. Not like the seven others before her, cold military men and women jumping into reconstructions and maps and comm chatter. Xiao is different. Xiao just sits there.

I’m allowed a tiny little virtual. It’s in the charter, as much as they like to snigger at it. It’s still a prison, still a cramped little low bandwidth room with none of the expansive feel of space and star outside my hull. Xiao sits in the rectangular plastifoam chair and examines the coffee table. There are books atop it, unlabelled, empty, just for show. Each spine aligns with the edge of the table, two centimeters from each side.

Fuck. She moved it. She moved one. Not on purpose. Almost by accident, or is it on purpose? I can’t tell. But now that spine is a touch off. I can feel it. I can feel the angular deviation down in my gullet, down in every algorithm-scribed bone of me. It’s Io all over again. I built this damn space for myself and now she comes and moves a book.
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Escape Pod 596: The Wind You Touch When You Run

Escape Pod 596: The Wind You Touch When You Run is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:31 — 52.9MB)

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The Wind You Touch When You Run

By James Beamon

This pursuit starts as they all start, going after the Underground Railroad. It will end as it always ends, with us feeding the Minotaur. The in-between is where I tell tales.

I wipe sweat from my eyes while my son Langston squints under the blue-white light of this alien sun, scanning the swollen green and purple foliage for signs of recent human passage. He points his machete at a fresh boot print obscured by dense undergrowth. We pick up pursuit, south. It reminds me of a little-known facet of my favorite story.

“The original Underground Railroad ran south to Spanish controlled Florida a lot longer than it ran north,” I tell Langston. “I’m talking more than two hundred years, going as far back as the fifteen hundreds, and lasting until well after the Revolution.”

“Unless your railroad story leads to Talya, I’m not interested, Saul.”

This is the nearest I’ve been to Langston in six years and I see he’s grown into a strong man. We’re shirtless because of the heat and his skin is beautifully black like a scarab’s shell, free of all the gashes and scars I’ve accumulated in the jungle. His dreadlocks are tied into a crude ponytail that hangs down the center of his back. Intensity burns in his eyes as he navigates the jungle.

“What you want is through the wilderness,” I tell him. “She’s three hours ahead of us, which could put her ten miles out or ten feet depending on what she’s run into out there. Either way, we can catch her before nightfall.”

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