Posts Tagged ‘physics’

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Escape Pod 961: Mathball

Escape Pod 961: Mathball is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:41 — 46.7MB)

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Mathball

By Larry Hodges

You are a baseball fan, sitting in the centerfield seats eating an overpriced hot dog. You are wearing a baseball cap, but not a batting helmet, of course. (Why would that be an issue? Hmm…)You smile brightly, but all will not end well for you unless you pay close attention.

“Play ball!” cries the umpire, crouching behind the plate. The crowd roars. The pitcher stares down at the catcher, waiting for the sign. They are the home team. Thousands cheer for them.

The batter waves his bat menacingly. He is a hero of this story.

Six scientists sit at their desks behind home plate, three on the third-base side, three on the first-base side. The three on the first-base side work for the pitcher and we don’t care about them—they are the enemy. The three on the third-base side work for the batter. They are from MIT. These latter three are the real stars of this story.

Well… mostly. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 851: Time Bomb Time

“Time Bomb Time” originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of Lightspeed Magazine. It was reprinted in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 and translated into Chinese by Geng Hui (耿辉) for ZUI Found (文艺风赏) in June 2015.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:12 — 40.6MB)

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Time Bomb Time

by C. C. Finlay

–pop–

The sharp scent of ozone–sudden like heartbreak, raw as a panic attack–filled Hannah’s dorm room, from the paper-swamped desk across her rumpled bed to the window overlooking the quad. The lights flickered. Her heart skipped a beat.

“God damn it.” She prodded Nolon’s foot with the toe of her shoe. She wanted to kick him. “Tell me what you just did.”

“Nothing.” He was leaning over the weird device from his lab, tapping a code on the keypad.

“What are you doing now?” Anger pushed at the edges of her voice, but she held it in check. She wanted him to leave, but she didn’t want to upset him.

“Don’t worry so much–nobody’s going to get hurt.” He pressed his shoulder against her, didn’t even have to push–she flinched and bumped into the wall. He laughed at her, like it was a joke. “It’s not a time bomb.”
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 794: Episode 4: The Deflection of Probability

Escape Pod 794: Episode 4: The Deflection of Probability is an Escape Pod original.

Science fiction-style death and peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:16 — 43.4MB)

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Episode 4: The Deflection of Probability

By Premee Mohamed

The tent billowed in the hot, humid wind, and Harriet thought if the canvas made that gun-crack noise near her head one more time she’d go mad—simply abandon her project and flee screaming into the meadow.

She took a deep breath, ignoring the hovering cameras that hummed in her peripheral vision. They’d make something of that in final production, she thought gloomily. That sigh. The plucky lass from Berwick-upon-Tweed, a clear shoo-in during the first three episodes, has done very poorly indeed today, and seems to be feeling the pressure… Well, and it would have to be ‘plucky,’ wouldn’t it? Harriet was sure the judges had an approved list of adjectives in their scripts. Some contestants were brilliant. Some were confident. Some…

Another gust of hot air roared in like the furious breath of a dragon. Her palladium microtorus setup spun on its little mirrored platform, reflecting glimpses of her startled gaze, her hair frizzed in the humidity. A skiff of pollen had dirtied the molecule-thick coating. Keeping her face still, she got out the nanofiber brush and cleaned the surface again.

It had all begun so well. Or at least it probably looked that way to viewers. Were episodes being aired already? Harriet didn’t know. But two weeks ago, her synthetic prions had gone about the place (well, the slide) like proper gangsters, knocking the other proteins aside and neatly recruiting only the ones they were meant to. Last week, only four contestants had managed to produce the correct crystal matrix in the final experiment—and hers had been the tallest of all, rising high and green as envy above their stations, nearly touching the ceiling. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 785: Death, the Universe, and Everything

Escape Pod 785: Death, the Universe, and Everything is an Escape Pod original.

Contains descriptions of death and suicide.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:34 — 54.9MB)

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Show Notes

An international list of suicide prevention hotlines and other suicide prevention resources is available HERE.

Death, the Universe, and Everything

By Sherin Nicole

The morning after it happened for the first time, I–

I’m not sure if I should tell you, but maybe you can tell me. If your understanding of reality fundamentally changes, does it change you?

And how responsible am I for who you become? 

I don’t know.

And that relative state of not knowing is the start of my conundrum. And my conflict.

The morning after it happened for the first time, I woke up with half of my soul hanging out of my body. The worst case of pins and needles possible. The pain was a soft plodding ache, but it couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. It hurt. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 776: Tloque Nahuaque

Tloque Nahuaque originally apeared in Future Lovecraft, Innsmouth Free Press, 2011 (translated from the Spanish by Silvia Moreno-Garcia).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:12 — 28.2MB)

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Show Notes

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s website is at https://www.silviamoreno-garcia.com/.

Tloque Nahuaque

By Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

—Carl Sagan

 

I—The Particle Accelerator

They built an underground temple. A well of Babel sinking into the gloomy ground at 175 metres of depth. They wanted, like the Biblical architects, to know the unknowable, to discover the origin, reproduce Creation.

The desire to unravel the nature of the Everything floated permanently in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Hundreds of fans and machines emitted a constant buzzing, which the investigators called the “silence of the abyss”. This, combined with the smell of burnt iron, gave the ominous sensation of finding oneself in space. Doctor Migdal lay upon a nest made of coloured cables and, with eyes closed, fantasised that his body, weightless, floated, pushed by the breeze of the ventilation.

Sometimes, he would imagine that he was being attracted by a very narrow tube, a cafeteria straw, the ink container of a pen, or a bleeding artery. His feet, near the edge of the conduit, would feel a titanic weight that would pull him and make him push through the small space. Migdal could see how he would turn into a thick strand of subatomic particles that would extend forever. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 696: The Homunculi’s Guide to Resurrecting Your Loved One From Their Electronic Ghosts

Escape Pod 696: The Homunculi’s Guide to Resurrecting Your Loved One From Their Electronic Ghosts is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:57 — 37.9MB)

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The Homunculi’s Guide to Resurrecting Your Loved One From Their Electronic Ghosts

by Kara Lee

0. Confession

If you are reading this, your Loved One has died. We are sorry for your loss.

If you are reading this, then you stumbled onto an archived thread on a lost forum saying that supposedly, it is possible to bring back the dead using their electronic ghosts, and that the Homunculi, whoever they are, know how it is done. And then you searched and searched in a blur of grief and desperation and nearly killed yourself with illegal thaumaturgical network protocols before you found our servers.

And now you want to know whether you really can bring your Loved One back from the dead.

The answer is mostly yes, with one exception.

But you must know that this is not a resurrection. It is a trade. Your Loved One may return to the land of the living in exchange for your life, body, humanity, and most of your soul. In other words, you will have to condemn yourself to being one of us for the rest of eternity.

We will not lie and say that there is much to our existence.

But there is hope. We, the Homunculi, would know. Because hope is why we wrote this guide.

For you see, we cling to a deep-down, bitter, shameful hope that we will one day be saved by someone who loves us. And we hope against hope that the someone will be you.

We know it is a terrible thing to hope for. We know better than anyone what awaits those who make the trade.

And so we apologize for our selfishness. But we do not ask for forgiveness. We only ask that you remember what it is to hope for something impossible.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 290: Tom the Universe

Escape Pod 290: Tom the Universe is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG-13: sexual situations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:17 — 23.6MB)

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Tom the Universe

By Larry Hodges

I permeate this universe, which I’ve named Tom, and guard against its destruction. If someone had done that for the universe I came from, then Mary, my sweet Mary, would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have killed her and everyone else when I accidentally destroyed that universe.

And now I’m on the verge of destroying much more.

My name is also Tom. I was an undergrad in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that January in 2040 when I made the discovery that doomed us all. My field of study was cognitive science, the study of human consciousness. What makes us aware of ourselves? Is it just the biomechanical workings of the brain, or something else?

Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I spent countless hours in the lab eliminating the impossible, and there didn’t seem to be anything left, improbable or not. The interconnectivity required for human consciousness to exist was just too many levels beyond what was possible. By all rights, we should all be unconscious blobs of matter mechanically going about our business as directed by electronic impulses from the brain, with no more consciousness than a calculator. I suffered brain cramps in the lab trying to figure out what improbables were left.

(Continue Reading…)

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