Posts Tagged ‘art’

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Escape Pod 942: The Eye of Applethorpe

Escape Pod 942: The Eye of Applethorpe is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (67.6MB)

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The Eye of Applethorpe

by E J Delaney

Úna’s dad once said to her: “You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

Spring had turned and they’d come cycling up the highway, fourteen kilometres north through a land bedecked with rocky upthrusts and pink-tinged blossoms. The Big Apple loomed before them, appraising its empty kingdom from atop a stubby pole.

Úna hadn’t understood. Where the Apple’s expression was unambiguous—a spray-painted frown—her dad’s was hidden beneath thickets of beard. He rested on his tiptoes astride the bike, as big and improbably balanced as a granite boulder. Sunlight danced through his cherry-candle bristles.

Úna held his hand. To her the world had seemed perfect. She was happy and loved, and she’d recently befriended a turtle where Quart Pot Creek curved past the homestead.

What could he have had, she wondered, that wasn’t there anymore?

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 930: Fulfillment in Purpose

Escape Pod 930: Fulfillment in Purpose is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:04 — 55.5MB)

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Show Notes

Zima Blue

Zima Blue episode of Love, Death & Robots

Get Excited and Make Things!

Ezekiel’s speech from The Walking Dead Season 8 Episode 4: And Yet I Smile

Fulfillment in Purpose

by Jack Windeyer

Eland was resetting his mother’s balancing sculptures when Hexben ran in from the storage room. The robot tilted its long head down while still making eye contact, managing a look of consternation despite its rigid, expressionless face.

“What?” Eland snapped.

“You should be packing those into boxes,” Hexben said without inflection. “Our lease ends next week.”

“Exactly,” Eland said. “It doesn’t end today.”

Hexben deepened the tilt of its head so far that its chin touched its chest in a spot where the paint was well-worn away.

“One big sale could change everything,” Eland said, looking back at his work. “We could renew the lease for six months with a single sale.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 915: The Confessionist

“The Confessionist” was previously published in the anthology: Community of Magic Pens, edited by E.D.E. Bell, released May 2020 by Atthis Arts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:07 — 26.7MB)

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The Confessionist

by Ava Kelly

Vemund pauses, standing on the wet sidewalk. Underneath the overcast sky, twilight stretches through the sloping city. Wealth lives here, in sterile houses carefully hidden behind designer bushes and fences. Not even petrichor feels natural this far across the megapolis. No stench permeates the air, no visible evidence of human misery, although Vemund knows from experience these walls hide just as many vile actions as the paperthin constructs at the other end of civilization.

The evening is chill enough that Vemund sees his breaths as he exhales. It fits this appointment, in a way; all day he’s been followed by a lingering impression that he’s about to trade his soul away. For almost twenty years, he’s worked as a confessionist. The only job he could ever take, young and untrained, but already buried under unbearable debt. Society needs you, they told him at recruitment. You’d be doing the world a favor. Vemund snorts quietly to himself. The only favor he’s been doing has been to ease abject consciences. Except for the children; sometimes he confesses children and their pain is almost always inflicted by others. They were all worth it, though rare enough to forget how it feels to actually help someone instead of simply dampening the guilt bred by one’s actions, consequences intended or not.

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Escape Pod 909: Murder or a Duck (Flashback Friday)

This story originally aired as an Escape Pod Original in Escape Pod 545 (October 2016)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:56 — 42.9MB)

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Murder or a Duck

By Beth Goder

George called out, “Mrs. Whitman, you have a visitor.”

Mrs. Whitman strode from her workroom, her white hair skipping out of its hairpins. She straightened her work skirt, massaged her bad knee, then hurried down the hall.

“George, what’s happened to the lamp with the blue shade?”

“To which lamp are you referring?” George smoothed down a cravat embroidered with tiny trombones. Improper attire for a butler, but George had never been entirely proper.

Mrs. Whitman examined the sitting room in further depth. The blue lamp was gone, as were the doilies, thank goodness. An elegant table sat between the armchair and green sofa, which was infused with the stuffy smell of potpourri. Behind the sofa hung The Roses of Wiltshire, a painting that Mrs. Whitman had never cared for, despite its lush purples and pinks and reds. And the ficus was there, too, of course.

Mrs. Whitman pulled out a battered notebook. George’s trombone cravat indicated she was in a timeline where he was courting Sonia. A good sign, indeed. Perhaps, after six hundred and two tries, she’d finally landed in a timeline where Mr. Whitman would return home safely.

Consulting her charts, she circled some continuities and crossed out others, referring often to an appendix at the back. The notebook was worn, its blue cover faded. And it was the twelfth one she’d had since starting the project. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 840: The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One) / Alien Invader or Assistive Device?

The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One) first appeared in Drabblecast in August 2021.

Alien Invader or Assistive Device? first appeared in Robot Dinosaurs in April 2020.

Crude language, violence, gore, and death.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:04 — 54.1MB)

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The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One)

By John Wiswell

Dinosaurs don’t want to kill you; they just don’t care that you’re there. More people have been sat on by brontosauruses than have been eaten by all the theropods combined. Since I joined security on the archipelago, 82% of dinosaur-related human casualties were from tourists who got too close during mating season. And the four times I’ve seen a deinonychus attack someone, they’ve always left them uneaten. Why? For the same reason bears and sharks tend to leave victims alive: because humans taste like shit. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 709: In A Wide Sky, Hidden

This story was previously published in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine (July 2017).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:33 — 56.2MB)

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In A Wide Sky, Hidden

by William Ledbetter

Warm liquid gurgled away and the kettle field winked off, leaving me naked, wet, and trembling in the soup kitchen’s receiving chamber. My traveling companion, Roger, waited with clothes. Humanoid in shape but impossibly thin, his eight-foot-tall metallic figure moved with an almost liquid grace as he stooped to help me into the robe. My new skin felt raw against the thick fabric, but, like the chills, was caused by the transfer and only temporary.

“Is she here?” I said while bending down to pull on a pair of quilted boots.

“No obvious signs,” Roger said and handed me a glass of bourbon.

I took a long sip and moaned as its burn saturated me from the inside out.

“Thank you,” I muttered.

His bulbous head nodded a slight acknowledgement. “You should really drink something else upon reconstitution,” he said. “Tea, perhaps. That really doesn’t help.”

“No obvious signs of her? What does that mean?” I said.

“Skimmer forty-eight found something interesting. I’ll be able to tell you more when its full report arrives in about five minutes.”

I looked up at his smooth, featureless face hovering two feet above mine. Even after nearly eighty years of association and friendship, my human hindbrain still expected facial expressions when I looked at him. Finally, when he offered no further information, I shrugged and took another sip.

It wasn’t real bourbon, only a molecule-by-molecule reconstruction from local materials, but unlike a human mind instantaneously transferred into a soup-kitchen body via a quantum link, no method could reinstall the soul into the body of bourbon. In other words, I had tasted real aged Kentucky bourbon on Earth and flattered myself by thinking I could tell the difference.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 707: Rule of Three (Part 3 of 3)

Rule of Three was first published in Future SF, no. 1, in 2018.

Includes descriptions of human reproduction and sexuality.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:31 — 45.1MB)

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Rule of Three (Part 3 of 3)

By Lawrence M. Schoen

Late in the day Foom laced its fingers with my clone’s and I felt my consciousness pushed aside. Not entirely out, but no longer in control of my doppelganger. There wasn’t the exchange of knowledge and insight that had accompanied this gesture in the past. I followed the alien’s focus, using everything I’d learned in the last few days. I could see what it was doing, but not understand it. “Can you explain what’s happening?” I asked.

“I am crafting what you would call a retrovirus from your double’s cells. Actually, many variations of this retrovirus. If I am successful, one of them will rewrite your gonads and ultimately alter the viability of any spermatozoa they produce. He’ll still produce semen in the normal fashion, but it will be inert for reproductive purposes. No ‘Jing’.”

Foom grinned as it said that last word, lapsing from the Miao tongue into Chinese for an old word from Chinese medicine for ‘sexual energy’ that I must have picked up years ago and long since forgotten. Apparently, it had pulled more than just the one language from me.

“Shooting blanks, as the Americans would say,” I added.

“Thus ensuring the extinction of your species without causing any physical harm to the living.”
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 706: Rule of Three (Part 2 of 3)

Rule of Three was first published in Future SF, no. 1, in 2018.

Includes descriptions of human reproduction and sexuality.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:24 — 64.2MB)

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Rule of Three (Part 2 of 3)

By Lawrence M. Schoen

“I have been exploring your solar system for most of a century,” Foom said.

“Why?”

“Cataloging.” Foom led me down to the riverbank. A giant pearl sat in the water not ten meters away. “You would call me a completist. Visiting each and every one of Jupiter’s moons alone took more than a decade. Some were truly majestic. Which is not to say your own moon is not interesting, but I am still processing what I learned there. It was my penultimate destination in this system. I saved your world for last.”

We stepped into the river and were quickly engulfed above our waists. The water was cold but the current not especially swift.

“Did you find life anywhere else in our solar system?”

“Life, yes, but nothing alive that was also self-aware and sapient as you are. And I found death, too. But only on your world is there unlife. Your pardon, can you swim?”

“Excuse me?”
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Escape Pod 697: The Last Stellar Death Metal Opera

Escape Pod 697: The Last Stellar Death Metal Opera is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:07 — 29.9MB)

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The Last Stellar Death Metal Opera

By Elly Bangs

Raya eases power into the singularity engine and all her senses sharpen with the glorious, brutal reality of the moment: dead ahead there’s the blacklight-purple disk of Wolf-Rayet 104, twenty-eight subjective minutes before it goes core-collapse supernova. In her rear view there’s the brown dwarf she’s dragging on a graviton leash. She aims to hurl it down that deep purple star’s gravity well fast and hard enough to nudge it a degree off its axis just before it blows, in turn tilting the jet of its impending gamma ray burst away from an ocean planet and sparing a half-billion bronze-age octopodes from a gruesome flash-boiled apocalypse.

After aeons of waiting and searching, finally everything is in order, all her conditions met: she’s the only one who can do it, this is the only way it can be done, and there’s no scenario that doesn’t end with her being blasted so effectively to smithereens that no tech in the universe can put her back together again.

She cranks up the music (some ancient pre-Unimind death metal) and cracks her neck. She verifies the integrity of her mohawk, the wicked glint of her spiked bracelets in the cockpit lights, the wings of her void-black eyeliner: She’s going to be the first human being to die in a very, very long time, and she’s damn well going to do in style. She plants a kiss on her fingers and transfers it to the photo of the late, eternal Jex Epsilon-James stuck to the cockpit ceiling.

“This is it, Jex. It’s going down.”
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Escape Pod 658: Beatrix Released

Escape Pod 658: Beatrix Released is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:20 — 58.9MB)

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Show Notes

Termination Shock
Termination Shock

TERMINATION SHOCK is a new roleplaying game from Greg Stolze, chronicling your adventures as an ordinary human rescued from hellish war by disorganized aliens. What will you do as a refugee in a strange cosmos? Cling to your past, or find a purpose among inscrutable aliens? Will you just get by, or will you redefine humanity in the eyes of a million extraterrestrials? The choice is yours in this new tabletop game, on Kickstarter now.

Beatrix Released

By Shaenon K. Garrity

The lichen in the cupboard has at last begun to sing.  It sings in two-part harmony, bel canto, essaying a faultless duet with itself.  What a strange and lovely fairy!  I am convinced more and more that my earlier theory was correct, that the lichen is a bipartite organism comprising both fungus and an algae or bacterium.  A remarkable symbiosis, distinct I believe from any recognized taxonomy.  The love its halves sing to one another is profound enough to make one blush, and I soon retreated to the far end of the room to sketch my collection of English mice in the bone cabinet.  Papa and Mamma have allowed me to keep a few childhood specimens in my room again, to be used for art lessons only.

Dinner party tonight.  All the MPs got a clinical dissection, it was lively.  Papa and Grandpapa are appalled by Gladstone’s capitulation to the Irish Free Staters.  I agree entirely.  If it were me I’d turn them all out with a thrashing.  When the guests moved to the drawing room for dessert and coffee Mamma suggested I retire, as the conversation was likely to get too intellectual for a girl like myself.

(Speaking of conversation: I’ve decided to continue this diary in a new code.  The previous simple substitution code was v. solvable, and the thought of Mamma reading my less charitable observations was keeping me up at night.  She will go through my things!  Besides it is good mental exercise to practice a new writing system.)

A few new faces among the dinner guests.  One gentleman with an amusing gait, stiff and precise, like a spider.  He specifically resembles the Pholcus phalangioides or Daddy long-legs.  The cause of the distinctive perambulatory motion of spiders is hydraulic pressure, which assists them in flexing their limbs.  The cause of the distinctive perambulatory motion of the dinner guest is unknown.
(Continue Reading…)

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