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Vault (Part 2 of 2)

By D.A. Xiaolin Spires

(…Continued from Part 1)

“Lukas?”

Chenguang’s voice echoes in this expanse of dark.

A vortex of light opens to her right and she sees a warped head and legs emerge from a point in the dark. It’s Lukas. As he enters the space, the light bends, his figure elongated as he pulls himself through and it closes behind him. It’s dark again.

“Hey, Lukas.”

“Chenguang?” His voice is low and resounds against unseen walls. “Where is this place?”

“Did we just—enter the structure somehow?”

“I—I—don’t know.” Lukas’ voice uncharacteristically wavers before it quiets down in the darkness.

Chenguang remembers listening to her grandma talk about physical experiments of the past. Pools of salty water that deaden sound. Eternal blackness to sharpen the mind. A chamber, her grandma called it. One that dispossesses you of your senses. That was before the planet went up in flames, before she bid her grandma goodbye as she left her behind.

Deprived. She feels like that now. There’s an ache throbbing within her.

A light comes up in the corner and they walk towards it. It feels like an infinite space, paths that lead in every direction, but they move toward the light. They don’t run. Somehow it doesn’t feel right here. Chenguang moves her legs, almost robotically towards the rays.

The light becomes bigger, brighter and they see it now and when it becomes the length of a vaprabar, palm-size, she stops and Lukas halts behind her. They’re standing five feet away. Chenguang feels Lukas’ breath before her, steady, in and out, in and out.

What first appeared like the vaprabar is rectangular and long, a series of small cubes arranged next to each other in a line formation. Pulsing light.

Lukas’ loud breathing seems to skip a beat, and Chenguang feels, too, something caught in her throat as an array of sensations overtake her body.

Her head feels hot, her limbs cold, her spine feels a chill pass through it, and her legs feels a searing heat travel through them. Her pendant with her comm lifts up and yanks at her neck. It’s pulling towards the light. She grabs it, trying to push it down to her chest, which is thumping, cold, cold.

Lukas has stepped up towards it and he’s reaching—

“No,” cries Chenguang, but Lukas is faster than her words. He swings his helmet and captures that lit-up bar, no bigger than a packet of gum, like he’s playing catcher at meteoroid-pitch.

The sensations in her body fade, her temperature returning to normal and she’s tugging at her chloropolyurethane sleeves again. Doing anything to make her feel like she’s got control of her body.

She moves up to Lukas, but he reaches his hand into his helmet, towards the light.

“That’s not a good—” she starts to say, but a deafening high-pitched buzz fills her ears and then there’s a blast, and she expects to hear an explosion, but only hears that shrieking buzz as mushrooming light blinds.

The feeling comes a moment later, lifting up and being thrown up against something. Her body hurts, aches that fill not only her body, but also the inside of her mind. The air in her chest collapses at her intake of breath and she sees through her closed eyelids, the brightness that could only be two suns.

She forces herself to open her eyes.

Lukas is rolling back and forth on his back on the roof ground, holding up his knee to his chest. He’s wincing and moaning to himself.

Crap.

Chenguang wills herself up and tries to knock some sense into Lukas. He looks up at her and shuts his eyes, opens them again. She hefts him up, despite his muttering objections. Her knees shake, but she’s got him. He’s heavy, at least heavier than she imagined, his arms and legs dangle out of her hug. Luckily, cartologist runners are more streamlined than bulky, so at least he’s not too beefy. She pulls him away from his cracked helmet, moves him to the far ledge on the roof.

She makes sure he’s all right. He’s moaning but otherwise okay, she guesses, and goes back and peers at the helmet. There’s nothing in there now. Just cracked shards lining what was once the perimeter of the head hole.

She doesn’t dare move it.

Crap.

How fast can he run without its aerodynamic edge? How much sunlight can he collect without its specialized absorption tech? He’ll freeze at night. Without it, he definitely won’t generate enough power to activate the heating cells in his blanket.

She plucks the water patch out of her backpack, wondering if she should wait to give it to him as a warmer at night, like the way she used it last night, but makes up her mind and rips it open. Tepid water, heated from the ambient air of this land of dual suns, trickles down her hand. She rushes to lick it and it feels startling and moist on her tongue.

Water.

She’s careful as she brings it over to Lukas, lifts up his head, and forces him to drink it. His eyes fly open when he realizes what it is that he is gulping. She realizes she’s licking her lips and her throat’s moving up and down, a phantom desire to taste what he’s having, as she feeds the elixir of H2O to him. He looks bewildered and his eyelids shut again. After he has gulped down the bulk of it, his eyes open again.

Just a few drops left that Chenguang loathes to waste, so she rolls up the package, so light in her hands now, as a contrast to the luxurious heftiness of the water weight before, and stuffs the mostly-packaging into her pack. Maybe I’ll lick it clean when we pack up for the night.

Lukas’ eyes clear up from the haze and look at her as she eats her vaprabar. She’s trying to think. To put together the many strands of thought entangling within one another. What was that? Where did we go off to? What happened to that panel block of light bits? What to do with Lukas and his busted helmet? Water. I wish I could have tasted more of it.

The vaprabar shatters into dry bits in her mouth as she chomps.

“Chenguang, thanks,” she hears Lukas behind her saying. She stops staring into the sky with its twin suns and turns around.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know. My knee’s not right. But, I think it’ll be better.”

Chenguang fishes out Eazslaps and helps him put it on. “Your turn for these.”

“My helmet.” It’s a statement, not a question.

“Yeah. Broken.”

“What was that?”

“I thought I’d ask you. You’re the one who touched it.”

“I’m not sure. But I’ll admit, that was pretty dumb.”

“Easier to say now, in retrospect. We had no idea what it could do.”

“Thanks, nice of you to say. Though, I’m sorry.” He casts his eyes down and he does look penitent. He rubs the Eazslaps over his knee. Shiny blue peeks through his fingers to show they’re working. “Hey, you okay?”

“Better off than you,” she says, swallowing the last of her bar.

“So, I guess you’ll go off. Finish the cartography. I can poke around here. Look for some shelter for the night. Cuddle up next to some concrete.”

Chenguang shakes her head.

“I think we should go down.”

“Down?”

“Into the wasteland. Into the buildings. Not just graze the rooftop. There might be something we can use to get you warm. Maybe some energy source. An old battery or something.”

“There? There’s nothing left. People left long ago.”

“I don’t know. I just get this feeling. You know, I felt something pull at me. Twice. And that panel of connected cubes of light. Maybe that has energy.”

“Too dangerous. We’re not playing around with that.”

“I’m not suggesting that. I just mean. We won’t know until we look. There’s no way I can map out this planet alone in time, so if you’re out of commission, neither of us will get our cred, you’ll be frozen dead from the night chill, and they’ll send new cartographers here. We’ll be in debt, paying for the commute and lift back. Well, I’ll be and you, too, if you manage to stay alive. This is the best way. Plus, I dunno. I just get this feeling.”

Lukas shakes his head.

“Lukas, I saw an opening before.”

“What?”

“An opening into the buildings. They’re not all sealed off like the High Institute’s Historical Society claims. A space was overlooked. It’s way over the side of one of the buildings, about five buildings back. If we could just make our way over there—”

“You’re crazy. You sure the blast didn’t mess you up? Going back and entering this condemned space—”

Chenguang hooks her arm into his elbow and helps him up. He limps, then shakes out his knee as he leans on her. He moves again and he looks more stable.

“The swelling’s going down. You’re going to make it. Lucky, no blood, no concussion, right? Let’s go.”

He tries walking a few more steps. He squats and gets up.

“Alright, hope you can leap, I’m heading over to the other side. Leave all the stuff. It’ll just weigh you down. Latch onto my arm if you can’t make it and I’ll give you a catch.”

Chenguang vaults back, retracing their way back to the building before. She makes it, though she’s not as swift as she once was.

She leans over the ledge and holds out her arms. She hopes she won’t have to catch him. She’s not sure if she can handle the weight after all.

He runs, looks good, tight form, and jumps and vaults. It’s clean and he lands with a roll onto the roof. He’s still limping, a bit. He’s trying to hide it.

They manage to leap, roll, and dash over to five buildings back.

Chenguang looks down the alleyway between two buildings. The black hole is there. A window that hasn’t been sealed up. She feels drawn towards it, like a whisper in the back of her mind guiding her that way. When she sees it, something like congruity settles in her bones.

“We gotta go. You can make it. I know you can. At least the Eazslaps will dampen the pain enough, yeah?”

She leaps back and forth between the building she’s on and the other one that’s slightly taller, as she descends. Like a moth, fluttering from one surface to another, she hops, light and assured until she reaches the opening at the wall. She perches on the windowsill for a moment, feeling the cool air of inside on one side of her and the heat of the sun on the other.

“Come on,” she says into her comm and she hears Lukas respond.

She alights onto concrete a few feet below the window and follows the panel of light from the window onto the floor. Nothing. Again, she sees nothing. Before she can walk up and explore, Lukas falls into place behind her.

“Good, you made it. Now, let’s do a search.”

 

They spend about half an hour walking through the place, lighting up the room with activated ray fabric. It’s the most energy-efficient light they have, but it’s a harsh white glow. Mostly it’s just the rough white concrete that looks up at them.

Chenguang spends some of her pent-up stamina on staircases, jumping up flights at a time, passing through the rails.

She’s beginning to suspect this to be a great waste of time, and Lukas was right after all, when her cartographer’s scrutinizing gaze finds a deviation on the tiles of the bottommost level. A carved depression, hooked back like a handle.

She slides her hand and lifts.

A basement?

She talks into her comm. “Lukas, slide down the banister to the bottom floor and get over here. There’s a route down here.”

She slips through, lands with a cat crouch, and walks in this dark tunnel. She’s feeling out the hollowness and the perfect curves of the walls when Lukas joins her.

“Leg okay?”

“Yeah.”

They walk what seems like ages. The path keeps going and going and a prod at the back of her mind’s telling her that she messed up. Lukas is losing strength, she can hear it in his breaths, even if he tries to hide it. She’s wasting time. Precious time that she could be charting out the world or at least soaking up the outside heat for the night.

She prompts her helmet and she’s at 78%. Yesterday she would have groaned. Today she’s thinking, not bad, given the circumstances.

The route opens up to a clearing.

 

Rather than empty space, the ray fabric shows tangles of webbing. She manipulates the fabric, shining the light at some of the strands. They’re cords. Tangles and tangles of cords. She hasn’t seen old tech like this in ages.

She follows them to their mass clump at the center.

“An AI?” whispers Lukas.

A voice booms throughout the chamber. Chenguang shines the ray fabric around, but the harsh light only illuminates cords. No speakers, but perhaps they’re implanted in the walls and ceiling. The voice sounds like it’s coming from everywhere.

“Eybzzkey—”

Chenguang elbows Lukas and points at his comm. “Turn on the translator.”

She triggers her own on.

The voice changes, dark and silky. “You’ve come.”

“You were expecting me?” Chenguang gestures to herself, as she walks forward, as if compelled by some force. Lukas puts a hand on her shoulder and Chenguang startles in her path forward.

“The upgrades. They’re overdue.”

“Upgrades,” says Chenguang. “No, we’re explorers. Well, cartographers, to be exact. Mapping out this land.”

“No upgrade?”

“Sorry, but, no.”

“Drats.” This sounds vaguely funny to Chenguang and she hears Lukas smothering up a laugh with a cough.

“Who—who are you?” Chenguang asks.

“I’m the Tattle, the Tneshtown Center. I handle all the deliveries and packages. Last week, we produced, inspected, and delivered 72,000 glons of kenophrane alone, even in the midst of the disruptions from the war. I manage all the trade with the outer worlds and accommodate the schedule of the workers.”

“Workers,” says Chenguang. She looks around. The room is bare except for the tangles of cords and them.

Tattle’s voice lowers. “It seems awfully quiet. Too quiet for a war.”

“Tattle, there’s no one here except us. There was a war long ago.”

“Long ago?” The voice lilts, waiting for something.

“Not anymore. The city’s been abandoned.”

It’s silent. Only a light tapping sound at the center of the wire clump gives any indication of processing.

Tattle’s voice arises again. “Ah, well, that explains it.”

Is it Chenguang’s imagination, or does it sound like its voice fell?

“I only awake when there’s activity and a need. It’s to save on energy. I must have been idle for a long, long time.”

Lukas whispers in Chenguang’s ear. “I’m going to scan the wires.”

Chenguang speaks up, keeping one eye on Lukas who’s running his fingers about half a foot above a wire to her left. “Listen, Tattle, we’ll report your existence to our contractors, and they might be able to get you out of here. Or otherwise reprogram you for another use.” More like resell you to a less developed planet. “There’s nothing left for you here.”

“No. I must stay here. I know this place will repopulate again. It has so much to offer. The jungle, the soil, and the resources. All the kenophrane.”

“Kenophrane was added to the RSL—”

“Restricted Substances List,” pipes up Lukas.

“—for years now.”

Tattle’s voice rises. “I’ll have to reorganize some of my programs, prioritize probing new resources—”

“Tattle, hey, Tattle. Listen. Before you do all that. There’s something we need to ask you. There’s a strange pull that I’ve been feeling. Messing with my movements. Part of it has led me here.”

“A pull?”

“Well, there’s a kind of double panel structure up on the roof a few buildings down and when I try to pass through it, it’s blocked. But, somehow, it led us to a dark space with a palm-sized slat of light made up of individual cubes.”

“Did you touch it?”

“Yes and—”

“It exploded.” Tattle’s voice speaks definitively.

Lukas locks eyes with Chenguang and nods.

“Yes, Tattle, we reached out to it and it exploded.”

“Landmines.”

Chenguang was thumbing her pendant absently, but stops.

“What?”

“Planted by workers bought off by the Kthal. I got rid of most of them. Scoured the buildings inch to inch, but some of them are deep in the sub-layer, luring people in.”

“I don’t understand. They’re mines?”

“Yes, weaponized organics. I know there are still quite a few around. I tried my best. I really tried my best. I—”

“Hey, Tattle, I’m sure you did. We’ll need to get rid of them. They can’t be here.”

“I wish I could help you. But, when the organics were dead, they were easy to discard. You just needed to wrap them in some mellalophane. Now, they’re awake and their properties must be all different.”

Lukas stops what he’s doing, his hand midair and speaks up. “Awake? Organics. You mean, they’re alive? These landmines are alive?”

“If enough time has elapsed as you say, then, yes, they’re alive.”

Lukas and Chenguang exchange a glance. Even in the diminishing light of ray fabric, she can read his expression. Anxiety at the crinkles of his eyes, his mouth upturned.

Triple crap.

“Are they conscious?”

“Conscious?”

“Are they intelligent creatures?”

“I don’t know. I only knew them when they were dead. They are easy to find and harvest. An easy tool for the Kthal. But, I know the species has a long dormancy. Not dormancy, death really, as they have no vital signs. Vital signs of their own kind, that is. They experience a growth process thereafter. They start out simply a physical entity with no life to them, but the life sprouts later. The detonation still works while they are without life. It’s called their morterm period. The explosives are the best then, clean and with wide range. My directory tells me that when they are awake, their explosives are less predictable and less effective. Perhaps a small burst.”

“Seems counterproductive to life. To be able to explode like that.”

“It’s a protective strategy, you know. To protect the nest. In case someone comes, they’ll detonate, but each detonation is unique and doesn’t affect other individual cubes. Their death period allows conservation. Only when resources are good and predators few do they come alive. Altogether they form one big colony. They are harvested in layers and planted as mines.”

“Do they communicate?”

“Not when they’re dead.”

“When they’re alive. What do they look like?”

“Light. They light up, an indication of life. Isn’t that like many other organisms?”

“Not all,” Chenguang says, looking at Lukas’ Eazslaps on his knees. Their light is fading.

“We gotta go,” says Lukas. He motions at the ray fabric. Chenguang was so focused she didn’t notice how quickly the light had dimmed there, too.

“Just, tell me if these landmines, if they’re intelligent. If they communicate. If they do, then this isn’t an abandoned area. It’ll be rezoned and re-designated.”

“I wish I could tell you. I haven’t come across one. Maybe I will soon, though, since I’m awake now. Come back and visit me, okay? It’s too quiet in here. And if you don’t, I’ll sleep again, and who knows when I’ll awake—”

Tattle is still talking as they rush through the tunnel, the light fading quick. They need to rush back and retrieve their tents and packs before it’s pitch black.

Chenguang’s mind races as fast as her legs. They cannot, in good faith, finish their job as cartographers if there are living beings on this planet.

As she sprints down the tunnel, she runs through her sensations from before. The pulling, the urge to get closer. Perhaps pheromones or some other release of the organics.

She’s thinking of the sensations when she trips.

No, not again.

 

Lukas is there with her. Snagged in the sub-layer. They approach the light that pulses at them. The fragment of the slab that is the landmine.

“As long as we don’t touch it, we’re okay, I think. Just don’t go near it,” says Lukas. But, he’s disobeying his own advice, drawing closer and closer. So does Chenguang. Her pendant around her neck flies up a bit, wavers, and falls and flies up. In tune to the pulsing.

She can’t help herself, she approaches. Closer. She feels a swarm of feelings in her body. She is warm-blooded, yes, she is warm-blooded, but her toes feel like ice, her chest like fire, her eyes like a subtle warmth, her hands the gentle coolness of a spring day in her homeworld. She wiggles her fingers, her toes—they feel like different worlds, disconnected.

A thought dawns on her.

She breaks through the visceral impact of the feeling and turns to Lukas, who is spellbound, probably feeling all the same sensations.

“You think, they’re communicating with us?”

“The light pulses? They’re not changing—just rhythmic on and off.”

“No, the temperatures. You feel that?”

He draws up next to her. His misty breath of icy coolness tells her his response.

“I’m hot, cold, warm, everything, in all different places.”

Chenguang closes her eyes, focuses on the different feelings permeating in her body.

She imagines stalls, different stalls all over. They expand all over the planet. Stalls of different temperatures and the miniscule light cubes that bob along from one stall to the next. She sees mini-ecosystems in each stall. Some filled with other organic life, cohabiting, symbiotic forms of activity.

She opens her eyes. She’s still in this sub-layer space. She doesn’t touch but pulls her hand close to the cubes in front of her, emanating light. Each cube shoots out a different temperature, acutely different. Palpable.

“Lukas, close your eyes and focus on your body, on all the different temperatures.”

Chenguang shivers, the chill in her spine deep, as she closes her warm eyes again.

She sees the image again, different stalls, life, organisms that look like trees, foliage and moving beads that slither on the ground. Tiny wispy helicopters floating in the air. In each stall are these cubes, like the ones before her in this sub-layer, some clumped together like clusters, emanating light and a particular heat signature.

She opens her eyes only to see Lukas open his, his pupils contract in the growing light of the landmine. He strokes his beard with a hand, as he drops his jaw. “I can’t believe it. They’re communicating with us. By heat—and cold.”

“Do you think they’re sending us some image of the past? Of this planet?”

“No, no. The files never showed the planet looking anything like what I just saw. Stalls. Cubicles you might call them.”

“Yes, with different flora and maybe fauna, if you could call them that. Some organisms, anyway.”

Chenguang feels an excruciating heat in her nose. Is it one of assent? In her cold gut she feels something like a ‘yes,’ like something agreeing with her. The feeling grows.

“Not the past,” she whispers. “The future.”

Lukas stares at her, with his strangely contracted pupils. “Yes, yes, you’re right. It’s their vision of their future.”

“They’re trying to tell us they have plans for this place. I think. Maybe.”

“You might be right.”

The impression of her body being isolated into various cells and splashed with varying amounts of heat and lack thereof starts to dissipate. The light of that bar of connected small cubes grows dimmer and once out of that trance of multi-thermal arrest, Chenguang realizes that their fabric ray light has died out completely. Without moving, they’re pulled away from that sub-layer space and return to their dark world in that abandoned building.

No, not abandoned, simply derelict.

They run, leap out of the underground tunnel, up into the basement, feeling their way through. Their leaps, vaults, and tumbles are more cautioned in the dead of the dark and they make gradual progress towards the roof.

They are lucky the moon is out, not trapped behind clouds like the other night. The return of light graces them with their characteristic fearlessness to pick up speed as they spring and leap back to their tents.

 

Usually bound by a fierce love for personal space, tonight Chenguang invites Lukas into her own tent. He refuses, staying in his tent until she’s sick of hearing his teeth chatter through the comms and utters, “If you die of cold, I will string you up with the wires of the AI. And you will spend eternity with chatty Tattle.”

“Who cares? I’ll be dead,” he says. But, his footsteps say otherwise and she hears the sound of the breach of the seal, as he fusses with the tent opening.

At night, they lay side by side, neither of them cold, not until, at least, the collected energy powering the thermal blanket drains and the chill seeps in. By then, it is near enough to dawn anyway. They’ll survive yet another night. She grabs his hand, not out of romance, but a sense of camaraderie, or a feeling of being alive, or of feeling warm. She doesn’t really know.

He squeezes the hand back. Props up on an elbow and looks her in the eye, heat emanating from his skin. “Last partner died of thirst. Accident, microhydro-gens short-circuited after a bad tumble. That sippee pack was to remind me of the dangers of these worlds.”

She nods. Not sure what to say. Sorry doesn’t really cut it. This is their life, stark and cold.

“Light on our feet, but we all carry our burdens,” she says, holding up the picture of her sister. “I do it for her.”

That seems to satisfy him. He lays back down, closing his eyes.

She can feel the coolness of the pendant on her chest through her transpandex and imagines her sister’s smiling face. There would be no energy harvest here. This place would be rezoned.

That means no cred deposit for the mapping. No moving out of the hive for her sister and the rest of her holed-up hermits. But, her sister is a softie. She would like the story, one of a species discovered.

With her free hand, Chenguang paws at her pendant, feeling its coolness in her fingertips.

One thing strikes her. She reviews those sensations from the sub-layer. In her mind, when she felt the discrete areas of different levels of hot and cold take over her body, when she could imagine the entity, that strip of connected cubes pulsing at her, making her envision the temporally-distant space, she noticed something.

That imagined future, that vision. It wasn’t simply stalls of different levels of heat. There was something else there. She couldn’t pinpoint it at the time because it had been too long, it became too foreign. But, she knows it now, lying in the tent in the escaping heat, the chill breaking all logical resolve and allowing her mind to wander.

It wasn’t just temperature, there was a distinct feeling of heaviness. Of a heaviness in the air that could only be moisture. Humidity.

The mines, those beings—they didn’t simply envision a future with various temperatures. They envisioned one with various climates. With dew, fog, steam.

It was a feeling that had pervaded her nose, tickled her esophagus as it went down with the air, as her body went through the shock of manifold degrees.

Water.

And she felt, deep in her heart, that it would be real. In her cold-induced haze of half-sleep, clutching onto a warm, rough hand, she knew this would be a place that exists. And not far off, but in the near future. The feeling she only now could disentangle, she realizes, is a process that had catalyzed and was coming to life. A part of the communication, a pit feeling, that she could not fully decipher until now.

And not only would this vision become real, but it would become a place that her holed-up people could trade with for the ever-scarce water. How the mine beings will make this water-filled ecosystem, she does not know, but there is much she does not know about the terraforming abilities of these creatures. Only that they can explode and creep into atmospheric sub-layers.

But, she feels that if she closes her eyes and focuses on the heat in her body, and drifts off mentally so reason no longer prevails, she can imagine herself and her sister, in a time she cannot place, sharing a warm thirst-quenching drink of liquid—tea, she realizes, a warm, dewy mug of tea with steam that rises and rises into the atmosphere—as she licks her lips and falls asleep.

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Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was the second and final part of Vault, by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, narrated by Rebecca Wei Hsieh.

Now, I shared some of our author’s thoughts with you last week– the ones that wouldn’t be too spoilery. So I thought I’d share the rest this week.

She says:

I was inspired by several different strands of thoughts when I was conceptualizing this story… including the fluid impressive feats of parkour, what a desiccated, arid planet would look like (and how preciously lush our Earth is in comparison), archeology, what characteristics alien life might take on, lonely AIs and sibling bonds shared over hot liquids (whether soup, tea or ramen). All these different strands of thought came together as “Vault,” and I’m pleased that Escape Pod is giving the story new narrative life with a fresh voice.

And about this story, I say:

Gosh, this was a cool world! I was quickly sucked into this tale of two people parkouring their way through an alien landscape. I really like super-competent protagonists, and this was neat to see the two of them know exactly how to go bounding across a foreign world, and also know how to make the most of the sun in order to survive the cold nights. I also thought the little blue cubes that communicate with heat and cold were way cool, and a lovely, intriguing turn in the story.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires always does a lovely job creating intriguing, sensawunda worlds. I had the pleasure of narrating her story “Erasure” for Toasted Cake several years back, so if you haven’t heard that, check that out if you’d like to hear one of her evocative little flash stories.

 

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

 

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that dream of restoring the water.

 

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Haruki Murakami, who said: Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life–and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.

Thanks for listening! And have fun.