Genres:

Escape Pod 492: The Silent Ones

Originally appeared in the August 2014 issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Some profane language and adult situations.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:23 — 15.5MB)

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The Silent Ones

by Erica L. Satifka

The year travel opens up between alternate Earths is the first year you fall in love, with a strapping farm boy from one of the rural worlds named Paul. He takes you to a barn dance thrown by his people, where you learn to smoke a corncob pipe. His sister, a tiny girl with saucer eyes and dirty hair, steals your purse. You’re too hammered to mind.

You get drunk on apple wine and fuck Paul behind a haystack while a band of his cousins screeches on their fiddles and moans in that unintelligible alternate-world dialect of theirs. At the pale green Formica kitchen table, Paul gives you a stick-and-poke tattoo of his initials inside a heart.

But when your six days are up, it’s back through the travel gate with you, and no more Paul. You mope for weeks, watching but not performing the calisthenics exercises on television, alternating handfuls of candy and amphetamines. Finally, your two best girl friends drag you from your home – “Don’t be such a drag!” – and bring you to the club.

And that’s when you see your first silent one. With the robes and everything. Shit. He’s sipping a martini, looking totally out of place, bopping his head to a spastic electroclash beat. Club soda rises up your nose, coming close to spilling out.

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Escape Pod 491: Heaven’s Touch

The story was originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and was named to the Locus 2012 Recommended Reading List.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:47 — 39.8MB)

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Heaven’s Touch

by Jason Sanford

As the Tonatiuh arcs through the sparkling coma of Heaven’s Touch, Parda’s holographic proxy wraps herself around my spacesuit and kisses my visor. “Please let Sister Dusty live,” the proxy prays in fervent devotion, defying the actions of the real Parda, who at this moment is piloting our ship on a collision course with the comet.

But I’m too busy for either Parda or her proxy. After topping off my suit’s air, I crank open the exterior airlock door until whiteness swirls before me, my fatigue-addled mind turning the ice and dust to ghosts. Countless comet ghosts. Icy haunts begging me to embrace my destiny.

“If you jump now, you’re dead,” the proxy whispers seductively in my ear. “All the prayer in the universe won’t save you. Wait until we’re closer to the surface.”

I nod, almost forgetting this isn’t the real Parda. Instead, the autonomous AI program is a near-perfect imitation of my best friend–the proxy’s programmed intelligence infesting my spacesuit, my visor’s holographic projectors creating the illusion of her body. The proxy appears to wear a white dress as she stands barefoot before the open airlock door, as if Parda and I were once again in Florida running along white-sand beaches.

To my eyes, this is Parda.

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Escape Pod 490: Flowers for Algernon

The story has been previously published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Copyright 1959 by Mercury Press.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:40:13 — 68.9MB)

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Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story, but it’s widely available online by searching.]

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Escape Pod 489: Uncanny

The story has been previously published in Asimov’s October/November 2014.

Deals with adult sexuality.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:20 — 9.9MB)

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Uncanny

by James Patrick Kelly

A month after I broke up with Jonathan, or Mr. Wrong, as my mother liked to call him, she announced that she’d bought me a machine to love. She found it on eBay, paid the Buy It Now price and had it shipped to me the next day. I’m not sure where she got the idea that I needed a machine or how she picked it out or what she thought it would do for me. My mother never asked advice or permission. I dreaded finding the heavy, flat box that UPS left propped against my front door.

I called her. “It’s here. So what does it do?”

“Whatever you want.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“You always say that, but it’s never true. We all want something.” I hated it when she was being patient with me. “Just give it a chance, honey. They’re more complicated than men,” she said, “but cleaner.”

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Escape Pod 488: In Another Life

The story has been previously published in Daily Science Fiction.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:20 — 21.6MB)

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In Another Life

by Kelly Sandoval

Waking after a night spent slipping, I reach for Louisa automatically, rolling into the empty space where she belongs. I lick the memory of her from my lips, languid with sex. The alarm shrieks from my bedside table but I’ve gotten good at ignoring it.

We went skating. Louisa wore a purple sweater and, giggling and unsteady, clung to my arm. We kissed on the ice and she pressed herself against me, her frozen fingers sneaking under my coat to stroke my back. It’s her laughter I cling to. These days, I only hear her low, honeyed laugh when I’m slipping. I miss the warmth of it.

But it fades. Even the taste of her fades.

I tell myself it’s all right. That it’s necessary. I’ve got an appointment with my therapist at noon. If I’m still clinging to the night’s slip, he’ll know I haven’t been taking my medication.

No help for it. I drag myself out of bed and hit the alarm. My head pounds and the world blurs along the edges. I’ve slipped for three nights straight and ice skating with Louisa is nothing like sleeping. If I don’t take a day off soon, it’ll start to get dangerous.

My therapist would say it’s already dangerous. But he doesn’t understand what I’ve lost.

I’ve got four houses to show before my appointment, and a lot of coffee to drink to be ready for them. He’ll make a thing of it, if I’m late. He always does.

The hours dribble past, hazy and distant. It’s like I left a shard of myself in my alter and can’t quite get back in step with my timeline. When the charming young couple at house two asks me about financing I try to answer, only to be distracted by the ghost of a red-headed boy rushing past in pursuit of a large gray bunny. The woman selling the house wears her red curls pulled back in a tight bun. She’s childless, though abandoned rabbit hutches sit moldering in the back yard, lowering her property values.

Does she slip, stealing moments with this laughing, clumsy boy?

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Escape Pod 487: New Folks’ Home

This story was originally published in Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction, July 1963.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:22 — 44.3MB)

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New Folks’ Home

by Clifford D. Simak

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story, but it’s widely available online by searching.]

Genres:

Escape Pod 486: Blight

Escape Pod 486: Blight is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:18 — 7.9MB)

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Blight

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

There are three thousand people in the world, and we are all the same.

I don’t mean equal, for The Book makes clear we are not in any way equal. Some of us are blessed, others unblessed, as some live in the temple and others live on the charred black surface. And I do not mean we are similar, like sheep – the term once used, I believe, for a world of people with different genetic coding but the same ideas. No, we are not “sheep.” We are the same, from our hair to our DNA.

The Book tells us that once there was The First, long ago, before the war. It tells us that She was not strong but lucky. Hospitalized for a broken leg before the bombs were released, all at once, across the world, or so The Book proclaims. The hospital was underground, hidden from the fallout’s worst. Most of the building caved in with the force of incessant blasts, everything destroyed but one wing: Hers. Our temple.

Inside the room with Her, Her sister Marna had been visiting. Sister Marna, a scientist skilled in genetic replication, was older than The First, who had seen only twenty years. Sister Marna nursed The First back to health in that room, mended Her wounded bones. They ate Jello from sealed plastic containers and cans of beans and the petals of roses left by loved ones they learned to forget. They did not know they were the last.

But they knew they should not leave the hospital wing, for the one time Sister Marna pushed open the door to the surface, she found the way blocked by rubble, saw a hazy light falling from the cracked concrete above. She and The First remained inside until the food ran out.

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Film Review: “Cinderella”

This review contains spoilers for the original fairy tale version of Cinderella, as well as the 1950 Disney animated version. It also contains minor spoilers for the short film Frozen Fever.

As both Honest Trailers and CinemaSins have recently shown, there are some problems with Disney’s retelling of the Cinderella story. But it’s such a huge part of the Disney empire that we were bound to get a new one at some point.

Welp, we certainly did.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 485: Supply Limited, Act Now

The story was recently released in the author’s short story collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, and was also released online at SFSignal.

Some explicit language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:33 — 32.1MB)

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Supply Limited, Act Now

by Helen Marshall

Because Larry said it would never work, we knew we had to try.

Because Larry said he didn’t want any part of it, we knew we had to try it out on him first.

That was the way it was with Larry. That’s how it had always been between us. The four of us knew it. No one questioned it. We could all see the slightly sick look come over Larry’s face as he realized. We could see him turning pale. Pushing at his taped-up glasses and starting to scramble.

He tried to say something.

Marvin grabbed the shrink ray.

Marvin pressed the button.

And the world popped and crackled around us.

That’s how it started.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been like that if Larry had never said anything. But when Larry had followed the instructions last time it had been a disaster.

“FRIENDS,” the ad had said. “HERE’S HOW TO GET at almost NO COST YOUR NEW, Real, Live MINIATURE DOG!”

“Supply Limited,” the ad said. “ACT NOW!!”

“Please let me come home with you,” the miniature dog begged in a giant speech bubble.

The dog was black, with long, floppy ears, cartoonishly wide eyes and a white-speckled snout. Larry, on the other hand, was skinny as a beanpole with a face full of acne. His elbows and knees were huge and knobbly. They stuck out like the knots in the ropes we had to climb for gym class. And if there was any boy who ever was in need of a dog it was him.

And so Larry sent in his coupons and waited at the door for the mailman every day.

He waited the way he had every day for the past year; while those other times it had been with terror, this time it was with stupid, fearless joy.

You see, the thing you need to know about Larry is that his brother Joe had joined the Air Force last September.

“GEE!! I WISH I WERE A MAN!” said the ad.

“Come to the UNITED STATES AIR FORCE Recruiting Station,” it said.

We all wished we could be men—of course we did!—but only Larry’s brother Joe was old enough. So he’d signed up just like it said to. They’d sent him to Honolulu for a while and then after that he had been moved to Seoul where he wrote back letters every once in a while about how hot it was and how many of the shovelheads he had killed and how much he missed his kid brother.

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Genres:

Escape Pod 484: That Tear Problem

This story was originally published in Kasma SF in June 2014.

Some adult language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:36 — 16.3MB)

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That Tear Problem

by Natalia Theodoridou

“Now flex your arm,” the controller said. Her voice sounded dry and mechanical through the speakers.

“The real one or the other one?” I asked and immediately received a neuro-ping: You are real.

“Both your arms are real, soldier,” she said.

I always thought of her as a woman, but really it was just a voice. There was no way to tell gender.

Focus.

“Right. Which one do you want me to flex?”

“The left one.”

I flexed my left arm. It’s one of the limbs they rebuilt after the accident. The Neuropage pinged me again, just in case: You are real. All this is real. I wondered if they figured out I had found the glitch. Was that what prompted this ping? But it couldn’t be; the pager was supposed to be entirely incorporated into the nervous system. No outside access available.

Unless that was a lie, too.

“Now the other one,” the voice said.

“How much longer is this going to take?” I asked, flexing my right arm. I could feel my legs getting fidgety. They always did that when I was strapped down for long chunks of time. Ever since the accident. Fidget fidget fidget. Even while I slept, the legs fidgeted. I would much rather sleep floating around, but that set off the security alarm. I had found that out the hard way, on my second day at the space station.

“The muscle-tone examination is complete,” the controller said. “Now on to the neural routine.”

“The neural routine. Of course.”

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