Posts Tagged ‘restaurant’

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Escape Pod 890: The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack

This story was previously published in Uncharted Magazine in May 2022

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The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack

by Francis Bass

Gab gripped her right wrist with her left hand at the small of her back. “Are we ready to order?” she asked.

The couple set their menus down on the brushed steel tabletop. It wobbled slightly. The man asked, “What’s on the cheese board?”

“The SEASONAL CHEESEBOARD is a selection of the best the Delaware Valley has to offer in Vegan cheeses. This month it contains a fermented cashew mozzarella, Real Lacto pepperjack from Pennlab, and a soft Pennsylvania Dutch Limburger made from coconut cream. The board also comes with stone seed crackers, torn sourdough, and raw treebark.”

“Oh treebark,” the woman said, “we had that at George’s retirement, remember?”

“Let’s get one of those,” the man said.

“What type is it?” The woman asked. “The bark.”

“We source our treebark from Adlaw Forests,” Gab said. “It comes from Adlaw pine, a geneered variant of Virginia pine. We use it raw on our SEASONAL CHEESEBOARD and SALAD 1, and pulverized in our PINE BREAD.”

A long silence. The woman squinted at her menu. Gab gripped her wrist tighter. She couldn’t leave, they had to dismiss her.

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Escape Pod 889: The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant

“The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant” originally appeared in Lightspeed in December 2017, and in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018.

Warning for some gruesome descriptions and maybe some cannibalism-adjacent behavior.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:22 — 54.5MB)

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The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant

by Rachael K. Jones

Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroded away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip.

So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.

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Black Future Month

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Escape Pod 805: Open 27 Hours

Open 27 Hours originally appeared in Issue 10 of Speculative City.

Cursing. Grief, death, and loss hinted.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:52 — 56.2MB)

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Open 27 Hours

By L.P. Kindred

“It had pops of habanero-like spice immediately calmed by the subdued dulce of roast sweet potato. You got lemony shots of citric acid alongside amandine crunches. The dish was studded with cubes of meat I was too young to name then and I’m now too old to recall. Nobavgo casserole is the single most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.”

D’Sheadra laughs a laugh that starts in her pinky toe. Her hands flail around the leather-clad booth before slapping the dark-grained table. “What the fuck is a nagabovgoat?” she wheezes.

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Escape Pod 559: Vegetablemen in Peanut Town

Escape Pod 559: Vegetablemen in Peanut Town is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:04 — 43.4MB)

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Vegetablemen in Peanut Town

By August Marion

Otto scanned the grassy countryside for any sign of marauding vegetables. The steeple he and Darby were in wasn’t quite thirty feet tall, but it was taller than any other building in Peanut Town, so it offered an unobstructed view of the surrounding farmland. There were acres and acres of genetically engineered, perambulatory peanut plants shuffling around in scattered groups, probing the rich soil for nutrients with their roots. Everything looked perfectly safe. Peaceful even.

“Hey, genius.” Darby said acidly. “North is that a way.”

“Oh.” Otto said, as he turned around. He refocused the binoculars he was using, and then he saw them: vegetablemen. The same strain that had so annihilated Manhattan that even the rats had given up on the place. There were about three dozen of them scattered over the gently rolling hills. They lumbered toward the town slow and heavy on their long, stout, green stalks. They were still far off, but he could tell from the coloring of the peels around their thoraxes that they were the same cultivar that the king had sown on Manhattan.

Otto lowered the binoculars. He swallowed hard.

“Well?” Darby asked. “Is them the ones from Manhattan?”

“Those are they, yes.” Otto confirmed, as he tugged at his collar. He hated hot weather. It didn’t fit his wardrobe.

“We’re going to have to fight them.” Darby grinned madly.
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