Escape Pod 755: Consolidation

Consolidation By Langley Hyde Lot 1796. Adult. Human. Female bodied. Standard limbs/digits. Immune/health function: class 7, can accommodate high-risk activity. Personality type: reactive/adaptive, ideal for customer service/high-level social interaction. Age: 0. Accident history: 0. Memory: N/A. Sold. Wake. Woken. Up. Upload. Connecting… connecting… Social/verbal package received. Movement package, received. Cognitive protocol, received. Download updates? Updating… Installation complete. I am.

Escape Pod 754: Where They Keep Their Promises

Where They Keep Their Promises By B. Pladek I imagine you eating the chocolate bar. It will arrive tomorrow, I hope, though the war has disrupted the medrunners’ routes between Chicago and London. It will arrive, though. I promise. I imagine you unwrapping it, double-checking the forged postmark from your old orphanage, the forged note that says only happy birthday, since I never learned your real name. You’ll guess it’s chocolate, though it’s so expensive you’ve never tasted it before. Only copywrit people can afford chocolate. The thought gives me pause. You believe I’m copywrit now, and I’m the only person who has ever bought you sweets. If you guess the bar is from me, you might throw it away. Promise me, Fi. Promise me you’ll eat it. I look up, away from the cartel’s sleek chemlab, and out over the Chicago skyline, hazy with sunset. How dare you, you might reply if you were here. How dare you make me promise you anything.

Escape Pod 753: Chasing the Start (Part 2)

Chasing the Start (Part 2) by Evan Marcroft ͼ-Sa, this is a bad fucking idea-ͽ Sa would die to admit it, but she must agree. This was perhaps a bit much for squashing a spider. The air boils with radiation. The sky is all storm, great scarified burls of fulgurant cloud lumped into screaming faces. Mushroom clouds bloom all along the horizon where cylinders of pure, fabbed uranium have been dropped from outside the planetoid, blasting starry craters in its shallow atmosphere, to say nothing of its crust. Warships flounder in the firmament beyond, gnawed upon by flung gobbets of surface matter gone cancerous. Sa takes it all in from the bellied-up keel of some leviathan war vessel bombarded into shapelessness, now a convenient straightaway. She has chosen her weapon a little too well. ͼ-It’s okay to pull the cord. Everyone does it once-ͽ

Escape Pod 752: Chasing the Start (Part 1)

Chasing the Start (Part 1) by Evan Marcroft There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flight for a small forever. You read the number that burns on her armor and you that this is not the end. She is proof that you are not finished yet, a promise chiseled into the diamond of history. She will always be here, always this strand. You want to say something to her, but she is already gone. The date is June 18th, 1815. The place is Waterlô. And Sa Segokgo is racing against time. The treads of her boots scoop up huge tracts of bloody, Belgian soil and thresh it into aerosol. Archaic bullets dart about her like swarming mosquitoes, pinging noisily off her poly-diadmant suit, its staalglas facepiece. An experienced strandrunner, she is not daunted by such minor impacts. Over ridges and crat...

Escape Pod 751: More Than Simple Steel

More Than Simple Steel By Aimee Ogden Micah misses the adults most when he wakes up each morning. Part of him is still waiting for the buzz of an alarm clock and the smell of toaster waffles to coax him up from sleep. But it's been four years, and there is no mother to nudge him awake. He sits up on his mattress and scratches crust from his eyes. The bedsheets smell like sweat and grass; is it laundry day today? He's the closest thing to an adult under the roof of Grand Avenue Elementary, and if he says it's laundry day, then it will be. Clothes on, shoes on. Everyone has to wear shoes all the time. That's the rule, ever since Marco got tetanus last year and they all thought he was going to die. It was the worst sickness they'd seen since the flops cleared out all the adults. Micah doesn't know what he'll do when something worse sweeps through. The door of the teachers' lounge--he can't stop thinking of it as the teachers' lounge, even though there are no teachers here and not much ...

Escape Pod 750: The Anatomy of Miracles

The Anatomy of Miracles by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko For half a song every evening, the sunsets reminded the miracle worker of home. The hills were reddish-brown in daylight, but when the two suns, one after the other, slipped below the horizon, they came alive with purple highlights. He could almost pretend the hills were blue, instead, that the sea in the distance was true water and not liquid methane. On those occasions, he leaned back on his rear limb-pairs and, from a great distance, heard the timekeepers singing time. He didn’t know what the window was made of. He couldn’t have said there was a window there at all, but for the fact he didn’t suffocate. He understood why his masters always sent him to inhospitable planets. His work was imprecise. It was safer that way. But this was the first planet that had been beautiful, the first that had brought the old songs ringing back. It was different. He felt it in his bones. By first dawn, the hills were red again, and he was m...

Escape Pod 749: Key Component

Key Component By T. R. Siebert The first thing you need to understand is that you don’t have a body. You are a body. They pulled you from your mother, kicking and screaming, and you haven’t found silence since. You are too much. Too much to handle, too much to hide. They tell you as much, with words and in a myriad of other ways. Too large to overlook, too obscene to see. You fold yourself into yourself and cannot escape the confines of it. The ship wasn’t built for you like you were built for it. In most hallways you have duck to not hit your head on the ceiling. You avoid chairs with arm rests because you know you won’t fit. You haven’t slept comfortably in a bed since you were ten years old. Back then, you had nightmares in which you never stopped growing until you pushed against the hull of the ship, bursting through it into the never-ending void of space. You move, and the world breaks around you.

Escape Pod 748: Flash Fiction Contest Winners 2020

Flash Fiction Contest Winners 2020 Our stories this week are the winners of the contest, as chosen by you: our listeners and readers. All four stories are Escape Pod originals. Out of 224 stories, the top four stories were: “Butterfly” by Drew Czernik, narrated by Hollis Monroe “In Roaring She Shall Rise” by Rajiv Moté, narrated by Katherine Inskip “Death Poems of the Folded Ones” by Carol Scheina, narrated by S. Kay Nash “The Day the Sun Went Out” by Hannah Whiteoak, narrated by Tina Connolly Now, get ready to explore new worlds of space, time, and relationships, because it’s storytime.

Escape Pod 747: Flash from the Vault

Flash from the Vault Host commentary by S. B. Divya Hi there and welcome to the third and final term of Escape Pod's Summer School, where we post some of our favorite flash fiction from the vault with a new perspective. I’m Divya, co-editor of the pod, and your instructor for this class. This episode also concludes our Summer Flashback series. We'll be back next week with the best in original and reprint science fiction. Today, I bring you three flash episodes from long, long ago. First up is "Standards," by Richard K. Lyon, then we have "Paradox," by Scott Janssens, and finally, "Stuck In An Elevator With Mandy Patinkin," by Kitty Myers.

Escape Pod 746: The ’76 Goldwater Dime (Summer Flashback)

The ’76 Goldwater Dime by John Medaille I started in 1962, that’s when I became a numismatist. You know what that is? It’s the study of... well, it’s not the study of anything. It’s coin collecting, is what it is. I was ten in 1962, and Christmas I got my first coin album. I didn’t actually get it. My father gave it to my brother. It was, you know, you’ve seen them, a sturdy cardboard folder with slots punched out that you put the coins in. Behind the slots, the empties, it had a backing of blue felt, I remember that. My dad gave it to my brother, I guess maybe thinking it would straighten him out. But coins, you know, they don’t really have that power. He wasn’t interested. He gave it to me. Me, I was interested. The album was for Lincoln pennies, 1909 to 1959. I had five cents in the world then and each of the five fit in the slot. It only took me five more days to get the other forty-five. I would do anything for those pennies and slot it in its slot. Anything, anything....