Sci-Fi

Into the Breach By Malon Edwards I’m off my bunk and into my jodhpurs, knee-high leather boots and flight jacket the moment the long range air attack klaxons seep into my nightly dream about Caracara. Muscle memory and Secret Service training kick in; I’m on auto-pilot (no pun intended) and a good ways down the …

And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued …

And Then There Were (N-One), Part 2 by Sarah Pinsker Not me, my logic brain understood, even though some tiny part of me screamed something was wrong. I’d made it through the entire afternoon talking with people who were more like me than an identical twin would be, but the body was somehow more real. …

And Then There Were (N-One), Part 3 by Sarah Pinsker Back in the hallway, I dug in my bag for a pen. I’d normally have taken notes while she talked, but I’d had a feeling it would have shut her up. Instead of a pen, I came up with the dinner roll I’d taken earlier. …

And Then There Were (N-One), Part 4 by Sarah Pinsker Back in my room, I stripped my wet clothes off and replaced them with another T-shirt and boxer shorts. The whiskey didn’t do the job I’d hoped it would, so I spent the night in imaginary conversation with Mabel. The rain battering the window filled …

Real Artists by Ken Liu “You’ve done well,” Creative Director Len Palladon said, looking over Sophia’s résumé. Sophia squinted in the golden California sun that fell on her through the huge windows of the conference room. She wanted to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. She was here, really here, on the hallowed […]

The Things by Peter Watts I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance. The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. […]

Lab B-15 (Part 1) By Nick Wolven The young man was sitting outside the parking garage, and right away Jerry thought that was weird. This was the Arizona desert, middle of summer. People didn’t sit outside. They especially didn’t sit outside ugly parking garages, on strips of hot concrete, with no grass in sight. The […]

Spectrum of Acceptance By Nyla Bright When Leon Kenner left the planet of Acceptance, he asked me to go with him back to Earth. I belonged with people like me, like him. No, that isn’t where I should start. Stories should be told in chronological order to make them easy to understand. On our first […]

A Most Elegant Solution by M. Darusha Wehm I always said I wanted to be one of the first to die on Mars. I never wanted to be the last. But here I am. I can’t even tell the others apart now. I know that inside those vaguely undulating metal cocoons are the bodies of […]

Oracle By Dominica Phetteplace The two biggest applications for predictive software are killing people and selling things. Rita was quite successful at the latter. She founded a nail-polish-of-the-month club that used an online personality quiz to determine customer preferences. Bold cremes for basics, chunky glitters for the outrageous, and dark, sparkly metallics for edgy, forward-thinking geniuses …

Dr. Mbalu and the Butcher’s Daughter By Megan Chaudhuri With a raspy pop, the cell sprayer in Rebecca’s hand sputtered one last drop of fur progenitor cells. Ignoring her stiff back, she leaned over the culture vat and daubed the cells onto the pink, gel-sculpted contours of a cheetah’s back muscles. The gel rippled; Rebecca held …

Nothing to See Here By Arthur Doweyko There is a comfort in the strength of love; ’Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain, or break the heart. ~William Wordsworth I heard a squawk—kind of like the goose call that comes out of a police cruiser. Blinking red and blue lights danced …

Straight Lines Naru Sundar This time they sent someone in a suit, neutral gray silk with utterly glorious creases, monofilament thin. “I’m Xiao Quan-Fei. They said you like to call yourself Em?” Emergent Behavior in full, but I always hated the pontificating tone in the name. Fucking shipwrights. Fucking irony too, but let’s not go …

Fire Rode the Cold Wind By Aimee Ogden The brown woman came to Vrau from the sky, without a name of her own. Piarcu knew that she was nameless, even though the women of his family only whispered it when they thought no one else could hear. It was they who had cared for her …

AUTHOR: Michael Glyde NARRATOR: Joe Williams HOST: Alasdair Stuart This story has not been published previously. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… M. Glyde recently moved 1813 miles from Pittsburgh, PA to El Paso, TX, …

AUTHOR: Nancy Fulda NARRATOR: Trendane Sparks HOST: Alasdair Stuart Recollection originally appeared in CARBIDE-TIPPED PENS, an anthology edited by Eric Choi and Ben Bova, TOR Books, December 2014. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… Nancy Fulda is …

Run By C.R. Hodges The claxon blares three times: all clear. We file out of the underground shelter and up the serpentine lava tube. Our semi-annual hibernation drill, bureaucratic gibberish for run down to the emergency shelter and hide, is now monthly. I’m all for avoiding nuclear annihilation, but I wish the drills weren’t scheduled so …

The Android’s Prehistoric Menagerie By A. Merc Rustad The world explodes. Unit EX-702 comes back online when UV wavelengths activate its solar plating. Its optics are crusted with red dust; a low-powered system scan concludes that though its left arm is missing and there is excessive oxidation damage along its chassis and helmet, as well as …

Two Steps Forward By Holly Schofield I eased myself down off the running board of the ’28 Hudson sedan then laid a hand on the hood in mute sympathy for its overheated pistons. A quick buttoning-up of my topcoat and a tug on my fedora and I felt ready to approach the farmhouse. The old …

Trusted Messenger By Kevin Wabaunsee Dr. Thaddeus Begay had been expecting a dying child in the exam room, but no one had said anything about a woman half-dead from starvation. He stepped inside and muscled the door shut—like the rest of the clinic, it was made from metal reclaimed from the original dropship, and like everything …

The Zombee Project 3.0 By Allison Mulder Jensen brought the job offer to each of them in person, like no one did anymore. She poached them from the best labs and the best apiaries, all over the world. Put everything she knew on the table, in out-of-the-way cafés and fine-but-nothing-fancy hotel rooms and home kitchens …

Four of Seven By Samantha Mills In the waning light of an artificial sun, Camelia Dunlevy climbed a mountain with her sister on her back. Delilah was a hollow weight, bird-boned from reconstructive surgeries, unbreakable. The trouble wasn’t her bones, but her lungs. She panted in Camelia’s ear, unaccustomed to altitude, a small sound that …

Real Artists by Ken Liu “You’ve done well,” Creative Director Len Palladon said, looking over Sophia’s résumé. Sophia squinted in the golden California sun that fell on her through the huge windows of the conference room. She wanted to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. She was here, really here, on the hallowed …

AUTHOR: Lavie Tidhar NARRATOR: Summer Brooks HOST: Alasdair Stuart This story was originally published in The Lowest Heaven, anthology, edited by Jared Shurin and Anne C. Perry, Jurassic London, 2013. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… Lavie Tidhar’s […]

An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light By Timothy Mudie “Ladies and gentlemen, everyone you know—the entire world you know—is now dead.” Murmurs ripple through the assembled cadets. Not because they’re shocked—everyone knew what they were signing up for—but because it all happened without fanfare, a jump across light-years of space unaccompanied by any grand orchestral swell …

Blonde by Priya Sharma “When did you go bald?” Only Clarice would ask such a forthright question. “Leave her alone,” Jake drains his beer. Only he would dare contradict his sister. The clock hands have gone from late at night to early in the morning. Jake’s bar is empty of customers. The staff, who are …

An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition By Ken Liu My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are …