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Escape Pod 1024: Some Things I Should Probably Have Mentioned Earlier (LIVE) (Flashback)
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- [00:03]
Laura Perlman
Escape pod episode 1024 some things I Should probably have Mentioned Earlier By Laura Perlman Flashback Friday.
- [00:31]
Alastair
Hello folks. Welcome to Escape Pod. I'm Alastair, your host and this week's story is the last of our year long tour of some of the big numbers from EscapePod's 20 year to date voyage. This last one comes to us from Laura Pillman. Laura's short fiction has appeared in Nature Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online and a handful of other places. Her lolcat captions have appeared in McSweeney's. She has a tragically neglected blog called Unlikely Explanations, can be found on Bluesky Aurasbad Ideas, and is the editor of our fifth show, Cat's Cast. This story was recorded live at Worldcon in 2018, so you should maybe know up front. The audience response audio does sound a little bit crunchy, but don't worry about it, because here's Laura and here are some things we all need to know because it's story time.
- [01:28]
Laura Perlman
Some things I probably should have mentioned earlier. By Laura Perlman Dear Kevin, I'm sorry I waited so long to tell you this, but I really hate your vacation cabin. Everything about it creeps me out. The sound of crickets at night makes my skin crawl. They sound like impending doom, like a critical piece of equipment being worn down by friction, or a thousand tiny voices hoarse from screaming, reduced to a raspy warning chant in some ancient language. The crickets aren't the only problem. The smell of so much wood in one place makes my eyes burn. And is it really necessary to throw pinecones into the fireplace? Are the burnt wood fumes not overpowering enough? I used to lie awake at night fantasizing about finding whoever came up with that idea, grinding them up, feeding them to the crickets, and then gathering up the crickets, stuffing them into the fireplace, burning the cabin down and watching from a safe distance upwind. Of course. Do crickets even eat meat? You probably know you grew up with all this, that's why you're comfortable with it. I'm not. To me, it's alien and disturbing. I wish I'd told you this the first time you took me there, right after we started dating. But your friends were having such a good time. I wanted to be the fun girlfriend who liked what everyone else liked. It must seem strange that I'm bringing this up now when neither of us will ever go back there. I mention it because saying I loved your cabin set off the chain of events that led us to where we are today. It wasn't the first lie I told you, of course. But the others were just my cover story. I wish I'd been honest with you then. I wish I'd had the courage to tell you who and what I am. I wish I'd shown you images of the different shapes I'd taken before committing myself to human form. I wish I'd been able to make you feel the joy and freedom that comes with flowing from one shape to another. And the profound sense of loss I felt when I gave that up. I wish I'd been able to share what life was like on the ship. It was a total immersive experience. We spoke human languages, ate human food, and molded ourselves into closer and closer approximations of human shapes. With human form instructors as our guides. We read your literature, tapped into your networks and watched your videos. We received our cover stories and fashioned our human personalities. One of the hardest things to master was food preferences. They're just so arbitrary. Remember the time your sister came over for dinner and we made chocolate fondue for dessert? We started with apple slices, orange sections and strawberries. Then Janice wanted to try dipping something salty, so I brought out the saltiest fruit. We had a jar of olives. Oops. I seem to mess up a lot during meals with your family. I'm sorry I laughed at your uncle at that first Thanksgiving dinner. I know you wanted me to ignore him, but information gathering is my job. I just couldn't keep a straight face. If he only knew. My people are far more illegal and far more alien than anyone he was ranting about. And believe me, we're not here to steal anyone's jobs. I won't go so far as to say that I should have told you our plan. Not our complete plan, but the research phase is scheduled to continue for another 73 years. We're nothing if not methodical. And I could have just said we were here to learn more about you. I should have told you at least that much when I found out I was pregnant. I honestly hadn't believed that was possible. And then I remembered something I'd read during the journey to this planet. The ship was stocked with most of your classic literature, including a story about a husband and wife who exchanged gifts. He sold his watch to buy her a hair accessory. She sold her hair to buy him a watch accessory. It was supposed to convey irony, I think. For a long time after I read it, I thought human hair stopped growing in adulthood. Otherwise, the story lacks symmetry. The husband is permanently deprived of his watch, but the wife's hair will grow back with no Effort on her part. I thought perhaps you and I were like the characters in that story. Maybe this wasn't an interspecies pregnancy after all. I'd spent the last four and a half years deceiving my apparently human spouse into thinking I was human. Maybe you'd been doing the same. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that this was true. I began to make preparations for the traditional Stralurian pregnancy announcement ritual pared down for just the two of us. I planned a feast of guinea pigs and salamanders, the closest things I could find to our traditional delicacies. I thought we'd break the rules just this once and gorge ourselves on live meat at the same time. Just as a formality, really. I collected hair and cell samples while you slept and took them in for analysis. I repeated the test three times and the results were devastating. You were totally and undeniably human. Dr. Tran says we were able to produce that tiny zygote because my human cell mimicry was so accurate. And it was able to survive because human stem cells are almost as malleable as ours. I should have told you all this gradually throughout the course of the pregnancy. I had so many opportunities to do so. When you asked why I wouldn't even consider your sister's obstetrician, I could have told you everything and explained that Dr. Tran was the only Strillerian physician in the area. But what if you didn't believe me? I convinced myself at the time that it would be better to wait for the ultrasound. We'd watch together, and you'd see the baby stretch and contract and reshape itself. As the day of the ultrasound approached, I became more and more preoccupied with my own fears. What if. What if there was a human fetus inside me with one of those enormous human baby heads? I've seen how you people give birth. I began having nightmares about one of those things bursting out of me. I was awash in the sea of fear and regret. That's why I forgot to tell you that I'd rescheduled the appointment. I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was to see the images of our perfect little angel flowing into an oval, an almost cube and an adorably lopsided dodecahedron before returning to her resting spherical form. I'm sorry things were so tense when my relatives arrived right before my due date. They've never approved of this marriage. My parents hated the idea of a human raising their grandchild. Three of them wanted to kill you out right the others just wanted me to leave you. The only thing they agreed about was how irresponsible I'd been. Getting pregnant, getting married, even the way I'd made decisions back on the ship. To be fair, they were right about that last bit. I don't know. You pick one for me is probably the worst possible answer you can give when asked to select a gender. Eventually, they reached a compromise. They concocted an elaborate plan for me to fake my own death, leave the country, and raise our baby alone. They arranged everything. New passport, plane ticket, apartment, even a new wardrobe. And wrote a new cover story for me. I refused to go along with it. I was sure our love was strong enough to withstand this challenge. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and I was determined that ours wouldn't be one of them. I should have planned a better distraction for you when I confronted my family. Leaving you alone with my parent adject, sorry, I mean, Uncle Roger was a mistake. He's not as bad as your uncle, but he does love to talk. And he tends to forget some of your more nonsensical cultural taboos. I should have warned him not to tell his war stories. And especially not the parts about feasting on his fallen enemies. Seriously, what's wrong with that? It's not like they're going to be any less dead if we left their bodies to rot. And as I tried to explain, we maintain proper hygiene, eating only healthy people we've slain in battle, not anyone who's died from disease. Arguing with you about that was a mistake. That's valuable time I could have spent telling you about my background and what to expect with the baby. And then I went into labor and it was too late to say much of anything at all. Still, I was sure you'd come around once our baby was born. A powerful love for our offspring is something our two species have in common. I didn't expect you to freak out at the sight of a few baby teeth. Yes, they appear within minutes of birth, instead of however long it takes for your kind. And yes, they're longer and pointier and more numerous than you're accustomed to. But that's a perfectly natural phase of infant development. For the next couple weeks, she'll be flopping around, all teeth and digestive tract, eating everything in sight to support her neonatal growth spurt. She's so adorable and clever. It looks like she's developing venom sacs. Only about 15% of stralurian babies have that instinct. Her grandparents are very impressed. Goodbye, Kevin. I can see now that you'll never be the kind of parent our child deserves. I'm putting this in a letter instead of speaking to in person because I don't want to subject our baby, or, let's face it, myself, to the escalating anger and frankly, xenophobia you've displayed ever since my parents showed up. I'm sorry it's come to this. I'm sure you understand why we can't let you go. I know the basement can get a little chilly, but you shouldn't be there much longer. I hope you'll find some comfort in the fact that although you won't be around to help raise our child, you won't have failed her completely. You won't nurture her, but you will nourish her. Tonight, when her teeth have completely hardened, you'll have the honor of being her first solid meal. All well, some of my love, Lyssa.
- [13:14]
Summer Fletcher
So for the last four weeks, everyone I know has been shouting, tribe. Tribe. I can't wait to be with my people. I need time with my people. It's expensive, but I'm going to take the days off work no matter what. And for the most part, after some hiccups and false starts that has happened here at Worldcon, we're all here. Fans, pros, humans, aliens, and all four of the escape artist casts. We're here together to celebrate escape pods. Incredible nomination. But that phrase, my people, our people, keeps coming up, and its actual definition is still kind of nebulous. We work and we play together. We hope and complain together. We celebrate the cool stuff and support each other when disaster strikes. But the stories we tell in the lives, the lives that we lead are inseparable. And conventions like these are where we can speak familiar language and share our crazy hobbies and argue about the practicalities of basement keeping and this judgment free zone. We can be ourselves. We can do our thing here. At least that's how it's advertised. And whether you're wearing a Mass Effect T shirt or doing a full group cosplay of your favorite starship's crew, there's always something more there. There's some part of ourselves we're still afraid to show. The same social pressures exist here as they do out there. And we still fall back on the rules, masking ourselves and mimicking what we see around each other in order to be accepted. Either in subtle ways like Strellurian stem cells matching just enough to make a half human baby, or. Or in performative ways like putting a false horn on a real unicorn to make them see the Unicorn. A lot of us are a little awkward, and these mimics keep the social machine running smoothly. But if something's wrong, that same protective shell becomes the barrier. One party has to keep up the deception past the point of exhaustion, and the other party doesn't have a chance to fix things and create a more welcoming space, and nobody's happy. But what if we drop to the mimic? You might be an orc, but you don't have to live in Mordor. You might be a Stormtrooper, but you can escape the Empire. Maybe you'll have trouble mixing with elves and rebels too, but you won't know until you try places like this. Worldcon Podcastle Cast of Wonders Pseudopod Escape Pod this is where the unexpected combinations flourish. It's not our people distinct from your people, and it's our people including your people. The more we blend, the more we challenge each other, the more we share the vast range of our experiences, the greater our possibilities become. So if you're here today at this con, or not listening now, or years from now, and you're thinking about what you should have said, maybe it's not too late to show up as you are. Thanks, Sa.
- [16:27]
Alastair
Given the nature of the story, and given its place within our Flashback Friday voyage this year, I thought I'd do something a little different. Here are 20 reasons why I love this story. 1. Laura is one of my favorite writers and people, and this is one of her best pieces to date. 2. Subversion of form is a big part of why I love most fiction, and an especially good part of why I love this. This starts as what is called in the UK a Dear John letter where you explain to your eminent ex why you're dumping them. That element of it is as carefully tempered as the rest, and it's never played for laughs, which somehow makes it both funnier and darker. 3. Laura has this Douglas Adamsian ability to emulsify mundane, normal life with the fantastical in a way that is often very funny. That's a skill I both love and admire. 4. I am the last person on the face of the earth who has a problem with scientific implausibility. Weirdly, I don't need the science to work either, but I love purely and completely this level of science. Just enough education to perform, just enough plausibility to land the big stuff. 5. The teeth. In every sense, I'm pretty fond of horror, and again, this is one of my favourite types of it. Horror that is smiling, charming, honest, implacable, and tied so beautifully to both the science and the science fiction. After all, babies are hungry. They have to eat. 6. The ending that last moment is the sort of thing that Rods Serling or the Crypt Keeper would nod approvingly at a definitive ending, a perfectly executed tonal and genre shift, and just a slight hint of glee as the science, biology, emotion and plot all come together as a door closes and a very hungry baby wakes up. 7. This story, it turns out, sits at the perfect nexus point of every iteration of of escape artists to date. Cats Cast is our newest show, and here is a story from our oldest show celebrating its 20th anniversary with a story from the future editor of Cascast. 8. Mothership Zeta this story originally appeared in Mothership Zeta, our brief attempt to produce a magazine as well as podcasts. MZ was a great idea. The writers as well as the Mothership editorial staff, including Murr and Karen Bovenmeyer, did fantastic work with it, but sometimes these things just don't find purchase. But that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be remembered. And it has been a singular pleasure to rediscover and remember this one. 9. Stories aren't bred and this story proves it. There is no expiration date on art. It's always a chance to find something for the first time. There is always something brand new to someone. I love that. 10. Live events we've actually done live readings throughout our existence, and one of the first episodes I remember hearing as a listener was, I think, the very first one we did. I love that we're able to celebrate that here too. 11. Wilcon this story was recorded at Wilcon in San Jose in 2018, which to us in 2025 feels a lot like listening to a wax cylinder recording. I have a complex relationship with genre conventions and worldcon in particular, but this was both a very hard one and a very, very good one. This story and the people we got to spend time with are massive reasons why it was very good. As for the bad, this was a convention. Someone actually sued, and one of my abiding memories of it was relaying a bottle of water from the improbably tall, Clark Kent level, handsome husband of the show's lawyer out to her as she patiently talked down the bigoted idiot man children protesting the show. 12 this was the same show that Marguerite and I worked as part of a volunteer team as a assembled to help people walk around the venue if they didn't feel safe because of the aforementioned protesters. That was a really stressful and oddly tranquil job, but one that ended up defining a lot of my path through the field from there to here. 13. Case in point, we met a dear friend when we walked them out to a blood drive van that was being protested. And yes, you heard me right, people were protesting a blood drive van. 14. And yet somehow those were more innocent, gentle times than the shitstorm we're all currently living in or adjacent to, which is both awful and something worth remembering. And God help us all. Honoring 15 on an infinitely lighter note, we were in the room when this happened. In fact, I think you can just about make us out. So between Laura, Summer, Marguerite and I, that's Mothership, Zeta, Escape Pod, Cat's Cast, Pseudopod, Podcastle, and Cast of Wonders all represented in one room. 16. Laura's delivery Laura is one of the best writers and funniest narrators I know. She has an intuitive approach to rhythm, knows when to pause, when to push, when to let the words breathe. She's great. Great. 17. A perfect host spot. Now it will surprise no one to know my inner Rod Serling always enjoys a good host spot. And this one. This one is perfect. Syncs with the story, syncs with the moment. Stands alone as well. Perfect work. Which brings us to 18. Summer Fletcher I am sometimes uncomfortable with the fact that fact I'm viewed as the voice of Sudapod and often the voice of the company. This is because I am by no means the best host we have or have ever had. I'm good. Don't get me wrong. This isn't false modesty. But Summer is and remains incredible. Every word is perfectly put, every theme is expressed, every line, every syllable matters, and every single one makes your heart sing. Community is vital. Community is difficult. Community gets done. Because we keep trying. Summer is one of the people who taught me that. Thanks buddy. You're the fucking best. We love you. 19. You we may be running top and bottom ads now, but our primary engine is listening to this show as we speak. And it is you. We are a 20 year old impossibility, a company powered by donations who give their work away for free but pay their artists for their time. That, coupled with our weekly Always on schedule makes it very easy to forget how cool this job is sometimes. This reminded me. And finally, 20 this line from Summer's Wrap Up. The more we share the vast range of our experiences, the greater our possibilities become. So if you're here today at this con, or not listening now, or years from now, and you're thinking about what you should have said, maybe it's not too late to show up as you are. This is us as we were, as we are, as we will be. Sarah Ely launched the universe's best escape pod 20 years ago and it is our honor and our privilege to share it with you all. Thank you folks for everything. We just rolled out ads. Don't worry, no mid roll, but we are doing ads at the top and bottom of each show. We have an ad free tier on our Patreon that costs seven bucks a month and that gives you access to our feeds all the way back to the start too. So if you want to go ad free, I would go to the Patreon and start there. Even if you can't do that, we still value and welcome individual one time donations. Regardless of whether you can subscribe or not. Please understand that when you donate, however much you do, what you're giving us is stability, reliability, the chance to plan ahead, the chance to plan for the future. All these great, great things. And if you can't donate at all financially, we understand times are hard and getting harder, but perhaps we could ask you to donate a little time. If there is an episode that you've enjoyed, please link to it on your social media. If you have a blog or a podcast and you want to talk to us about our podcasts and our blog, please get in contact. We love doing that kind of thing. And finally, if there is a way that you want to donate financially that we don't currently have, please get in contact@donationsscapeartists.net we always love hearing about this stuff and while we can't guarantee we can do everything, we can guarantee that we will listen to you and if we can work out solutions, will work with you for that. Also, please stop by and say hi on social media. We're currently on bluesky@escapepod.org and we would love to see you there finally. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, T shirts, and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artist Void Merch Store. The link is in various places, including our pinned post over on bluesky. Escape Pod is part of the Escape artists Foundation and a 501c3 nonprofit and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial no derivatives 4.0 international license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like. Don't change it. Don't sell it. Theme music is by permission of Daikaiju. This is me done for the year. Thank you so very much all of you. The Escape Pod Team, the Escape Pod listeners, every author, every host, every audience member we have ever had. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to walk you through our incredible history to date. Our future starts next week with more story time. Second star on the right, straight on till morning. We'll see you then.