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From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from
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comedy gold to relationship fails.
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Escape pod episode 1036 we who Live in the Heart Part 2 by Kelly Robson.
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Escape Pod Host (Alastair)
Welcome to Escape Pod, the science fiction podcast. I'm Alastair, your host and this week's story is the second in a three parter by Kelly Robson. You can find the previous part in episode 1035, which should be just up a little bit to the left there. You got it. Kelly writes science fiction, fantasy and horror. Her short fiction collection Alias Space and Other Stories was published by Subterranean and won the 2022 Aurora Award. Her time travel adventure Gods, Monsters and the Lucky peach won the 2019 Aurora and was a finalist for the Hugo Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus. Her most recent book, the fantasy stoner comedy High Times in the Low Parliament, was a finalist for the nebula. In 2018, her story A Human Stain won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and her story we who Live in the heart, this one was a finalist for the 2018 Theodore Sturgeon. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New writer and in 2016, her novella Waters of Versailles won the Pre Aurora Award and was a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy. Her story the Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill was a finalist for the 2015 Theodore Sturgeon and her story Two Year man was a finalist for the 2015 Sunburst. Kelly grew up in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies and as a teenager was crowned Princess of the Hinton bighorn rodeo. From 2008 to 2012 she wrote the Wine and Spirits column for Chatelaine and Canada's largest women's magazine. Kelly consults as a creative futurist for national and international organizations. She and her wife AM de la Monica live in downtown Toronto. Your narrator for this one is the always excellent Eber Amonkass. Eber is an award winning writer director based in la, available for audio or cinematic projects across the board. She still hasn't found time to build a website and encourages listeners to shame her about it on Instagram or Twitter. Your audio producer this week is Adam Pracht, who lives in Kansas and asks that you not hold that against him. He was the 2002 college recipient of the RFK Award for Writing about the Disadvantaged and has published a disappointingly slim volume of Short stories called Frame 7 Stories of sci Fi and Fantasy, Horror and Humour, which is available from Amazon as an ebook or paperback. He's been working on his second volume, Schrodinger's Seven Weird and Wonderful Tales of the Undead, since 2012 and successfully finished the first story. He hopes to complete it before he's cremated and takes up permanent residence in an urn. You can also hear his narration and audio production work on two audible audiobooks and as a regular producer and occasional narrator for the travelcast so the sky is calling. Let's see what it has to say. Let's see what stories it has to tell.
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Ricci got into my notes. I don't keep them locked down. Anyone can access them free and open. Distribution of data is a primary force behind the success of the human species. After all, didn't we all learn that in the crash? Making data available doesn't guarantee anyone will look at it. And if they do, chances are they won't understand it. Ricci tried. She didn't just skim through. She really studied. Shift after shift, she played with the numbers and gamed my simulation models. Maybe she slept, maybe not. I figured Ricci would come looking for me if she got stumped. So I de hermited, banged around the rumpus room, put myself to work on random little maintenance tasks. When Ricci found me, I was in the caudal stump dealing with the accumulated waste pellets. Yes, that's exactly what it sounds half kilogram plugs of dry solid waste covered in wax and transferred from the labs by the hygiene bots. Liquid waste is easy. We vaporize it, shunt it into the gas exchange bladder and flush it through the gill like permeable membranes. Solid waste. Well, just like anyone, we'd rather forget about it as long as possible. We rack the pellets until there's about 200, then we jettison them. Ricci pulled up her goggles and scrubbed knuckles over her red rimmed eyes. Why don't you automate this process like you do for liquids? Ricci asked as she helped me position the rack over the valve. No room for non essential equipment in the mass budget, I said. I dilated the interior shutter and the first pellet clicked through. A faint pink blush formed around the valve's perimeter, only visible because I dialed up the contrast on my goggles to watch for signs of stress. A little hormone ointment took care of it. Not too much, or we'd get a band of inflexible scar tissue and then I'd have to cut out the valve and move it to another location. That's a long, tricky process, and it's not fun. There's only two bands of tissue strong enough to support a valve. I bent down and stroked the creamy striated tissue at my feet. This is number two, and really, it barely holds. We have to treat it gently. Why risk it? Then take it out and just use the main valve. A sarcastic comment bubbled up. Have you never heard of a safety exit? But I gazed into her big brown eyes and it faded into the clouds. We need two valves in case of emergencies, I mumbled. Ricci and I watched the pellets plunge through the sky. When they hit the ice slush, the concussive wave kicked up a trail of vapor blooms, concentric rings lit with pinpoints of electricity so far below each flash just a spark in a violet sea. A flock of jellies fled from the concussion, flat shells strobing the reflected lights, trains of ribbon like tentacles flapping behind. Ricci looked worried. Did we hit any of them? I shook my head. No, they can move fast. After we'd finished dumping waste, Ricci said, say, Doc, why don't you show me the main valve again? I puffed up a little of that. I'm proud of the valves. Always tinkering, always innovating, always making them a little better. Without the valves, we wouldn't be here. Far forward, just below the peduncle isthmus, a wide band of filaments connects the petals to the bladder superstructure. The isthmus skin is thick with connective tissue and provides enough structural integrity to support a valve big enough to accommodate a cargo pod we pulled you in here. I padded the collar of the shutter housing. Whoever prepared the pod had put you in a pink body bag. Don't know why it was such a ridiculous color. When Voula saw it, she said, it's a girl. I laughed. Ricci winced. That joke makes sense. Old style, I explained. No, I get it. Birth metaphor. I'm not a Kreshy, Doc. I know. We wouldn't have picked you if you were. Why did you pick me? I grumbled something. Truth is, when I ask our recruiter to find us a new habmate, the percentage of viable applications approaches zero. We look for a specific psychological profile. The two most important success factors are low self censoring and high focus. People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long fermented resentments. And obsessive people don't get bored. They know how to make their own fun. Ricci tapped her fingernail on a shutter blade. Your notes aren't complete, Doc. She looked up at me, unblinking. No hint of a dimple. Why are you hoarding information? I'm not. Yes, you are. There's nothing about reproduction. That's because I don't know very much about it. The other whale crews do, and they're worried about it. You must know something, but you're not sharing why. I glared at her. I'm an amateur independent researcher. My methods aren't rigorous. It would be wrong to share shaky theories. The whale crews had a collective research assignment. Once you wrote it, she fired the document at me with a flick of her fingers. I slapped it down and flushed it from my buffer. That agreement expired. We didn't renew. That's a lie. You dissolved it and left to find your own whale. I aimed my finger at the bridge of her goggles and jabbed the air. Yes, I ran away. So did you. She smiled. I left a network of halves with a quarter billion people who can all do just fine without me. You ran from a few hundred who need you. Running away is something I'm good at. I bounced out of their double time. Ricci didn't call after me. I wouldn't have answered if she had. The next time she talked to Jane, Ricci didn't mention me. I guess I didn't rate high enough on her list of problems. I didn't really listen to the details as they chatted. I just liked having their voices in my head while I tinkered with my biosynthesis simulations. Halfway through their session, Voola pinged me. You can quit spying, she said. None of us are worried about Ricci anymore. I agreed and shut down the feed. Ricci's been asking about you, by the way. Voola added your history with the other whales tell her everything. You sure? I've been spying on her for days. It's only fair. Better she heard the story from Voula than me. I still can't talk about it without overheating. And they tell me I'm scary when I'm angry. Down below ground, the air is thick with rules, written and unwritten. The slowly decaying husks of 30,000 years of human history dragged behind us from Earth. And the most important of these is cooperation for mutual benefit. Humans being human, that's only possible in conditions of resource abundance. And not just actual numerical abundance, but more importantly, the perception of abundance. When humans are confident there's enough to go around, life is easy and we all get along, right? Cooperation makes life possible, but never easy. Humans are hard to wrangle. Tell them to do one thing and they'll do the opposite. More often than not. One thing we all agree on is that everyone wants a better life. Only problem is, nobody can agree what that means. So we have an array of habs offering a wide variety of social, cultural options. If you don't like what your hab offers you, you can leave and find one that does. If there isn't one, you can try and find others who want the same things as you and start your own. Often, just knowing options are available keeps people happy. Not everyone, though. Down below ground, I simply hated knowing my every breath was counted, every kilojoule measured, every moment of service consumption or contrib accounted for in the transparent economy, every move modeled by human capital managers and adjusted by resource optimization analysts. I got obsessed with the numbers in my debt dashboard, even though it was well into the black. All I wanted to do was drive it up as high and as fast as I could so nobody would ever be able to say I hadn't done my part. Most people never think about their debt. They drop a veil over the dash and live long, happy, ignorant lives, never caring about their billable rate and never knowing whether or not they siphoned off the efforts of others. But for some of us, that debt counter becomes an obsession. An obsession and ultimately an albatross chained around our necks. I dreamed about an independent habitat and abundant space and unlimited horizons. And I wasn't the only one. When we looked, there it was, floating around the atmosphere. Was it dangerous? Sure. But a few firms provide services to risk takers, and they're always eager for new clients. The crews that shuttle ice climbers to the poles delivered us to the skin of a very large whale. I made the first cut myself. Solving the problems of life was exhilarating. Air, food, water, warmth. We were explorers, just like the mountain climbers of old, ascending the highest peaks wearing nothing but animal hides. Like the first humans revolutionary. Our success attracted others and our population grew. We colonized New Wales, and once we got settled, our problems became more mundane. I have a little patience for administrative details, but the burden soon became agonizing, unending meetings to chew over our collective agreements, measuring and accounting the debts and credits and assigning value to everyone's time. This was exactly what we'd escaped. Little more than one year in the clouds and we were reinventing all the old problems from scratch. Nobody needs that. I stood right in the middle of the rumpus room, inside the creature I'd cut into with my own hands, and gave an impassioned speech about the nature of freedom and independence and reminded them all of the reasons we'd left. If they wanted their value micro accounted, they could go right back down below ground. I thought it was a good speech, but apparently not. When it came to a vote, I was the only one blocking consensus. I believe, hand to heart. If they'd only listened to me and did what I said, everything would have been fine and everyone would have been happy. But some people can never really be happy unless they're making other people miserable. They claimed I was trying to use my seniority, skills and experience as a lever to exert political force. I had become a menace, and when they told me I had to submit to psychological management, I left. Turned out we'd brought the albatross along with us after all. When Jane pinged me a few days later, I was doing the same thing as millions down below ground, watching a newly arrived arts delegation process down the beanstalk and marveling at their dramatic clothing and prosthetics. I pinged her back right away. Even though I knew she would probably needle me about my past, I didn't hesitate. I missed having Ricci and Jane in my head, and life was a bit lonely without them. Also, I was eager to meet her. I wasn't the only one. The whole crew was burning with curiosity about Ricci's pretty friend. When Jane's fake melted into reality. She was dressed in a shiny black party gown. Long dark hair poofed over her shoulders, held off her face with little spider clips that gathered the locks into tufts. Her chair was a spider model, too. With eight delicate ruby and onyx legs that cradled her torso. Hi, Doc, she said. It's nice to finally meet you. I'm a friend of Ricci's. I think you know that, though. A friend. Not a therapist, peer counselor, or emotional health consultant. That was odd. And then it dawned on me. Jean had been donating her time ever since Ricci joined us. She probably wanted to formalize her contract, start racking up the billable hours. When I glanced through her metadata, my heart began to hammer. Jane's rate was sky high. We can't float your rate, I blurted. Not now. Maybe eventually. But we'd have to find another revenue stream. Jane's head jerked back and her gaze narrowed. That's not why I pinged you, she said. I don't care about staying billable. I never did. All I want to do is help people. I released a silent sigh of relief. What can I do for you? Nothing. I just wanted to say hi and ask how Ricci's getting along. Ricci's fine. Nothing to worry about. I always get gruff around beautiful women. She brightened. She's fitting in with you all? Yeah, one of the crew. She's great. I love her. I bit my lip and quickly added, I mean, we all like her. Even Voula. And she's picky. I blushed badly, Jane noticed, and a gentle smile touched the corners of her mouth. But she was a kind soul and changed the subject. I've been wondering something, Doc. Do you mind if I ask a personal question? I scrubbed my hands over my face in embarrassment and nodded. She wheeled her chair a bit closer and tilted towards me. Do you know what gave you the idea to move to the surface? I mean, originally, before you'd ever started looking into the possibility. Have you read Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage? I asked. You must have. No. She looked confused, like I was changing the subject. You should. Here. I tossed her a multi bookmark compilation. Back down below ground, I'd give them out like candy at a Crush party. She could puzzle through the diction of the ancient original or read it in any number of translations, listen to a variety of audio versions and dramatic readings, or watch any of the hundreds of entertainment docs it had inspired. I'd seen them all. This is really old. Why did you think I know it? She flipped to the summary. Oh, I see. One of the characters is named Jane. Read it. It explains everything. I will. But maybe you could tell me what to look for. Her smile made me forget all about my embarrassment. It's about what humans need to be happy. Sure, we evolved to live in complex, interdependent social groups, but before that we were nomads pursuing research opportunities in an open, sparsely populated landscape. That means for some people, solitude and independence are primary values. She nodded and I could see she was trying hard to understand down below ground. When I was figuring all this out, I tried working with a therapist. When I told him all this, he said we also evolved to suffer and die from violence, disease, and famine. Do you miss that too? Jane laughed. I hope you fired him. So one book inspired all this? It's not just a book. It's a way of life. The freedom to explore wide open spaces, to come together with like minded others, and to form loose knit communities based on mutual aid. And to know that every morning you'll wake up looking at an endless horizon. These horizons aren't big enough. She waved at the surrounding virtual space, a default grid with dappled patterns, as if a directional light source was shining through gently fluttering leaves. For some, maybe. For me, pretending isn't enough. I'll read it. It sounds very she pursed her lips, looking for the right word. Romantic. I started to blush again, so I made an excuse and dropped the connection before I made a fool of myself. Then I drifted down to the rumpus room and stripped off my goggles and breather. Whoa, Boosh, said Doc. What's wrong? Eleanor turned from the extruder to look at me, then fumbled her caffeine bulb and squirted liquid across her cheek. Wow. She wiped the liquid off with her sleeve. I've never seen you look so dreamy before. What happened? I'm in love, I thought. Jane, ping me, I said. Instead, Boosh called the whole crew. They came at a run, even Voula. In a small hab. Any crumb of gossip can become legendary. I made them beg for the story, then drew it out as long as I could. Can you ask her to ping me? Eddie asked Ricci when I was done. I would chat with her for more than a couple minutes. Unlike Doc, said Treasure. Char grinned lasciviously. Can I lurk the whole crew in one room? Awake and actually talking to each other was something Ricci hadn't seen before, much less all of the howling with laughter and gossiping about her friend. She looked profoundly unsettled. Vula bounced over to the extruder, filled the bub with her favorite social lubricant, and tossed it to Ricci. Tell us everything about Jane, chara said. Treasure waggled her tongue. It's not like that. Richie frowned. She's a friend. Good, they chorused and collapsed back into the netting, giggling. I've been meaning to ask. Why do you use that handheld thing to talk to her, anyway? Chara said. I've never even seen one of those before. Ricci shook her head. Come on, Ricci. There's no privacy here, voula said. You know that. Don't go stiff on us. Ricci joined us in the netting before answering. When she picked a spot beside me, my pulse fluttered in my throat. Jane's a peer counselor. She squeezed a sip from the bulb and grimaced at the taste. The handheld screen is one of her strategies. Having it around reminds me to keep working on my goals. Why do you need peer counseling? Asked Chara. Because I Ricci looked from face to face, big brown eyes serious. Everyone quieted down. I was unhappy. Listen, I've been talking with some people from the other whale crews. They've been having problems for a while now, and it's getting worse. She fired a stack of bookmarks into the middle of the room. Everyone began rifling through them except me. That's too bad, I said. You want to know what's going on, Doc? Asked Chara. I folded my arms and scowled in the gentle direction of the extruder. No, I said flatly. I don't give a shit about them. Well, you'd better, bulla said. Because if it's happening to them, it could happen to us. Look. She fired a feed from a remote sensing drone into the middle of the room. A group of whales had gathered 100 meters above a slushy depression between a pair of high ridges. They weren't feeding, just drifting around aimlessly, dangerously close to each other. When they got close to each other, they unfurled their petals and brushed them along each other's skin. As we watched, two whales collided. Their bladders bubbled out like a creshy squeeze toy until it looked like they would burst. Seeing the two massive creatures collide like that was so upsetting I actually reached into the feed and tried to push them apart. Embarrassing. Come on, Doc, tell us what's happening, said Voula. I don't know. I tucked my hands into my armpits as if I was cold. We should go help, said Eddie. At least we could assist with the evac if they need to bail. I shook my head. It could be dangerous. Everyone laughed at that. People who aren't comfortable with risk don't roam the atmosphere. It might be a disease, I added. We should stay as far away as we can. We don't want to catch It Treasure pulled a face at me. You're getting old. I grabbed my breather and goggles and bounded towards the hatch. Come on, Doc, take a guess, ricci said. More observation would be required before I'd be comfortable advancing a theory, I said stiffly. And I can only offer conjecture. Go ahead. Conjecture away, said Voula. I took a moment to collect myself and then turned and addressed the crew with a professional gravity. It's possible the other crews haven't been maintaining the interventions that ensure their whales don't move into reproductive maturity. You're saying the whales are horny? Said Boosh. They look horny, said Treasure. They're fascinated with each other, said Voula. Voula had put her finger on exactly the thing that was bothering me. Whales don't congregate. They don't interact socially. They certainly don't mate. I'd guess that the applicable pseudoneural tissue has regenerated, perhaps incompletely, and their behavior is confused. Ricci gestured at the feed where the three whales collided, dragging their petals across each other's bulging skin. This isn't going to happen to us. No, I said. Definitely not. Don't worry. Unlike the others, I've been keeping on top of the situation. But how can you be sure? And then realization dawned over Ricci's face. You knew this was going to happen, didn't you? Not exactly. She launched herself from the netting and bounced towards me. Why didn't you share the information? Keeping it secret is just cruel. I backed towards the hatch. It's not my responsibility to save the others from their stupid mistakes. We need to tell them how to fix it. Maybe they can save themselves. Tell them whatever you want. I excavated my private notes from lockdown and fired them into the middle of the room. I think their best option would be to abandon their whales and find new ones. That would take months, Voula said. Nineteen whales. More than 200 people. Then they should start now. I turned to leave. Wait. Ricci looked around at the crew. We have to go help, right? I gripped the edge of the hatch. The electrostatic membrane licked at my fingertips. Yeah, I want to go, boosh said. I'd be surprised if you didn't, Doc. I want to go, said Treasure. Me too, chara chimed in. Eddie and Eleanora both nodded. Voola pulled down her goggles and launched herself out of the netting. Whales fucking. What are we waiting for? I'll start fabbing some media drones. With all seven of them eager for adventure, our quiet, comfortable little world didn't stand a chance. We're not the only Humans on the surface? Not quite. Near the South Pole, a gang of religious hermits lives in a deep ice cave making alcohol the old way using yeast based fermentation. It's no better than the extruded version, but some of the habs take pity on them so the hermits can fund their power and feedstock. Every so often one of the hermits gives up and calls for evac. When that happens, the board crew of a cargo ship zips down to rescue them. Those same ships that bring us supplies and new crew, they also shuttle adventurers and researchers around the planet, but mostly they sit idle, tethered halfway up the beanstalk. The ships are beautiful, sleek, fast, and elegant. As for us, when we need to change our position, it's not quite so efficient or fast. When Rishi found me in the rumpus room, I had already fabbed my gloves and face mask, and I was watching the last few centimeters of a thick pair of protective overalls chug through the output. I told the other crews he'd be happy to take a look at the regenerative tissue and recommend a solution, but they refused. She said, they don't like you, do they? I yanked the coveralls out of the extruder. No, and I don't like them either. I stalked to the hatch. Can I tag along, Doc? She asked. You're lucky I don't pack you into a body bag and tag you for evac. I'm really sorry, Doc. I should have asked you before offering your help. When I get an idea in my head, tend to just run with it. She was all smiles and dimples with her goggles on her forehead, pushing her hair up in spikes and her breather swinging around her neck. A person who looks like that can get away with anything. This is your idea, I said. Only fair you get your hands dirty. I fabbed her a set of protective clothing and we helped each other suit up. We took a quick detour to slather appetite suppressant gel on the appropriate hormonal bundle and then waddled up the long dorsal sinus, arms out for balance. The sinus walls clicked and the long cavity bent around us, but soon the appetite suppressant a cold and we were nearly stationary, dozing gently. In the clouds. On either side towered the main float bladders, clear, multi chambered organs rippling with rainbows across their honeycomb pattern surfaces. Feeder organs pulse between the bladder walls. The feeders are dark pink at the base, but the colors fade as they branch into sprawling networks of tubules reaching through the skin, grasping hydrogen and channeling it into the bladders at the head of the dorsal sinus. A tall slot shaped orifice provides access to the neuronal cavity. I shrugged my equipment bag over my shoulder, showed Ricci how to secure her face mask over her breather, and climbed in with the masks on to talk. We had to ping each other. I was still a bit angry. So no chit chat. Business only. I handed her the laser scalpel. Cut right here. I sliced the blade of my gloved hand vertically down the milky surface of the protective tissue. See these scars? I pointed at the gray metallic stripes on either side of the imaginary line I'd drawn. Stay away from them. Just cut straight in between. Ricci backed away a few steps. I don't think I'm qualified to do this. You've been qualified to draw a line since you were a krushi. When she began to protest again, I cut her off. This was your idea, remember? Her hand shook but the line was straight enough. The pouch deflated, draping over the skeleton of the carbon fiber struts I'd installed way back in the beginning. I pulled Ricci inside and closed the incision behind us with squirts of temporary adhesive. The wound wept drops of fluid that rapidly boiled off, leaving a sticky pink SAP like crust across the iridescent interior surface. Is this the whale's brain? Ricci asked. I ignored the question. Ricci knew it was the brain. She'd been studying my notes after all. She was just trying to smooth my feathers by giving me a chance to show my expertise. Not every brain looks like a brain. Yours and mine look like they should be floating in the primordial ocean depths. That's where we came from, after all. The organ in front of us came from the clouds. A tower of spun glass floss threaded through and through with wispy feather like strands that branched and rebranched into iridescent fractals. My mobility control leads were made of copper nanofiber embedded in color coded silicon. Red, green, blue, yellow, purple, orange and black. A ragged dull rainbow piercing the depths of an alien brain. Ricci repeated her question. Don't ask dumb questions, Ricci. She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender and backed away. Not far. No room inside the pouch to shuffle back more than one step. The best I can say is it's brain like. I snap the leads into my fist sized control interface. The neurons are neuron like. Is it the whole brain is the entire seat of cognition here? I can't tell because there's not much cognition to measure. Maybe more than a bacterium, but far less than an insect. How do you measure cognition? Ricci asked. Controlled experiments. But how do you run experiments on animals this large? All I can tell you is that most people who study these creatures lose interest fast. But here's a better measure. After more than 10 years, a whale has never surprised me before. Today, you mean. Maneuvering Takes a little practice. We use a thumb operated clicker to fire tiny electrical impulses through the leads and achieve a vague form of directional control. Yes, it's a basic system. We could replace it with something more elegant, but it operates even if we lose power. The control it provides isn't exactly roll, pitch and yaw, but it's effective enough. The margin for error is large. There's not much to hit. Navigation is easy, too. Satellites ping our position 1,000 times a second, and the data can be accessed in several different navigational aids, all available in our dashboards. But though it's all fairly easy, it's not quick. My anger didn't last long. Not in such close quarters. Especially just a few hours after realizing I was in love with her. It was hardly a romantic scene. Both of us swathed head to toe in protective clothing, passing a navigation controller back and forth as we waggled slowly towards our destination. In between bouts of navigation, I began telling Ricci everything I knew about the organ in front of us. A brain dump about brains inside a brain. Ha. She was interested. I was flattered by her interest. Age old story. I treated her to all my theories, prejudices, and opinions. Not just about regenerating pseudoneural tissue and my methods for culling it, but the entire scientific research apparatus down below ground, the social dynamics of the hab I grew up in, and the psychological underpinnings of the research exploration proposal we used to float our first forays out here. Thank goodness Ricci was wearing a mask. She was probably yawning so wide I could have checked her tonsils. Here. I handed her the control box. You drive the rest of the way. We were aiming for the equator, where the strong, steady winds have carved a smooth canyon bisecting the ice right down to the planet's iron core. When we need to travel a long distance, riding that wind is the fastest route. Ricci clicked a directional adjustment and our headings swung a few degrees back towards the equator. What does the whale perceive when we do this? Ricci waggled the thumb of her glove above the joystick. When it changes direction, are we luring it or scaring it away? Served me right for telling her not to ask simple questions. I don't really know, I admitted. Maybe it makes them think the other whales are around. What if they want to be together, just like people? But before now, they didn't know how. Maybe you've been teaching them. My eyebrows climbed. I'd never considered how we might be influencing whale behavior, aside from the changes we make for our own benefit. That's an interesting theory, Ricci. Definitely worth looking into. Wouldn't it be terrible to be always alone? I'd always considered myself a loner, but in that moment, I honestly couldn't remember why.
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Escape Pod Host (Alastair)
I talked last time about Robson's ability to balance big ideas and intimate realizations. And I think that's central to this second act. Most obviously, it's there in the literal collisions that lie at the heart of this part. The crew colliding with the outside world. Feelings. Colliding with pragmatism. Safety. Colliding with adventure. Celibacy, Societal and biological, chosen and enforced. Colliding with libido. Massive cool space whales colliding with each other. There's a lot of it, but two lines really sparkled for me. The first is obsessive. People don't get bored. They know how to make their own fun. There's that collision once again, this time between personal choice and cultural expectation. I also love how Robson approaches representation in this story. The same way it's approached in life, it's just there. Not everyone moves the same way. Not everyone is the same size, the same build, has the same level of neurodivergency. People are just people. But in a tight space like this, people are more themselves than anywhere else. Robson finds the drama there, and the contrast between the careful assembly of a crew and the offhand modification of the whales is a gently handled and very sinister piece of world building. This isn't quite as brave or as nice a world as it thinks it is. And the safety of the crew's routine being burst speaks to that even before the whales do. The other line is this, so nobody would ever be able to say I haven't done my part. As a former talented child with a complicated parental relationship and a Catholic work ethic, this one hits me square in the guilt centres and there's a lot of them and they're big. The drive to be useful is great. Being useful at the expense of being happy is. Not realising when you're doing that is almost impossible. And doing it changes your life basically instantly, for the better. Doesn't make it easier, though. And that being one of the arcs of this story is one of the many reasons why I love it. One last thing. Riders of the Purple Sage is a real book published in 1912, it's regarded as one of the seminal Westerns and follows three characters as they struggle with persecution from the local town run by a Mormon elder. I love how Robson to used uses it here both to emphasize the universality of personal choice and exploration as personal definition, and to show how goals like Live Free are actually destinations disguised as goals. It's also out of copyright if you're interested, so we will drop a link to the text via Project Gutenberg in the show notes What a great story. Come back next week for the last bit onto the subject of subscribing and support. Escape Pod has long survived on donations alone, and even though there's ads now, subscribing through our Patreon remains the best way to ensure we can keep bringing you one story told well. And if you subscribe at the seven buck tier, you can get rid of the ads. So if you would like to support what we and the rest of Escape Artists do, please join our patreon@patreon.com eapodcasts through your browser. To avoid paying the App Store fees, prefer another method. There are details for supporting us via Twitch, Amazon prime, ko fi and paypal on escapeartists.net or you can reach out directly by email at donationscapeartists.net with any questions you might have. I promise someone will get back to you. The legal bit Escape Art is part of the escape Artist Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial no derivatives 4.0 international license. That means you can share it, and we want you to share it, but you can't sell it and you can't change it. If you want specifics, check creativecommons.org oh, and my music is by Daikaiju One last thing. EscapePod is proud to say that we have partnered with SleepPhones to provide a special Escape Pod branded set of headphones. Sleepphones are soft headphones that you wear while you sleep. They're comfortable, slim. They are basically headphones in a headband. So you put it on, you unplug, and you surround yourself with the exact sound experience you need. You do so without disturbing or being disturbed by the person next to you. Sleepphones were designed by a family doctor and they provide wearable comfort that is literally music to your ears. And they're available with both standard 3.5 millimeter audio jacks and Bluetooth that sound you just was two entire generations self fiving. They're easy to clean, comfortable and now you can get them with our logo. And you can get a 10% discount off your order of the Escapepod branded sleepphomes if you use the coupon code escapepod. That's all one word. Follow the link in our show notes to sleepphones and remember the code escapepod to get 10% off. Escape pod is part of the escape Artists Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial no Derivatives, you guessed it, 4.0 international license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don't change it. Don't sell it. Theme music is by permission of Daikaiju we'll see you next week for the final installment. Before then, we're sending you off into the week with another quote from Starfleet Academy. Say what you will about this present time, but it has one advantage over every other it's ours. We'll see you next time folks. Until then, have fun.
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