Escape Pod 1039: The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita

Summary

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Escape Pod Episode 1039: "The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita"

Author: Tim Pratt
Narrator: Isabel Jae Kim
Host: Tina Connolly
Date: April 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this ingeniously layered, darkly humorous science fiction story, Tim Pratt explores the iterative rebirths of Karina Morita, a citizen of a post-scarcity utopia, who — after a sudden, accidental death — finds herself thrust into a cosmic system of reincarnation. With each "rebirth," Karina is sent into ever-harder realities, each crafted to refine her soul toward a mysterious standard of "perfection." Retaining an unusual level of memory between lives, she must adapt, learn, and grow—sometimes through pain and loss, happiness and success, always questioning the purpose behind her cosmic journey.

Pratt’s tale oscillates between empathetic struggle, satirical bite, philosophical inquiry, and unflagging curiosity, centering not on the rules or architects of this afterlife system, but on the character’s personal evolution.

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Key Discussion Points & Story Segments

1. Karina's Sudden Death and Unexpected Awakening

• [03:01]
  • Karina, accustomed to a world where death is rare and reversible, perishes in an accident en route to a festival. Expecting to wake in her futuristic home, she's instead revived in a sterile silver room by a technician who cheerfully welcomes her to "the Interval" — a liminal space between lives.
  • The technician explains: "Welcome to the Interval. I'm your technician. I see this is your first time passing through. Don't worry, we'll get you assessed and processed quickly." (Technician, [04:30])
  • Karina's existential confusion and snarky inner monologue immediately set the tone for a story that's as much about personality as premise.

2. First Rebirth: A Mundane, Stressful World

• [06:21]
  • Without warning, Karina finds herself in the body of a tired working mother, stressed and confused by carpool, inboxes, and household minutiae—a world entirely unlike her post-scarcity home.
  • Her bewilderment is both comic and poignant:
    • "This was some kind of nightmare realm where my brain was crowded with minutiae about immunization schedules and profit and loss sheets and some grim ritual called date night..." (Karina, [07:50])
  • Panic leads to her accidental death, sending her back to the Interval.

3. Failure to Forget: Karina’s Awareness Persists

• [09:42]
  • Each time Karina is sent to a new reality, she becomes increasingly aware—against protocol—of her prior selves and the Interval. This anomaly baffles the Technician.
  • "Oh dear. Very unusual. You're not supposed to remember any of this. Not me and not your old life. But the discontinuity in your consciousness isn't complete. There's a resumption of connectivity." (Technician, [09:47])
  • The Technician tries to reassure her: "If your memory does come back again, try not to panic. Just muddle on as best you can. The longer you live, the more you can learn." (Technician, [10:50])

4. Subsequent Rebirths: Pain, Mundanity, and Adaptation

• [13:25]
  • Next, Karina becomes a junior publicist—tolerating bad jobs, relationships, and “horrific physical ailments.” She is confronted with the often-overlooked pain and struggle of more ordinary lives.
  • She tries to cope, but eventually checks out of this world as well, always returning to the Interval with memories intact.

5. Systems of Reincarnation Explained

• [16:04]
  • The Technician reveals the (purported) reason for the cycle: it's “about the perfection of the soul … an iterative refinement process.” Each life is an attempt to distill the spirit, exposing Karina to new hardships for continued growth.
  • “Every new milieu cooks off some of your impurities. Every time you die, you are reborn into a new world, one that has different things to teach you...” (Technician, [16:04])

6. Nature of the System: Unanswered Questions and Speculation

• [17:58]
  • Karina inquires about the nature of the worlds—are they real or simulated? The Technician shrugs off the distinction as potentially meaningless to their inhabitants: “We mostly think it's a distinction without a difference. All the people in them think they're real, so close enough.” (Technician, [18:01])
  • The ultimate goal, she suggests, is "perfection," but who decides or oversees this is left open—perhaps gods, aliens, a future perfected self, or even a long-abandoned machine experiment.
    • “One interesting theory is that there's some best possible version of each of us in the future, and that future person is trying to make sure we achieve the perfection that permits them to exist.” (Technician, [19:02])

7. Karina's Adaptation and Attempts to Cheat the System

• [21:16]
  • Karina realizes her unusual memory retention gives her an advantage. She begins leveraging knowledge from previous lives—especially scientific knowledge—using it to improve her circumstances and those of others in each new world.
  • Notable, comic honesty:
    • “I cheated, I told the technician gleefully. I’ve been cheating for ages. I’m using the knowledge of my past lives to improve my circumstances in every horrible world you drop me into.” (Karina, [24:53])

8. Insight into Growth: True Purpose of Challenges

• [25:51]
  • The Technician reframes Karina’s “cheating” as evidence the system actually works:
    • “You mean you're learning and adapting, which is the entire point of the process." (Technician, [25:57])
  • Karina’s skepticism and irritation are undiminished, but now tinged with curiosity about future challenges.

9. Facing New and Greater Challenges

• [26:55]
  • Aware that she’s being sent to increasingly difficult realities, Karina bravely, even defiantly, embraces the challenge. The Technician’s final sendoff for this encounter:
    • “Best of luck, Karina, the Clean Energy Queen Morita." (Technician, [27:19])
  • Karina awakens in a primitive, violent world as “Karina the Red,” vowing to conquer, civilize, and innovate.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• The initial confusion of immortality:

  • "A copy of your consciousness isn't the same as your intangible immortal soul, and that's the part of you that moves on." (Technician, [05:02])

• Dry wit amidst metaphysical confusion:

  • “This was a joke. A prank. Or maybe a social destabilization happening orchestrated by the Clatter Society.” (Karina, [06:21])

• On the iterative nature of the afterlife:

  • "It's about the perfection of the soul…an iterative refinement process, and it goes on and on until. Well, until you're finished. I guess." (Technician, [16:59])

• Metaphysical ambiguity and cosmic satire:

  • “I lean toward the idea that it's some kind of machine intelligence running an experiment, maybe to decide whether it's worth keeping organic beings around at all.” (Technician, [19:10])

• Finding a challenge in hardship:

  • “Once I had a working steam engine sorted out, I was going to become empress of this place, and after I taught the locals about aspirin and indoor plumbing, there would be statues of me standing tall for 10,000 years.” (Karina, [28:24])

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Thematic Insights

• Growth through Adversity:
  With each reincarnation, Karina is forced to face new and unfamiliar challenges, driving her to adapt, grow, and develop resilience. This is underscored by her shift from outrage and panic to determination and shrewd acceptance.

• Questions of Identity and Continuity:
  The story investigates what makes a self, the difference between soul and consciousness, and the consequences of memory (or its absence) across incarnations.

• Satirical Critique of Modernity:
  Karina’s horrified and humorous observations of ordinary earthly existence lampoon everything from office culture to menstrual pain, skewering the conceit that all “progress” is good.

• Ambiguity of Meaning and Agency:
  The “why” of the Interval is never answered—just as in life, the rules remain mysterious and open to interpretation.

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Host Commentary & Reflections

• [29:14]
  Host Tina Connolly commends the story’s refusal to over-explain its metaphysics:

  • “Pratt does one more thing with the fantastical twist in the story that I tend to really like, which is she doesn't over explain it. The point is not who set this up and why and how. The point is to watch Karina improve.” (Tina Connolly, [29:14])

• She praises the central conceit—applying acquired wisdom (and technical skill) to ever-restarting lives—as "cheating," but also recognizes its deeper point:

  • "It's nice to watch Karina grow as a person and touch on all the alternate timelines she gets dropped into." (Tina Connolly, [29:14])

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Key Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Karina's first death & arrival in the Interval | 03:01 | | Awakens in the "real world" as a working mother | 06:21 | | Technician’s explanation of the afterlife system | 16:04 | | Speculation about simulacra, gods, and purpose | 18:01 | | Karina leverages reincarnation for technical mastery | 21:16 | | “Cheating” and the Technician’s acknowledgment | 24:53 | | Technician assigns toughest world yet | 26:55 | | Karina’s new challenge as “Karina the Red” | 27:26 | | Host commentary and reflection | 29:14 |

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Memorable Moments

• Karina coming to terms with (and manipulating) her unique afterlife predicament, using memories to build empires or rise above adversity.
• The Technician’s deadpan, bureaucratic approach to reincarnation, undercutting any grand cosmic revelations with dry wit.
• The sharply observed, often hilarious, culture shock as Karina is thrust from post-scarcity luxury into the frustrations and pains of mundane human life.
• The closing scene: Karina the Red, determined to industrialize her new, medieval world—and perhaps pursue a dark, snaky immortality.

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Final Thoughts

“The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita” deftly balances cosmic satire, genuine character growth, and philosophical intrigue. By focusing not on the architecture of the afterlife but on its impact on one sharp, resourceful soul, it invites listeners to consider what we carry—and what we learn—between the many “lives” we live, day to day or incarnation to incarnation.

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Transcript

[Mixtape Stories Host]

Does this current dystopia got you down well? At the Mixtape Stories podcast, we replace your existential dread with original speculative short stories and miniseries filled with humor, hope and wonder and brought to life with music and a cast of human actors. Check out Mixtape Stories wherever you get your podcasts. At Mixtape Stories, we're creating beautiful fiction in in a disappointing timeline. Escape pod episode 1039 the many rebirths

[Tina Connolly]

of Karina Morita by Tim Pratt. Hello and welcome to Escape Pod, your weekly science fiction podcast. I'm your host this week, Tina Connolly, and I am here to bring you the Many Rebirths of Karina Morita by Tim Pratt. This story first appeared on her Patreon. Tim Melody Pratt is a gender fluid Hugo award winning SF and fantasy author and editor and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Sturgeon Stoker, Mythopaic and Nebula Awards, among others. Pratt's short fiction and poetry have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Best American Erotica, Uncanny, Asimov's, and Clark's World, and she is the author of over 30 novels. Your narrator this week is Isabel Jae Kim. Isabel Jae Kim is a Korean American speculative fiction writer based in New York City. She is a Shirley Jackson Award winner, a Hugo, Nebula and Astounding Award finalist, and her short fiction has been published in Clark's World, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other venues. Her work has been reprinted in the Best American Science fiction and fantasy 2023 and 2024 and translated into Chinese and Japanese. When she's not writing, she's either practicing law or co hosting her Internet culture podcast, wow. If true, both equally noble pursuits. Find her at Isabelle Kim or Isabelle Kim on Twitter, your audio producer. This week is Summer Brooks, so get ready to visit the interval because it's story time.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita by Tim Pratt Narrated by Isabel Jae Kim My problems all started when I died. People didn't die too often in my hab or anywhere else. On the planets and stations of the standard curve. We cured illness and aging long ago, but there were still occasional deaths by misadventure. I was flying an ultralight to the outdoor Sex and Ice Cream festival on the melodious archipelago when an unexpected updraft sent me spinning out straight into the side of a familiar mountain. It was hollowed out and contained an eternal night dance club. As the meticulously textured stone surface rushed toward my face, I thought, oh well, at least I had a backup yesterday. I'd lose my memories of the morning, sure, but my post breakfast orgasms hadn't been any better than usual, and the hollandaise on my dodo eggs was only okay, too. I was supposed to wake up in the cozy rebirth lounge of my own home. On the shimmering terrace, my consciousness decanted into a fresh clone, as I had done a dozen times before. Instead, I awoke naked and shivering, stretched out on a long table in a small room with silver walls, while a short woman wearing a pure white jumpsuit and an elaborate crown of stainless steel smiled down at me.

[Technician]

Karina Zephyrus Morita, she said.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Welcome to the Interval. I'm your technician. I see this is your first time passing through. Don't worry, we'll get you assessed and processed quickly. I shrieked and sat up on the table. Was I in some kind of clinic? Had there been a mishap with the cloning process? I felt fine, and the bits of me I could see didn't appear malformed. What's happening? Who are you? What is this place? The technician cocked her head and shrugged.

[Technician]

It's the Interval.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

The place in between lives. Some people call it the Bardo, which isn't quite right, but it's a similar concept if you're familiar. No. She had a clipboard, but it must have actually been some kind of tablet, because she prodded it with her finger and gazed down. Ah, you're from a post scarcity milieu. Culturally beyond such concepts due to functional or immortality. Okay, so you died, and this is the afterlife. But the afterlife is just a waystation before your soul moves on to a new world. Died? Afterlife. Vague memories of classic sims about clouds and harps and flames and pitchforks arose. This place didn't have any of those things, which was both disappointing and reassuring. But I had a recent backup. My consciousness should have persisted. I don't know about any of that. The technician shrugged. A copy of your consciousness isn't the same as your intangible immortal soul, and that's the part of you that moves on. Or maybe every copy of your consciousness gets its own soul, and they all pass through here upon cessation. That's a nice idea. This was a joke. A prank. Or maybe a social destabilization happening orchestrated

[Technician]

by the Clatter Society.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

I swung my legs around to dangle off the table. I'm getting out of here. That is true, the technician said cheerfully. It only takes a few moments for the system to scan your developmental metadata so I can assess the best world for your continued refinement. The room flashed with a sudden burst of purple light, leaving me blinking and stunned okay, off you go to your next life. Don't worry, you won't remember any of this or anything about your past lives either, except on a fundamental spiritual level where those experiences will guide your instincts and insights. Think of it as a fresh start and an opportunity to learn and grow. This is, I began, and the next word would likely have been an expletive or a noun modified by an expletive, but the floor dropped out beneath me and I plummeted and found myself sitting in a car in traffic after drop off at the elementary school, my brain a jagged haze of interlocking and overlapping to do lists, constantly shifting according to stress based triage. I looked down at myself and picked a piece of cereal off the front of my red blouse where it left an oat milky smear. But at least my little Cassandra was someone else's problem for the day, and I might even have time to stop and get a latte before I went up to the office to deal with the endless hydra of emails in my inbox. And I screamed and stared wide eyed.

[Technician]

Where was I?

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

What was a car? Who was my little Cassandra? What was an inbox? What was an elementary school? What was happening? Who was I? This was not my world, the glittering array of the standard curve, a place of reliable pleasure and safe exploration. This was some kind of nightmare realm where my brain was crowded with minutiae about immunization schedules and profit and loss sheets and some grim ritual called date night that involved an entity called a husband and which apparently required me to scrape off most of my body hair with a piece of sharp metal. I fumbled with the unfamiliar yet also totally familiar door handle and jumped out of the strange boxy conveyance, which led to a chorus of cacophonous honks and shouts from the vehicles around me. Everywhere there were long low buildings and hard black and gray surfaces and sad looking drooping trees and poles, dangling wires. A light hanging on a crossbar changed from red to green and the honking intensified. Filter noise. I shouted, but my perceptual system didn't respond. Maybe I didn't even have one anymore. There were damp spots under my armpits and I could faintly smell myself, sweat, and some kind of sweetly metallic scent that I assumed was meant to cover

[Technician]

up the first odor.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

I went rushing heedlessly away from my vehicle across an open stretch of the hard black ground toward the trees, because stunted or not, at least they were trees. A moment after I stepped over a double yellow line painted on the ground. One of the vehicles, a big one Struck me so hard the impact was a sensation that was totally all consuming. And this time I sat up in the silver room, screaming and the technician winced. Traumatic exit that time, huh? Well, better luck next. Karina Finnegan.

[Technician]

Name?

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Morita. I jumped off the table, seized her by the shoulders and shook her.

[Tina Connolly]

You.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

You again. What was that horrible place? Why did you send me there? She stared at me, then gently removed my hands, half turned away and poked at her clipboard. Oh. Oh dear. Very unusual. You're not supposed to remember any of this. Not me and not your old life. But the discontinuity in your consciousness isn't complete. There's a resumption of connectivity. Do you remember being a child in that most recent world? What? No. Except I did. Sort of, if I thought about it. But it was like reading someone else's boring diary. I just found myself in this thing called a car and there were all of these noises and then I was struck by a fast moving object and it hurt. My nerve blocks didn't even kick in. Uh, no, they wouldn't have that kind of tech. You won't be going to any milieu's with nerve block technology ever again.

[Technician]

Probably.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

She sounded apologetic. I'm not sure why your consciousness and

[Technician]

memory return to you like that.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

I'm going to open a support ticket and see if we can figure it out. Hopefully we'll get it all sorted. In the meantime, we're going to send you on to your next stop on the road to perfection. If your memory does come back again, try not to panic. Just muddle on as best you can. The longer you live, the more you can learn. Alright, here we go. That all encompassing purple light strobed again. Think of it as a fresh start and an opportunity to learn and grow. No. Stop. You can't. The floor dropped away beneath me. Next time I swam up into consciousness, I was sitting in a room that smelled powerfully of solvents while a black haired woman painted my fingernails pale pink. There were other people around me, all chattering away and the woman was talking to me too, telling me a long story about her daughter's terrible girlfriend. I understood her language perfectly. I knew that my name was Karina Morita. No middle name. My culture didn't really do those. I knew that I was 24 years old, that I was a junior publicist at a PR firm, I was single and tired of dating, and that this twice monthly visit to the salon was one of my life's greatest pleasures. A quick scan through this other version of me's memories revealed bad sex and with only one gender of partner, bad food hacked from dead animals, in some cases limited travel to bad places. So maybe a blessing, and horrific physical ailments, mucus running from holes in my face. But I did not want to return to that strange place with the silver walls and the useless technician. And I understood that I lived a life of relative privilege compared to most people in the milieu. I wondered if I was time traveling. Was this the past of my own beautiful homeworld? I never paid any attention to history. I wasn't a scholarly type in what I was grudgingly thinking of as my first life. I mostly indulged myself, traveled to the varied wonders of the standard curve, and did a little semi professional mech racing on the side. Normal things. Like anyone else, I decided to try to make the best of my situation. Maybe this whole experience was my brain setting off strange fireworks at the moment of impact with that mountainside. Maybe I was stuck in some new kind of immersive sim, a fictional scenario

[Technician]

that erased your memory of entering the

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

sim in the first place. Or maybe it was exactly what it seemed. Reincarnation. But not as a bug or a bunny rabbit or an underprivileged person, but just as another version of yourself in another world. After my nails were done, I followed the promptings of my deeper mind to hand over a little rectangle of plastic and then poked at a screen, payments and things called tips. How bizarre. And then went out to my vehicle, a sleeker and shinier version of the one I'd fled last time. At least this car drove itself, so I wasn't expected to figure that out. It took me to an apartment halfway up a stubby tower, a set of rooms where I would not have deigned to keep a disfavored pet back home. But I gathered for the smiliew it was considered very nice. There was a lot of wine in the apartment, drinkable even. So that was good. I resolved to stay here and learn the ways of this place and make the best life for myself that I could. And I lasted for 10 days, using something called sick time to avoid the unbearable tedium of my job in publicity, a concept I chose not to think deeply about. Then I was seized by horrible abdominal cramps, agony of a degree I'd never imagined possible. And then I bled from a place you'd never want to bleed. My deeper mind assured me this was a regular occurrence. This, of course, was intolerable to me. Apparently cutting oneself with razors was a common way to escape life here. But I didn't have any, since this version of myself underwent an awful ritual involving hot wax to deal with unwanted hair instead of they didn't have selective growth mods in this hellscape. But my deeper mind told me that wine and certain pills would solve the problem of living, too. And so I didn't scream this time. I sat up, weary, and looked at the technician. I still remembered. I can see that. She poked at the clipboard. Your consciousness just snapped awake after about two and a half decades. Both times.

[Technician]

I've never heard of this happening before.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Maybe remembering this way is part of your process. It's definitely nicer to believe this is happening on purpose, right? That there's an infallible order and not that there are just glitches sometimes. I needed to understand. Understanding would help, right? It must. Please explain to me what is going on.

[Technician]

What?

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Why is this happening to me? The technician went, mmm. Then a stool on wheels came rolling out of a corner of the silver room. I didn't remember seeing a stool there before, but I was distracted. The technician sat down and put a clipboard on her lap and said, it's not just happening to you. It happens to everyone. It's about the perfection of the soul. Think of it like triple distillation, the way people make really pure alcohol. Every new milio cooks off some of your impurities. Every time you die, you are reborn into a new world, one that has different things to teach you. To expose you gradually to new hardships, to help reveal the aura of your character hidden behind the base rock of your unconsidered inclinations, to help you become better. It's an iterative refinement process, and it goes on and on until. Well, until you're finished.

[Technician]

I guess.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

I put my face in my hands. New hardships. You mean every world I go to is going to get worse? She swiveled back and forth a little on the school, turning her hips. I wouldn't necessarily say they get worse. Not on a systemic or social level, anyway. Each milieu gets more difficult for you personally. The idea is each world makes you stronger, more resilient, better at adapting, even if you don't have conscious memories. The soul remembers.

[Technician]

She paused.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Well, you're an outlier. But each new life is tailored to you personally, to teach you things that you can benefit from. Like that last world. It was pretty nice, actually. They were about to figure out reliable fusion energy production, even. It's just that you personally worked too much in that world and didn't value love. Are these worlds real?

[Technician]

Or simulations.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

The technician held up both hands, palms up, then dropped them. Couldn't tell you. We mostly think it's a distinction without a difference. All the people in them think they're real, so close enough. But what's the point of all of this? What's the ultimate goal? The technician blinked. Perfection, didn't I say? But what happens when I'm perfect? And who decides what perfection even means? She snorted. Oh, that's way above my pay grade.

[Technician]

Ha ha.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Not that I get paid. I knew what paying was now, at least, so I understood what she meant. If you just work here, who's in charge? Uh, that's the most popular topic of conversation in the break room, she said. Some kind of God or gods? That's the most popular opinion. Some say it's aliens. One interesting theory is that there's some best possible version of each of us in the future, and that future person is trying to make sure we achieve

[Technician]

the perfection that permits them to exist.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

That one's a little convoluted from my taste.

[Technician]

I lean toward the idea that it's

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

some kind of machine intelligence running an experiment, maybe to decide whether it's worth keeping organic beings around at all. Or it could be that a machine

[Technician]

intelligence set up the experiment and then broke down and the experiment is just still running for no reason. Maybe someday we'll find out. There were implications here. So you're like me. This happened to you too? Dying and waking up and moving on? She nodded. This last time I woke up here and I was given this job, just running the scanner and choosing the next best world based on the data. Presumably I'll die here at some point and go elsewhere, but I've never had a co worker die, so maybe this is my perfection. Wow, that's depressing, isn't it? I seized on a thread of hope. If you decide where to send me, you can send me back.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Back home.

[Technician]

I should even have a body there. My clone. Nice try, she said, and the purple light strobed.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Think of it as a fresh start

[Technician]

and an opportunity to learn. And shut up, I screamed into my

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

new reality,

[Technician]

now that I knew the worlds were going to get more difficult for me personally. Each time I tried much harder to last. In each one I learned there were medicines to treat the pain of the body, though the best methods caused new problems eventually, and it took me a few worlds to learn the problem proper balance and not die from too much of a good thing. In one world I was a nurse and the mother of triplet toddlers, and my feet ached all the time. In the next, I was a college professor having almost adequate sex with one of my students until she got upset about something and told my employers and my meager comforts all came crashing down in another I spent all day stooping over picking tomatoes while eight foot tall figures in chitinous black armor chittered orders at us. I didn't last long there after I threw a tomato at one of them.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

When I returned to the interval, I

[Technician]

didn't bother to argue with the technician anymore, just submitted the scan and my new deployments. I resolved that even if my worlds were going to get harder and harder for me, I would take steps to mitigate those horrors as much as possible. And I had an advantage, didn't I? I carried knowledge from other worlds. I had a good mind, it turned out, even though I'd never used it for much back home. I had a particularly fine grasp of technical matters, and in each life I studied the most valuable inventions a given world possessed. It was just a shame I'd never done that with the everyday miracles back home. Over time I developed expertise in everything from broadcast technology to transistors, communication satellites and radios, antibiotics and microwaves, radar, and powered flight. These studies didn't always help me. If you're born in a wooden shack on a scoured island, knowing how to build a fusion reactor is no help at all. And when you're a factory drudge in the choking smogs of the internal londinium, your automation overseer isn't interested in your ideas about improving the assembly lines. But in other worlds, where I had some initial resources, and where I was considered attractive and well spoken, I was sometimes able to parlay my knowledge and insights into more comfortable situations. In worlds where women could do such things, at least I was cheated and taken advantage a lot at first. But I learned how to protect my interests over time, and how to balance the natural generosity that came from my life in a post scarcity reality with the pragmaticism necessary to survive in places where competition was ferocious. In some worlds, after successfully attending to my basic needs, I sought love. In some of them, I found it. In others, I didn't seek it at all, but it ambushed me anyway. Love enriched those lives in so many ways, but because I could remember my husbands and wives and spouses after they were lost, those experiences turned into thorns, pricking my mind. Even in new worlds that opened before me, I began to turn away from those feelings when they arose as a hedge against future pain. I felt I'd learned enough about the human heart. At that point, surely my remaining needs for perfection were in other areas. In one world, my parents. But they weren't my parents, not my original ones. They never were. Isn't that strange? We're well off financially, but emotionally cold and demanding. The relative privilege enabled me to excel in my studies, however, and by the time I woke up I was in graduate school doing pure mathematics. To ignore my practical father, I swiftly

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

pivoted to applied physics.

[Technician]

It wasn't hard. Once I talked to the most avaricious, eminent professor in the department and showed him a few drawings, and that was the best world to get. I built a business and it became an empire. The advances I made there, especially in the energy sector, made me wealthy and also made the world substantially better for most of its inhabitants. That milieu was nowhere near the glory of the standard curve, but I was proud of myself for setting it on the beginning of a path that might eventually lead there. I was also finally able to afford decent food and easily attracted an acceptable number of and variety of sexual partners. Sometimes I got high or drunk and talked about the standard curve, and my friends thought I was describing a science fiction story or my vision of the future.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

The latter was closer.

[Technician]

I departed that world at the age of one hundred and six, floating away on a sea of drugs in a bed in my own home, attended by loyal employees and tearful proteges. I would have liked to stay longer, but I never studied life extension technology on the standard curve, and I'd never been to another world that even approached my home's capabilities in that area back in the interval. I sat up, pleased to be in the same young, strong body I'd worn every time I arrived here, even with all the money in the world. In most worlds, pain is inescapable, and many forms of it increase with age. I cheated, I told the technician gleefully. I've been cheating for ages. I'm using the knowledge of my past lives to improve my circumstances in every horrible world you drop me into. She raised one eyebrow, then chuckled. You mean you're learning and adapting, which is the entire point of the process.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

I scowled.

[Technician]

I'm not supposed to remember things like

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

how cold fusion works, though.

[Technician]

It's an unfair advantage, and I'm exploiting it, bringing that kind of technology to fruition in the last milieuage you were in. She scrolled her clipboard that required technical mastery with the details held entirely in your own mind, without so much as a textbook or even a notepad to consult.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

It also took business savvy a keen

[Technician]

understanding of human psychology, attention to detail, the ability to learn from failure, resilience, and a lot of other qualities that we track in your metadata.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

I hate to tell you this, but

[Technician]

you're just getting better. The system works.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Oh, shut up.

[Technician]

I laughed, though for the first time I was curious to see what was coming next instead of just resigned. What was the next challenge going to be, and how was I going to crush it? Where am I going this time? The purple light flashed and she consulted her clipboard.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Ah, well, it looks like the best

[Technician]

option is a place where your old strategies aren't going to be much help.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

This is a real outlier world, different

[Technician]

from most of the others you've seen, and pretty rough. Honestly, I might be seeing you again sooner rather than later. I gave her a savage grin. I'll take that as a challenge technician. Best of luck, Karina, the Clean Energy Queen Morita.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

Think of it as a fresh start and an opportunity to excel.

[Technician]

I shouted as the floor opened beneath me. I came to on my hands and knees in mud that stank of blood. I lifted my head and saw bodies all around me, some human corpses dressed in fur and leather, and some more bizarre, scaly humanoids with lizard heads, wearing armor made of what looked like glossy beetle shells. I struggled to my feet, noting my own fur and leather garments and the knives at my belt and a great hammer at my feet, blunt at one side with a sharp spike on the other. I picked up the hammer, my deeper mind telling me it was my favorite weapon. Everyone around me was dead, and I knew I was the last survivor of a skirmish with the members of some snake cult who'd been transformed by their devotions. My name was Karina the Red. My village was gone, my people had been annihilated, but I still lived, and I wanted revenge. Screw that, I said out loud. I looked around at the mud, the distant mountains, the sun hanging low and shrouded red, and I grinned. Once I had a working steam engine sorted out, I was going to become empress of this place, and after I taught the locals about aspirin and indoor plumbing, there would be statues of me standing tall for 10,000 years. Also, my deeper mind told me that some of the snake cults promised immortality, and that was definitely worth looking into.

[Karina Morita (Narrator/Character)]

And we're back.

[Tina Connolly]

And again, that was the Many Rebirths of Karina Morita By Tim Pratt Narrated by Isabel Jae Kim this was such a delightful story. It definitely made me want to visit the Standard Curve, even if I didn't want to follow Karina's entire trajectory, but honestly, that kind of holds appeal too. The thought of being able to use past knowledge and apply it to new lives. As Karina says, it feels like cheating. But it's nice to watch Karina grow as a person and touch on all the alternate timelines she gets dropped into. Pratt does one more thing with the fantastical twist in the story that I tend to really like, which is she doesn't over explain it. The point is not who set this up and why and how. The point is to watch Karina improve. I'd certainly be curious hear the explanation of these underpinnings, but since Pratt leaves us unexplained, the focus of the story stays on Karina and with my curiosity unfulfilled, it leaves intriguing questions open and I continue to wonder about the story in general Housekeeping News Escape Pod is open to General submissions until May 31, 2026. You can find all the [e-mail] under our guidelines. So if you've been thinking about submitting something to us, why not hop on over there and check that out? Escape Pod is a part of the Escape artist foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution on commercial note Derivatives 4.0 International License. Don't change it. Don't sell it. Please go forth and share it. How do you share it, you ask? Well, in addition to your social media of choice, consider reading and reviewing us on podcast listening sites such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability. Makes for more Escape Pod for you. You can't lose. Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our discord, where you can come chat with other fans as well as our staff members. Shoot. If you enjoyed our story this week, then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com eapodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that go looking for immortality with the Snake Cult. Our opening and closing music is by [e-mail] and our closing quotation this week is from Martha Graham, who said, practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired. Thanks for listening and have fun.

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