LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy Story Podcast (Sci-Fi | Audiobook | Short Stories)

From the very beginning—which I guess is also the middle and the end if you follow the bent logic involved and arrange events by some scheme other than strict chronological order—there was never any way of knowing which one of us, my wife or myself, was going to invent time travel. Narrated by Rajan Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The photograph is of a woman at the center of a forest. She is slim and tall and pale as the birches she stands among. The shadows turn her ribs and spine into branches, into knots in the wood. Around her arms, the peeling white bark of the birches, curved in bracelets. Between her thighs, the hair is dense and springy like moss. She is turning into a tree. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s how I remember it: A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it took me a moment to realize the hand had seven fingers, three more than mine. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He felt death coming a moment before it struck. In the lingering gray twilight, Smoke lay on his bedding, eyes not quite closed and mind adrift, only half-aware of the sounds of the encampment around him: steel on whetstone, the rattle of dice, a soft song, and loud bragging. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster. If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest of his family. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at least a million bucks—and eventually everybody did—they would reset you to whatever age you liked. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is such a thing as an antifuse. This device is used to maintain the ongoing flow of electricity when there is local failure. The antifuse works similarly to a fuse in that it is designed to be sacrificed for a specific goal. But while a fuse is sacrificed to stop electricity from flowing, an antifuse is sacrificed to guarantee that the electricity does not stop. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Heresy,” he told me. The brackish waters of his pool sloshed gently. “Another one?” I said wearily. “There are so many these days.” Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My enemy’s body is still warm when I take my knife to him. Stripped to his skin and lain upon his back, he looks much less frightening than he had when he was alive, armed, and desperate to kill me. But there is still power in the shape of his relaxing muscles and the size of his cooling frame, and, as he is a foot taller than I am, I feel a surge of pride in my accomplishment that is even greater than the hot pleasure of the kill. Narrated by Emily Janice Card. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Six feet tall, the statue had been carved from wood that retained most of its whiteness, even though the date cut into its base read 2005, seven years ago. Jim thought the color might be due to its not having been finished—splinters stood out from the wood’s uneven surface—but didn’t know enough about carpentry to be certain. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The wooden detour barricade is barely in place when I spot the car closing fast from the east. Just a glint of light against the desert hills, yet I know it is his car. I ignite the last flare and toss it onto the centerline of the lonely rural two-lane highway. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She paced the stones, her feet separated from the chill by sable-lined slippers. She was cold despite them, cold from her toes to her crown. Perhaps it was the vengeance of the fire, that she had not joined her husband in its embrace. Long ago, he had decided that he wished to be immolated in the manner of their ancestors. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mabel blurred through the Doorway and stumbled into a wall. She groped for a fingerhold, anything to prop herself up until the gut-twisting vertigo passed. Every time she experienced the blur it got a little worse. All that worse added up to worst because she had made hundreds of auditing trips to the past during her thirty-nine year career in cross-time accounting. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tristram was certain she would never have made the attempt had she not heard that it was a thing other children often did. She did so want to be like other children—lolling about like great striped cats, batting at moths with oversized paws, snapping at dust-motes with wet pink jaws. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A faint, steady vibration carried through the igloo’s massive ice walls—a vibration that shouldn’t have been there. Jayne heard it in her sleep. Age had not dulled her soldier’s reflexes, honed by decades spent on watch against incursions of the Red. Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath. The vibration hummed in the walls, in the bed frame, in the mattress, perceivable even over Carly’s raspy breathing. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I found my friend Desmond Kean at the northeast corner of the penthouse viewing terrace, assembling a telescope with which to look at the world below. He took a metal cylinder holding a lens and screwed it into the side of the telescope, then put his eye to the lens, the picture of concentrated absorption. How often I had found him like this in recent months! It made me shiver a little; this new obsession of his, so much more intense than the handmade clocks, or the stuffed birds, or the geometric proofs, seemed to me a serious malady. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The apartment was in his name, and the Accord was in hers. It took Lauren less than a minute to step out one door and into the other. She put her suitcase in the floorboard and her laptop bag in the passenger seat. Her container garden fit snugly in the back. Narrated by Heather Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Missouri Banks lives in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains, here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly up towards the western sky. She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison’s electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and elixirs. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, Birha laid her hand on the dog’s neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was revisit what had happened all those years ago. Yet her irritation subsided before the memory. She could still see it with the shocking clarity of yesterday: the great, closed eyelid set in the enormous alien stronghold, opening in response to her trick. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something is eating the starship Stephen W. Hawking, chewing it slowly and efficiently to pieces. Hurtling through hyperspace, or merely hanging suspended therein (who can really tell about hyperspace?), the vessel has become entangled with an unknown entity that exhibits at least one recognizable attribute: curiosity.stev Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Sanders was beautiful. One night after work, she stopped off at a bar downtown, which is where she met the beast. “Hi,” the beast said, in a gentle voice. “Can I buy you a drink?” Narrated by Janis Ian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ella sat by Nana’s body for two days before she pushed it out the window. She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do. It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains. Narrated by Christie Yant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My curse is that I set off alarms. Smoke alarms. Car alarms. House alarms. It doesn’t matter what kind; I set them all off as soon as I get close to them. Close is usually about thirty feet. I don’t know why I set them off. I haven’t always been like this. I used to be fairly normal. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carefully, with gloved hands, she removed the object from its stone niche, where it had rested for centuries deep underground, inside the dormant volcano where the mysterious Icelandic cult that guarded it made its home. It hardly weighed anything. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next. Narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fox shoulders and wriggles from between her jaws, first the whiskery, pointed muzzle and then all the rest. Finally free, it shakes its sodden coat and shoots Rosa a disgusted look. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dandelion lost structural integrity so quickly that I doubt the bridge even had time for a distress call, and this escape pod’s radio is only sub-light. Narrated by Ted & Heather Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lloyds was not willing to insure a phoenix egg, not even of the most impeccable pedigree. Hence the inspection of the purchase became a great deal more important. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jamie Keller and his partner hadn’t found the shoggoth larva smugglers yet, but his boss, the head of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation’s southeast hub, had other things on his mind. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s getting harder and harder to pretend we aren’t racing along the edge of a knife, one box of flashlights and a fistful of batteries away from the mercy of the things in the darkness. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I gulp the whiskey and it burns my plastic throat, sets my nutrient sac on fire. I've got filters, but they haven't been changed in six months. Too expensive. Narrated by Joe Barrett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship's net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Georgie got rid of most of what she'd inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn't really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As her breath hissed out it thickened and spread and wrapped around the planet. Before long it was pushing everything down; my mother's breath became the atmosphere of Mars. Narrated by Claire Bloom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields. Narrated by Stephan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Somebody asked me if I'd heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serena still felt the heat of her passage through Kaluza space. That in­candescent journey via the bowels of a singu­larity had raised her temperature dangerously near the fatal point. Narrated by Harlan Ellison®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you've asked for more information about us, which means you're thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all: You. Narrated by Arte Johnson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know how you’re feeling. You wake up alone in a strange room, you get up, you look around, you soon discover that both doors are locked from the outside. It’s enough to unsettle anybody. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it came time for her restructuring on her sixteenth birthday, she was going to walk into the room, and ask to be made a Tiffany. Narrated by Taylor Meskimen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I miss you already. But you know that. What you don’t know is just how proud I am of you. You were born for this, and no one could possibly be able to handle such a demanding job as well as you. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Heather Scott, Gabrielle de Cuir, Ted Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following transcript details the last known use of the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor, once a mandatory install on all craft equipped for interstellar travel. Narrated by Amanda Carlin, with Stefan Rudnicki and Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one knows what happens when an object crosses the point around a black hole known as an event horizon and falls into the singularity. Narrated by Stefan Rudniki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry. Copyright 2011 by Nancy Kress. Narrated by Jim Meskimen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of course we moved into the cities of the planet we now know we must call Zobranoirundisi when Worlds Federated finally permitted a colony there. | Copyright 1973, 2001 by Anne McCaffrey First appeared in Worlds of If, from The Girl Who Heard Dragons Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices