The Soundproof Escape Pod Magazine
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/ SOUNDPROOF / 1 The Soundproof Escape Pod Magazine Digest 2, Q2 2012 Part of Escape Artists, Inc Escapepod.org Editor: Mur Lafferty Assistant Editor: Nathaniel Lee Producer: Mat Weller Web Content Editor: Josh Roseman Publisher: Paul Haring Founder: Steve Eley Creative Commons BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the authors / SOUNDPROOF / 2 Letter from the editor Dear Faithful Listeners: It’s been a fantastic quarter, with EP getting back on our feet with a new assistant editor, Nathaniel Lee, and a hard slog through our outstanding slush pile. We had our annual Hugo month, and we were able to feature four of the five nominated stories, and we’ll feature those here, as well. If you want to read John Scalzi’s story, you can see it at Tor.com. The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu, recently won the Nebula Award, and we’ll be featuring another story by Mr. Liu in coming months. Also this quarter we feature work from Catherine M. Valente and Lavie Tidhar, plus some Escape Pod originals! We also celebrated superheroes in June, so look for three awesome costumed stories. Be mighty- Mur Lafferty [email protected] / SOUNDPROOF / 3 “Run,” Bakri Says by Ferrett Steinmetz "I just want to know where my brother is," Irena yells at the guards. The English words are thick and slow on her tongue, like honey. She holds her hands high in the air; the gun she's tucked into the back of her pants jabs at her spine. She doesn't want to kill the soldiers on this iteration; she's never killed anyone before, and doesn't want to start. But unless she can get poor, weak Sammi out of that prison in the next fifty/infinity minutes, they'll start in on him with the rubber hoses and he'll tell them what he's done. And though she loves her brother with all her heart, it would be a blessing then if the Americans beat him to death. The guards are still at the far end of the street, just before the tangle of barbed wire that bars the prison entrance. Irena stands still, lets them approach her, guns out. One is a black man, the skin around his eyes creased with a habitual expression of distrust; a fringe of white hair and an unwavering aim marks him as a career man. The other is a younger man, squinting nervously, his babyfat face the picture of every new American soldier. Above them, a third soldier looks down from his wooden tower, reaching for the radio at his belt. She hopes she won't get to know them. This will be easier if all they do is point guns and yell. It'll be just like Sammi's stupid videogames. "My brother," she repeats, her mouth dry; it hurts to raise her arms after the rough surgery Bakri's done with an X-acto knife and some fishing line. "His name is Sammi Daraghmeh. You rounded him up last night, with many other men. He is - " Their gazes catch on the rough iron manacle dangling from her left wrist. She looks up, remembers that Bakri installed a button on the tether so she could rewind, realizes the front of her cornflower-blue abayah is splotched with blood from her oozing stitches. "Wait." She backs away. "I'm not - " The younger soldier yells, "She's got something!" They open fire. Something tugs at her neck, parting flesh; another crack, and she swallows her own teeth. She tries to talk but her windpipe whistles; her body betrays her, refusing to move as she crumples to the ground, willing herself to keep going. Nothing listens. This is death, she thinks. This is what it's like to die. # "Run," Bakri says, and Irena is standing in an alleyway instead of dying on the street - gravity's all wrong and her muscles follow her orders again. Her arms and legs flail and she topples face-first into a pile of rotting lettuce. The gun Bakri has just pressed into her hands falls to the ground. Dying was worse than she'd thought. Her mind's still jangled with the shock, from feeling all her nerves shrieking in panic as she died. She shudders in the garbage, trying to regain / SOUNDPROOF / 4 strength. Bakri picks her up. "What is your goal?" he barks, keeping his voice low so the shoppers at the other end of the grocery store's alleyway don't hear. Why is he asking me that? she thinks, then remembers: all the others went insane. She wouldn't even be here if Farhouz hadn't slaughtered seventeen soldiers inside the Green Zone. It takes an effort to speak. "To - to rescue Sammi." "Good." The tension drains from his face. He looks so relieved that Irena thinks he might burst into tears. "What iteration? You did iterate, right?" "Two," she says numbly, understanding what his relief means: he didn't know. He'd sent her off to be shot, unsure whether he'd linked her brother's technology to the heart monitor he'd stuck in the gash in her chest. It was supposed to trigger a rewind when her heart stopped. If he'd misconfigured it, Irena's consciousness would have died in an immutable present. Irena looks back at The Save Point, stashed underneath a pile of crates, a contraption that's totally Sammi; it's several old X-Boxes wired together with rusted antenna and whirligig copper cups, the humming circuitry glowing green. It looks like trash, except for the bright red "<<" arrows Sammi spraypainted onto the side. That, and the fact that it just hauled her consciousness back through time. Bakri gives her an unapologetic nod: yes, I sent you off to die. "We can't let the Americans get it." "No," she agrees, then runs out to the street, headed four blocks down to where the prison is. She closes her hands into fists so her fingers don't tremble. She's been shot. She will be shot again, and again, until she rescues Sammi. # "Run," Bakri says, and this time she pushes the tether up around her arm - it's wide enough to slide up over her bicep, underneath her abayah's billowing sleeves - but the guards are panicky. They shoot her when she crosses the chain they've strung across the road to the prison entrance. God damn you, she thinks. I'm not like Sammi. I don't want to kill you. But they're terrified of what Fahrouz did. He cut the throats of seventeen men before anyone heard him; it's why the Americans rounded up anyone who had any connection to the resistance last night, including her brother. They think Fahrouz was a new breed of super-soldier; they believe any brown face is capable of killing them. But she's just a girl who's never fired a gun, not even in Sammi's stupid videogames. "Run," Bakri says. She tries climbing the high fence around the prison, but the barbed wire rips at her hands and the guard on the wooden sniper platform scans the prison every sixty seconds. He is inhuman, never tiring (at least in the fifty minutes she has before The Save Point's power / SOUNDPROOF / 5 fades and she's pulled back to the alleyway) - and his aim is infallible. He introduces her to the horror of her first headshot; when she reappears in the alleyway, her brain patterns are so scrambled she has a seizure. "Run," Bakri says. She tries different approaches; she smears her face with blood, yelling there's a shooter in the marketplace. She weeps, approaching as a mourner. She sneaks from the shadows. Anything to avoid killing them. They yell that they have orders to open fire on anyone crossing the line. Though they wince when they pull the trigger, open fire they do. "Run," Bakri says. She tries prostrating herself upon the ground. As she kneels to place her hands on the concrete, the tether slides down her arm. The sudden movement causes them to fire. "Run," Bakri says. She's getting good at dying, now. The trick is to go slack, so you don't flail upon waking when you rewind. Yet surrendering to her body's shutdown is like dying before she's dead. And every time she returns, Bakri's grabbing her with his sweaty palms, demanding to know her goal. "Stop it." She slaps his hands away. She shakes the iron bracelet at him; things inside it rattle. "You gave me a tether that looks like a damn bomb. No wonder they're shooting me! You have to restart it - Sammi made a tether you could bite down on, so no one could see - " "That one broke when they shot Fahrouz in the head," Bakri snaps back. "You're lucky I could build any tether at all. You're lucky I'm here. Everyone else thinks this machine just drives men mad. They want Sammi to die." The stitches from where Bakri implanted the heart monitor never stop hurting, her gashes always bleeding in the same way. She's always thirsty; her body can never relieve itself as she loops through the same time again and again. She gorges herself on stolen drinks from the marketplace between the alleyway and the prison - but then she's back with Bakri, dryness tickling the back of her throat. Why didn't she drink before Bakri started this? Why didn't anyone tell her to start the Save Point when she was lying down, so she wouldn't keep falling over? "Run," Bakri says.