Contents (Both Exist, and Exist Not) Editor’s Note —3— EP269: Élan Vital By K. Tempest Bradford —4— Book Review: For The Win Review by Josh Roseman —11— EP271: God Of The Lower Level By Charles M. Saplak —13— Sauropod Dinosaurs had weird feet By Sarah Frost —19— EP273: Dead’s End to Middleton By Natania Barron —20— Superhero Fiction: The Next Big Thing? by Adam Christopher —32— Escape Pod Publisher: Ben Phillips – ben @ escapeartists.net Founder: Steve Eley – steve @ escapeartists.net Editor: Mur Lafferty – editor @ escapepod.org Assistant Editor: Bill Peters – bill @ escapeartists.net The Soundproof Escape Pod and all works within are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All works are copyright their respective authors. Hello— Mur kindly introduced me in the last issue of Soundproof, but for anyone who missed that, hi. I’m Escape Pod’s Assistant Editor, and I’m most publicly known for doing the feedback segments in the podcast. I also oversee our teem of slush readers and end up sending out a lot of our rejections, and of course I lay out Soundproof. And other things, as necessary. So in this beginning of a new year, I’m instead going to take you back a few days to the death of the last machine on earth that could turn a roll of Kodachrome from an opaque deep red film stock into color etched rectangles of plastic. Most of us have moved onto digital, which, let’s be fair, is significantly more user friendly and easier to control. Cheaper, too. But it says something about Kodachrome — the first successful color film — that it took 75 years to be phased out of production. Sure, it had dwindled in years past, and films meant for paper prints rather than to be projected got rapidly popular, and it was a finicky, and slow, film to shoot. Getting it developed in the last decade or so meant sending it to one place in Kansas and always worrying that the machine would break or Kodak would stop making the developing chemistry. While it’s trivial to develop black and white film at home, and not too horrible to do most modern color films, Kodachrome’s process (K-14) would confound most any man. But it was pretty. Someone wrote a bit too saccharine song about it. And it picked up the light in a bit dif- ferent way than everything after it did. So this month we’re bringing you three stories in this pixelated form: Élan Vital by K. Tempest Bradford, Dead’s End to Middleton by Natania Barron, and God of the Lower Level by Charles M. Saplak. They’re quite good. —— Bill Bill Peters Assistant Editor, Escape Pod —30— 3 EP269:Élan Vital By K. Tempest Bradford The few minutes I had to spend in the Institute’s waiting room were my least favorite part of coming up to visit my mother. It felt more like a dialysis room, the visitors sunk into the overly-soft couches and not speaking, just drinking orange juice and recovering. There were no magazines and no television, just cold air blowing from the vents and generic music flowing with it. I’d finished my juice and was beginning to brood on my dislike for overly air-conditioned buildings when my mother arrived attended by a nurse. I kissed and hugged her, automatically asking how she was, mouthing the answer she always gave as she gave it again. “I’m fine, same as always.” It wasn’t strictly true, but true enough. “Let’s go on out,” she said, shrugging off the nurse’s continued assistance. “It’s too cold in here.” Despite the hint, the nurse tried to help Mom over the threshold. As always, she rebuffed any attempt to treat her like an old person. “Where to today?” she asked, slipping her arm into mine as we escaped the frigid building. “Just down to the lake,” I said. “Don’t want to overexert you.” She squeezed my arm as her feet slid carefully over the cobbled path. I wanted her to use a wheelchair, or a walker, at least. She wouldn’t. “What you mean is that we haven’t got so much time today,” she said. I shrugged instead of answering. I didn’t want to go into why I couldn’t afford much this trip. “Next time I’ll come for a couple of days, at least. I promise.” “No, that’s all right,” she said. “I don’t like it when you spend so much for days and more. A few hours is fine.” I helped her past the immaculately landscaped gardens and small orchards. The scent of flowers, herbs, and fresh-cut grass wafting at us in turn. I glanced at the garden entrances as we passed by, catching quick glances of other people in the middle of visits. A young couple who’d been in the waiting room with me knelt by a small, bald girl as she splashed in the koi pond. Two elderly women stood under a weeping wil- low, their heads close, lips barely moving. A large group of people speaking Mandarin milled around the waterfall in the rock garden. I could still hear faint traces of their melodic din all the way down by the lake. I preferred this spot–the flora was less regimented and more natural. And no walls. Just an open space, water gently flicking the shoreline, a beautiful view down the hill, and the occasional cat wandering by. “This hasn’t changed much,” my mom said as I helped her down on one of the small benches by the water. “I thought they were going to get ducks or geese or something.” I chose a nearby rock for my own perch. “I think they’re having trouble with permits or whatever you need nowadays.” The wind kicked up, sending freckles of reflected light across her face. Her skin was still perfect, beautiful and dark brown, though stretched across her cheekbones a little too tight. I hated that I never had enough to restore her round cheeks and full figure. I have to look at pictures just to remember her that way. “You haven’t changed much, either,” she said while fussing with my hair. I’d bought some dye the week 4 before, knowing she’d notice it. “How long has it been?” “Three months.” She let out a familiar sigh–part exhaustion, part exasperation, part sadness, I suppose. “That’s too soon.” “It’s your birthday, though.” “Is it? It’s fall already?” She looked out over the small forest that edged the Institute’s boundary a few miles away. The trees were still green with no hint of turning. It always felt and looked like summer there; one of the reasons the administrators chose the location. “I miss the seasons. Fall colors, Christmas snow…” “You never did when you had to shovel it.” That got her to smile. I reached out and held her hand; still a little cold even in the full sunlight. “Besides, I missed you.” “I know. But…” “And I won’t be able to come back until after the new year, anyway, so I wanted to squeeze in one more visit. Since today is special…” Years ago I used to bring her cake and presents on her birthday. She couldn’t really eat the cake–one of the side effects of whatever they did when they brought her back. The presents had to go back home with me since she didn’t have any place to put them and couldn’t wear clothing or jewelry once she went back to sleep. I hated having to give that up, too. “Okay, I’ll give you a pass this time.” She kissed my cheek, seeming more like her old self. “Where are you off to?” “Rwanda. For a dig. Dr. Berman promised I’d be more than a glorified volunteer wrangler this trip. And they want me for a year. Still, I’ll try to come back and see you sooner than that.” “No, you should concentrate on your work. I’ll still be here.” My mother never changed. It was the same when she was sick. I wanted to take a break from college and stay home with her. It was pretty clear that her death was inevitable by that time, the only question being: how long? I wanted to be with her, she wanted me back in class. If you take a leave of absence you might never go back, she’d said. So I went back. “For me it’ll seem like you’ve gone and come back right away.” Trying to reassure me again. “I know,” I said. “Must be strange, not being able to perceive the passage of time.” We didn’t say anything for a while. This was the part of the visit where one of us either addressed the el- ephant in the room or steered the conversation around it. “At least I’m not as bad as Ella,” she said. And we both laughed. My aunt, her older sister, was so notorious for being late that we started her funeral a few hours behind schedule because it just felt right. My cousin Brandon joked that we should have carved an epitaph on her headstone: “I’ll be back in five minutes.” “Remember the time she was supposed to pick me up from rehearsal or something?” “And you waited for her, caught the bus, and was home before she’d even left the house!” Mom kept me laughing for a long time, recounting trips she’d taken with Ella and their cousins and every- thing that went wrong because they were never on time anywhere.