Escape Artists
PseudoPod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Bdoomed on April 21, 2022, 03:08:25 PM
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PseudoPod 806 : Garden Empire (https://pseudopod.org/2022/04/15/pseudopod-806-garden-empire/)
Author: Christopher Matson (https://pseudopod.org/people/christopher-matson/)
Narrator: Dan Rabarts (https://pseudopod.org/people/dan-rabarts/)
Host: Scott Campbell (https://pseudopod.org/people/scott-campbell/)
Audio Producer: Marty Perrett (https://pseudopod.org/people/marty-perrett/)
PseudoPod 806 : Garden Empire is a PseudoPod original.
Content Warning:
I’d bought the house only the week before, when I was still in possession both of my teeth and of my job as the Head of Machine Learning for an Auckland-based startup. A two-story villa with a section of native bush so dense that it baffled the city noise into a murmur.
After David called to tell me I was being pushed out, I wandered in a daze out of the house and into the cool heart of the garden, where I slumped against a tree fern and watched a bumblebee clamber about a lavender bush. Its bulbous shape evoked the image of a furred twitching brain – my brain, I idly imagined, always seeking nutritious data. But where would it feed if the lavender sickened? Would it throb unhappily to a dark corner of the garden, to dine on sullen fungal growths or the entrails of a dead mouse? My mind’s eye would not hold the bee’s gentle fur in the same scope as a rodent’s cadaver, and the bee flickered into a fat black fly, and the fly multiplied into a swarm. Bees, entrails, flies … Mother had often warned me to be on guard against unhealthy mental progressions, and I realized that without a job I would need something appropriate to occupy my teeming mind.
I needed a hobby.
Listen to this week's PseudoPod. (https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/pseudopod/Pseudo806_GardenEmpire.mp3)
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