Author Topic: PseudoPod 655: Black Matter  (Read 1765 times)

Bdoomed

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on: July 05, 2019, 05:48:03 AM
PseudoPod 655: Black Matter

Author: Vivian Shaw
Narrator: Robert C. Eccles
Host: Alasdair Stuart

PseudoPod 655: Black Matter is a PseudoPod original.



Show Notes
“I’m an aviation nerd with trainwreck syndrome, so air crash investigation is a subject dear to my heart. Having watched documentaries on (and read NTSB reports about) ever so many crashes, I began to wonder what it might be like if the investigators had one last secret fall-back option when no clear cause for an accident could be found, and what it’d be like to be that fall-back option. I write fiction in which the supernatural and the ordinary exist side-by-side — monsters and magic are real, if not commonly understood — and the idea of a practical necromancer contracted to the NTSB seemed like an obvious conclusion.”



… when all those legs and arms and heads… shall join together at the latter day and cry all “we died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left…

—Shakespeare, Henry V

It’s easier if you use a finger. If you have a finger to use. I don’t have fingers, on this one. What I have is a case full of samples, in tubes, and I can already tell this is a complete shitshow: they’re hopelessly garbled, mixed up together in a cacophony of terror and pain that gives me the kind of headache that will last for days. I need to get out to the site.

They don’t like people poking around, of course, during an active investigation, but I’m nominally part of the National Transportation Safety Board – got the blue nylon jacket with the letters on the back and everything, like some overgrown high-school kid who lettered in nerd instead of football. I’m allowed access to the crash site, it’s written down in the rules, and if I pick up fingers that don’t belong to me it doesn’t technically fuck with the chain-of-evidence protocol. Sometimes I get lucky and find what I need right away, soaked into the cockpit: human flesh and bone pulverized at the point of impact to a pink soup which nonetheless is capable of standing up, on this latter day, and telling me a tale. Sometimes I don’t, and it takes longer.

I’m strictly last-resort. When everything else is coming up empty, when both black boxes and the quick-access recorder, if there is one, are useless; when they cannot from the radar track and transponder data work out why the plane did what it did, when there’s no obvious evidence of explosion and the pilots didn’t say anything useful to ATC and all the shreds of aluminum and rubber and plastic are keeping their secrets to themselves – when they simply do not know enough to determine probable cause – that’s when they call me, and it’s always four a.m. when that call comes through. Stacy, we got one. Pack up your crystal ball and shag ass, we need you.




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I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


Gargoyle

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Reply #1 on: July 05, 2019, 03:06:06 PM
I really enjoyed this episode, it feels like the first chapter of a book.

I got a bit confused about Devin Stacy's power, mainly triggered by a comment by Alasdair in the outro about The Thing In The Mountain (TTITM) "looking at Stacy" and it sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to work out which way the story should be read.

Quote
In that second before the end of it I had looked down at the mountaintop five miles below our feet, and something vast had looked back at me, and seen me. It had seen me very well, and it had smiled.

My view of Stacy's power was that he could experience what the pilot had experienced.

Quote
I see it. Captain Warner sees it, and therefore so do I

I read that as Stacy's power is not time travel, he's has no affect on the events he is watching, he is just re-experiencing the events now (a few days after the crash) that the pilot is sharing with him. This leads me to 2 possible conclusions:

  • TTITM was smiling at the pilot, Stacy experienced the fear the pilot felt. TTITM has no knowledge of Stacy from re-experiencing the event
  • TTITM can somehow step into the re-experienced events shared between the pilot and Stacy at a time after the original plane crash, and alter how Stacy experienced the event

Looking forward to a Chapter 2 to see if TTITM does know Stacy or not.



Scuba Man

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Reply #2 on: July 16, 2019, 01:31:15 PM
I really enjoyed this episode, it feels like the first chapter of a book.

I got a bit confused about Devin Stacy's power, mainly triggered by a comment by Alasdair in the outro about The Thing In The Mountain (TTITM) "looking at Stacy" and it sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to work out which way the story should be read.

Quote
In that second before the end of it I had looked down at the mountaintop five miles below our feet, and something vast had looked back at me, and seen me. It had seen me very well, and it had smiled.

My view of Stacy's power was that he could experience what the pilot had experienced.

Quote
I see it. Captain Warner sees it, and therefore so do I

I read that as Stacy's power is not time travel, he's has no affect on the events he is watching, he is just re-experiencing the events now (a few days after the crash) that the pilot is sharing with him. This leads me to 2 possible conclusions:

  • TTITM was smiling at the pilot, Stacy experienced the fear the pilot felt. TTITM has no knowledge of Stacy from re-experiencing the event
  • TTITM can somehow step into the re-experienced events shared between the pilot and Stacy at a time after the original plane crash, and alter how Stacy experienced the event

Looking forward to a Chapter 2 to see if TTITM does know Stacy or not.
You’re right on the money, Gargoyle. This. This was a tantalizing introduction into a VERY wrong universe. Whatever the hell was...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

IT IS PLAYTIME FOR THE LOVECRAFTIAN HELL BEAST!
Wow, when the narrator...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
If the owners of the franchise could ever properly reboot it, I could see plenty of cameos for John Constantine in this world (with a John Wick flare).
Dear authour (Vivian Shaw): bravo, eh. As I’m zipping along on a high speed train to Canterbury, I’m 99.991% that I’ll arrive without being pulverized into mush. Thanks... grumble grumble heh heh...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: July 16, 2019, 01:36:03 PM by Scuba Man »

I'm a stand-up philosopher until 2024. Then, I move onto my next gig. I'm a gentleman forester and farmer. I also enjoy jumping into Lake Huron and panicking the fish.


Scattercat

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Reply #3 on: August 26, 2019, 05:04:47 AM
I'm always down for downtrodden blue-collar workaday magic tech support.  It's one of my favorite (sub-sub-sub) genres.  The main character was fun to spend time with and the premise was interesting and amusing.

It wasn't as fun for me having the problem be an ancient god-entity; I didn't end up liking the "first chapter of a novel reworked into a short story" feel.  I prefer it when stories are a little more self-contained and the lingering "what if?" questions are less directly "what happens next?"  Still, I did like that the solution to an ancient horror awakening is "route the planes around it."  That feels very true to human experience and made me think of things like this map; illustrations of how, despite all our world-altering (and potentially environmentally catastrophic) powers of invention, we are still so fundamentally limited and tied to the natural world, even if we can't always perceive it.
« Last Edit: August 26, 2019, 06:00:55 AM by Scattercat »