Author Topic: EP734: Murmuration  (Read 1241 times)

divs

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on: June 02, 2020, 06:25:50 PM
Escape Pod 734: Murmuration

Author: E. Catherine Tobler
Narrator: S.B. Divya
Host: Benjamin C. Kinney
Audio Producer: Summer Brooks

This story appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 56 (April 2017)

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Show Notes
This is the fourth in a special series of space-themed stories in May 2020.



Sita Balachandran found the bone on her forty-first birthday, its pale wind-scoured point emerging from the dry Martian floodplain like the splintered stalk of a flower. At first, she thought it was a stone, the floodplain a riot of similar, jagged debris, but the shape and color told her otherwise. A fossilized rib bone, she was sure.

The Martian atmosphere was well-known for the tricks it would play, even the earliest collected images of Mars calling to mind familiar shapes. A rock that resembled a crouched squirrel. A swirl of dark dust that took on the shape of a mourning woman. People sought what they understood, preferring the familiar rather than contemplating what they did not know. Especially when it came to distant worlds. But archaeologists couldn’t afford to look away; they had to look at everything from a new perspective, in order to assemble the broken past.

No matter how Sita looked at the bone, no matter how she tried to see it from a new perspective, it remained a bone. Beneath the shadow of the ancient, excavated Pathfinder lander shell, a bone.




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CryptoMe

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Reply #1 on: April 21, 2021, 04:36:29 AM
I have no idea what went on in this story. What was the piece of Mars in the MC? Why did it kill her? What was with all the Martians trapped underground and suddenly released - I mean that really came out of nowhere. Can anyone explain any of this?