Summary: by Jeffrey Wikstrom Read by Alasdair Stuart Links for this episode: Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page About the Author… Jeffrey Wikstrom is a writer, registered patent agent, gamer, PhD chemist, and nerdly hobbyist. This blog consists of material written on these interests and things relating to them; lately it’s mostly King Arthur. After growing up in Arkansas and the Gulf Coast, he went to school in Boston and now lives in Wilmington DE, in a house he shares with his wife and their dogs. About the Narrator… I’ve worked as a magician, a rally marshal, a secretary, the world’s politest bouncer, and the manager of a comic/game store. I’m now a freelance journalist, editor and podcaster and write regularly for SFX, Bleeding Cool, How It Works, Neo and Comic Heroes. I edit Hub magazine (www.hubfiction.com), a free weekly PDF magazine covering science fiction, fantasy and horror with 10,000 readers that’s relaunching shortly and I host Pseudopod (www.pseudopod.org), the weekly horror ficton podcast. Nutshell by Jeffrey Wikstrom Carpet ocean, stretching over miles; hills and valleys and ravines, all upholstered. The green indoor-outdoor gives way to blue, as land gives way to sea, but the texture never changes. When it rains, as it sometimes does, the drops pass through the carpet without making contact, as though they or it aren’t really there. It’s there enough for me to walk on, at least, though spongy in some places and firm in others, as though it conceals hidden frames or foundations. Out on the blue carpet-sea, it feels stretched, tight, as though I walk on a drumhead. Maybe if I cracked it open I would find a vast dark expanse of water, lit by undersea jack-o-lanterns and holes that show the sky without breaking up the carpet-underside ceiling. None of it is real, of course. That probably goes without saying. It’s funny; I wasn’t supposed to experience time at all. When they loaded us into the ship, we were told that the travel would be instantaneous from our perspectives. One minute lying down in the big white plastic tombs, the next freshly decanted and opening raw new eyes. We would transition seamlessly from fluorescents and anesthesia to the light of some distant new sun. Certainly I have no memory of consciousness during departure. I wouldn’t have wanted to be aware, during that dreadful acceleration which pulped our bones, and wrecked our flesh. By then they had already guided us from our old bodies into the safety of simulation and storage. This curated world never bruises me or shows me sharp edges. Trees are padded poles, slick vinyl trunks capped by rubbery green spheres fifteen, twenty feet up. Stairsteps run up the hillsides, though even the steepest rises are shallow enough I don’t really need the footholds. Fat plush toys, pink and green and blue, gambol across the plains and mimic living beasts grazing carpet-grass, or drinking from carpet-brooks. They ignore me, even when I shove or punch them. Do I dream? In dreaming, should I question my dream? Should I feel some continuity of experience? I can loop around, circle back and pass the same stand of vinyl tree-sculptures four times without noticing any discrepancies. Do I simply lack a capacity to recognize breaches of continuity? Was that cottage always there? I think it wasn’t. Still, it’s mine, and not unwelcome. I know it. I don’t fear it. A woolen cube, windowed and doored, with a taut wedge of canvas for a roof. I press my hand into the salmon-colored exterior wall. It sinks in a half-inch, and leaves a deep handprint that faded slowly. The flannel texture of the wall exactly matches a blanket I remember from childhood, one just that shade of pink. The vast hall within stretches far too large to fit in that flannel cube exterior. I step ont[...]
