EscapeBOD, Episode 113. Here Instead of Bear. Part 1 of 2. By Elizabeth Bear. Hello and welcome to Escape Pod, your weekly science fiction podcast.

I'm Valerie Valdez, your host for this episode.

Our story this week is Here Instead of There by Elizabeth Bear.

This story was originally published in Communications Breakdown in 2023.

It will be presented in two parts.

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year.

She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Aestounding Award-winning

author of over 30 novels and more than 100 short stories. She lives in the Happy Valley

of Massachusetts with her husband, best-selling fantasy author Scott Lynch, four cats, and two

Icelandic horses. Our narrator, Jess Lewis, is a trans, non-binary, and pansexual writer, designer, and voice

actor who hails from the hollers of Western North Carolina.

They currently live in the deep south, where they explore futures of liberation and how

to get there.

When they're not imagining weird queer clify utopias, designing

future tech, or facilitating capacity-building workshops, they're organizing programming with their

local queer community and the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird. Their work has

appeared in a range of publications, including Solarpunk magazine Hyphen Punk, and Colliderotrope.

You can visit their website at queerfutures.com and follow them on Instagram at Mary Noontide.

Now get ready for a floating common to get some bad weather news because it's story time.

Here instead of there, written by Elizabeth Bear, narrated by Jess Lewis.

Waking up sick in a punk house shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, so I don't know why it always came as a surprise to me.

My head throbbed so bad, I couldn't tell the difference between the hangover, my sinus headache, and Kai pumummeling the drum set over in the yacht hanger. The Kai part also wasn't unusual. The crash's drummer is our early riser. That's the

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