EscapeBOD, Episode 114, Here Instead of Bear, Part 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 part two of Here Instead of There by Elizabeth Bear.

This story was originally published in Communications Breakdown in 2023.

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 Astounding 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 clifai 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, Hykenpunk,

and Colliderytrope.

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

Now, get ready for a struggle to survive against nature's wrath

because it's story time.

With the launch gone, there was just one rubber dinghy with an outboard motor stowed under the floor of the hangar, along with two kayaks, a sailboard, and a jet ski in an abjectly terrifying state of disrepair.

There were 23 human souls on the pod, plus Henry.

Doc and her wife went up and down the steads, alerting our neighbors that they needed to clear out.

By the time they came back, we got in the fugs organized into evacuation groups.

...