Escape

episode 673. Optimizing the verified good by Effie Seaberg. Welcome to Artemis Rising. I'm going to Hello and welcome to Escape Pod, your weekly science fiction podcast. I'm Laura Perlman, your guest host for this episode.

I'm an associate editor in Escape Pod, the author of a handful of short stories, and along with

SK Nash, one of the guest editors for Artemis Rising Five. Our story this week is optimizing the verified good by Effie Seyberg.

This story was originally published in Analog September, October 2018.

Effie Seyberg is a fantasy and science fiction writer.

Her stories can be found in the Women Destroy Science Fiction Special Edition of Light Speed magazine, winner of the 2015

British Fantasy Award for Best Jampology, Galaxy's Edge, Analog, Fireside Fiction, and Podcasts

Amongst others. Her stories include a finalist in the Am Lab Awards 2016,

and honorable mention in the year's best Y-A speculative fiction 2015,

and inclusions in the Tangent 2016 recommended reading list.

She is a graduate of Taos Toolbox

and is a member of Sifua and Codex.

Effie lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She likes to make sculpted cakes and bad puns.

Read more of Effie's work at Effieiber.

Or follow her on Twitter at FESIBER.com or follow her on Twitter at FES that's spelled EFF IES.

Your narrator this week is Trendane Sparks. Trendane Sparks was originally born in Texas, but

eventually escaped and wound his way through a mystical series of jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has worked as a software QA

tester for both graphics drivers and video games, a freelance mascot

performer, and several jobs on a PBS kids show. For most of his life people have

told him that his voice is a pleasure to listen to. But since being a

werewolf foam sex operator can get boring, he decided to use his powers to entertain a broader audience.

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