A skate pod episode 856, The Princess, MP, by Brian Hugenbrue.

Hey there, welcome to a skate pod. I'm your host and co-editor, Merlaferty.

This week we bring you the Princess, MP, by Brian Hugenbrue. Brian is a speculative fiction

writer and poet living in upstate New York with his family and their pets. By day, he writes

information security programs to protect your data on and from the internet. His work has been

featured in departure mirror, apparition lit, syntax and salt, and several anthologies. No, he's

not sure how to say his last name either. It's narrated for us by Lee Wallace. Lee is an Ottawa

writer, artist and narrator who worked with a Canadian federal government. Perfection is available

in Tesseract 19, podcast and urban fantasist. She's a graduate of the 2013 Bible Paradise Workshop.

This is an escape pod original. I can tell you're 0.0003% more distracted now than you were

two seconds ago so I will go ahead and get started because it's story time.

The Princess, MP, by Brian Hugenbrue, narrated by Lee Wallace.

I sat in the commander's office at Hexastation in close that stank of subspace and the only

polite thing I could do to drown out the universe was compute obscene sums in my head.

It didn't stop the sounds from piercing my ears though. Metal chairs scraping against plastic

floors, a pulse generators low-thrumming some 20 floors below. The whisper of air recycling

through the prefab station. The universe was omnipresent. I could feel it all and it never, ever stopped.

Lullabies were my preferred method of soothing soul and stilling mind.

I learned thousands of them in the earliest days of my conditioning.

Alas, people ask the wrong kinds of questions if one starts singing mid-conversation.

Math was a precisely imperfect fallback. So when Seneca King asked me a question,

it took a moment for his words to cut through the white noise. I stopped adding

...