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The Anatomy of Miracles

54:16 recording · AUTO · 3 speakers

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Brief overview

A lonely alien miracle worker and a homesick teenager answer each other's longing and both go home.

  1. Miracles are trades, not engineeringThe miracle worker balances his masters' desire for movement against another mind's desire for stillness — "as fair a trade as ever had been made."
  2. Politeness is the unsolved physics problemLucy's idea that you should ask whoever is on the other side, in art or feelings rather than words, is what finally makes the bridge work.
  3. Home is the kanji that ends the storyThe year's kanji is "home," Lucy's endless calligraphy refrain is "home, home, home," and a framed "some art, some feelings" hangs in her later lab.
Executive Summary AI
  • Host Alistair introduces an Escape Pod bonus replay of episode 750, first aired 17 September 2020: "The Anatomy of Miracles" by Filip Hardar Denisek Zorko, a Slovenian-born Clarion West 2019 graduate living outside Portland, narrated by S.B. Divya and David D. Levine.2:03
  • In the story, an ancient alien miracle worker serves masters who send him to inhospitable planets; he works translocations not by science but by listening across a door into other universes until two beings' desires balance.4:37
  • In a parallel thread, sixteen-year-old Lucy Hasegawa splits her year between Seattle and Tokyo, where her parents David Hasegawa and Emily Smith run the Pacific Institute for Transdimensional Physics, and she suggests they ask permission of whoever lives on the other side, using something universal like art.6:01
  • A five-word message finally reaches the miracle worker after chasing him 973 light-years for 973 years — "Come home. Please come home." — and he stops working, keens his grief, and catches the trace of another mind wanting the same thing.35:32
  • On 31 December 2083 Lucy vanishes from her mother's northeast Seattle lab at four minutes to seven and appears five miles away in her family home, becoming the first human trans-dimensional event; Alistair closes by reading Cameron Hurley on breaking time loops and a Strange New Worlds quote on first contact.45:09
Key Quote
“Impossible in one world might be trivial in another.”
— Narrator16:53
Key Quote
“Above all, he was a translator.”
— Narrator17:48
Key Quote
“Maybe we need permission.”
— Lucy20:11