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What Any Dead Thing Wants

38:41 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Hob exorcises the last haunt, leaks the terraforming footage, gets fired, and builds a preserve with Jaara.

  1. Hob turns on his own company by releasing the footageHe smashes the data safe, then sends the terraforming footage to Ozzy's destination code and is logged out of everything by HQ.
  2. The crash was an accident, not sabotageAnalysis of the dead ship's maintenance logs shows a faulty gas exchange and ventilation connection failed catastrophically, not company monsters.
  3. Small acts matter even when they cannot change everythingHob and Jaara build a preserve around the crash site, and Tina compares it to the parable of the starfish.
Executive Summary AI
  • Host Tina Connolly introduces Escape Pod episode 1028, the third and final part of What Any Dead Thing Wants by Amy Ogden, a Nebula finalist first published in Psychopomp, narrated by Isaac Harwood with audio production by Summer Brooks.0:53
  • Back at the habitat, Hob finds messages from Jaara about missed check-ins and the relay files on Ozzy Sagar's crew, and Ozzy tells him he wants what any dead thing wants, the impossible, before vanishing.4:30
  • Hob exorcises the cabbage-faced megafauna haunt by conjuring an illusion of its lost child, then smashes the data safe holding Ozzy's drone footage with a hammer while Ozzy howls at him to stop, arguing nobody cares about exos.9:39
  • Ozzy returns one last time to enter a destination code for the footage and stops existing; Hob presses send, wakes to a dozen urgent notifications, an interview request, a demand for testimony, and news that he is fired and locked out.20:39
  • Jaara arrives to take him into custody but instead joins him in re-terraforming the crash site into a preserve for the CFMs, and Tina closes with the parable of the starfish and Mary Oliver's The Waterfall.25:47
Key Quote
“I don't know anything. I guess I want what any dead thing wants.”
— Ozzy (read by Isaac Harwood)7:02
Key Quote
“You think that matters? People care about human lives, not exos.”
— Hob (read by Isaac Harwood)14:42
Key Quote
“Remaking a world in your image is only a good idea if you aren't ugly as shit to begin with.”
— Isaac Harwood (narrator)16:53