Escape Pod 1066: Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being (Part 1)

Tatiana Grey (0:08)

Escape Pod, Episode 1066 Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being.

Mur Lafferty (0:14)

Part 1, by A. W.

Tatiana Grey (0:16)

Prihandita.

Mur Lafferty (0:41)

Hello and welcome to Escape Pod. I'm your host and co-editor, Mur Lafferty.

This week, we bring you part 1 of Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being by A. W. Prihandita. A. W she-her is a Nebula Award-winning author of speculative fiction. She splits her time between the US where she pursued her graduate studies and Indonesia where she grew up and where her home remains. She attended the Odyssey Workshop in 2023 on their Fresh Voices Scholarship and the Syrian Workshop in 2024 on their Octavia Butler Scholarship. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Cast of Wonders, The Dark, and Correjo, among others.

Besides the Nebula Award-win, her story has also been a finalist in the Ignite and UG Awards. After earning a Ph.D. in Language and Rhetoric from the University of Washington, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, at the University of Maryland in College Park.

You can find her on Instagram and Threads and Blue Sky at AW. Prihandita. Our narrator is Tatiana Grey. Tatiana is a critically acclaimed actress of stage, screen, and the audio booth. She has been nominated for dozens of fancy awards, but hasn't won a single damn thing. She lives in a minuscule apartment in Brooklyn, New York, which she hopes to move out of one day because they don't allow pets. What a travesty.

This originally ran in Clarkesworld, and won the 2024 Nebula for Best Novelette. Get your translation dictionaries ready. It's story time.

Tatiana Grey (2:20)

Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being by A. W. Prihandita Dark, there's a hole growing in me, the alien said, through the spherical interpreting machine hovering over them.

Samal barely registered the word hole, so taken was she by the sight of the alien. If she were just a tad less caring about propriety, she would have let her eyes blow wide open. The alien looked impossibly transparent, yet not transparent at the same time, like a mound of water. Their shape was almost humanoid, a roundish head sitting atop a misshapen lump of torso. They were visible in the way ocean waves were visible, only through folds that magnified its translucence to almost opaqueness. Samao glanced again at the patient form. Name. Tzuzna. He-him. Species. Plasmorinox motori.

Samao had never heard of the Plasmorinox before, and a quick look up in Bras's database of interstellar species told her this wasn't her fault. The Plasmorinox had an occurrence rate of 0.000013% of interspecies encounters, which made her impulsively count the decimal places. She'd never seen anything that small. She wanted to look up the motori system as well. What kind of place was home to this super rare species? But this wasn't the time to satisfy idle curiosity. Hello, welcome, please sit down. She trailed off into a question, worried the alien wouldn't fit in her patient's chair. But he shrank as he was sitting down, fitting the chair like liquid fitting its container.

Would you tell me more about this hole you mentioned? She said, the Plasmoranox didn't look holy at all. Could water be holy? A liquid lump separated from his torso and formed an approximation of a human arm, one with no hand at its end, just a dull point. He gestured at his chest. There is a... He paused, or rather, his interpreting machine paused, blurting a second of static noise. A hole in me. Very small, but it is there. I can feel it growing.

How exactly does this feel?

A pause. He had no face per se, but the liquidy lump that formed his head was more textured than his torso. The way the surface of a vast ocean was more textured than the surface of water in a cup. And now the waves of his head swirled, tightening in a confused eddy. Samao decided this was his face, the waves a means of expression. It's hard to describe, he said. His interpreting machine rendered his words in a doubtful tone, matching his face. There is, I just feel it inside of me. It feels heavy, but not in the usual way.

There's a hole inside of you, but the hole feels heavy.

That is contradictory, is it not? Samao turned her emerging grimace into a smile, and for good measure she shook her head too. Not a problem, we'll puzzle it out. Is there anything else you feel? The Plasmoranox gave her a head shake that looked uncannily like the one she'd just given. He offered no further explanation. All right, then, Samao said. She reached for the largest screen hovering over her desk, the interface of the health model she was licensed to use. The screen displayed a transcript of their conversation so far, but she ignored that for now, pressing consent protocol instead. I'm Practitioner Dr. Samao Kiyo. I hold license FKGHB-00987-Nusantara for the interspecies health model INT-HealthGTT v8.5, which I will use to diagnose your symptoms. Do you consent to the processing of this consultation for diagnosis and prescription? Yes, the Plasmoronok said. Samao pressed Diagnose. With such a measly doctor-patient interview, she'd expected the model to ask for more data, but instead it quickly returned a message framed in red. Species. Plasmoronoks. Not included in database accessible to FKGHB-00987-Nusantara.