In this episode of SF Crossing the Gulf, we tackle two short pieces from contemporary authors on our mathematical theme. We start out talking about Ken Liu’s “Single-Bit Error” and then we wind up raving about Vandana Singh’s novella Distances. We recorded this podcast live when Karen Lord visited me in Houston, TX. As such, I managed to screw up the recording in a whole new way. The sound level is very low even after boosting, and yet you can easily hear my dog chewing a bone through the first half of the podcast (we didn’t have the heart to kick her out of the living room), and the fireworks from the next town over in the second half. I had the best luck listening to this episode on headphones with the sound cranked up. My apologies as always, but for our next season wrap-up episode we’ll be back in the comfortable realm of Skype recordings.