One day in the summer of 2024, I was seized by an intense maternal feeling toward a potential future child. From that came the I will, you will—the first-person future tense which contributes to the prophetic, instructive voice. When I think about parenthood, I think about diaspora, generational trauma, and immigration, and writing from the narrator’s voice, traversing these tensions, felt relieving. I’m finding I write about parent-child relationships a lot.

“Terms of Enlightenment” came about after I started dabbling in meditation several years ago. I’d go on Ted Talk or Calm app binges, and during that time, I heard the same Buddhist parables over and over. While listening to “The Tiger & the Strawberries,” I had the (always worthwhile) thought, “How would Terry Pratchett write this?”

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of the quest for immortality, and Chinese legends abound with such tales—Taoist sages “spiritually cultivating” their way to immortality and riding away on cranes; emperors poisoning themselves with “immortality” elixirs that contain mercury and arsenic; an emperor who funds multiple failed expeditions to Penglai, the fabled land of immortals.

If it’s not obvious, I wrote this story during the period last year when DOGE was tearing apart long-standing US government agencies and firing skilled workers by the tens of thousands for a supposed cost reduction, but really to remove federal oversight from private enterprise.

The inspiration is loosely from our increasing dependence on technology, especially in the setting of biological catastrophe—think about the surge in Zoom usage during Covid—but also from just how bizarre AI responses tend to be.