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.

I absolutely love Titan as setting. A few years ago, I wrote a story called “The Djinn of Titan’s Dunes” (Cossmass Infinities #2, May 1, 2020, for anyone interested) in which a pair of researchers stationed on the moon, well, one thinks he’s found life, and he wants to protect it from a grabby Earth.

One of the central questions I’ve been exploring within these destinations is the idea of dreams, both literal and figurative. There’s a way we live in a dreamworld constantly—both from the daydreams we have about the future (locations we dream of moving to, hopes we have for travels, our wishes for better professions or love lives) to the more mystical experiences of wondering whether, as the Buddhists claim, this world is indeed an illusion.

I got the idea to write a story about several different alien planets in their last few days of existence before the apocalypse. I thought it would be interesting to explore snapshots of these alien societies in their final days. Eventually, I got the idea to connect them through some kind of psychic anomaly that brings them together in their moment of death.

I wanted to write a story set in space or on a spaceship. My main focus is fantasy so whenever I write science fiction or horror, it is always a bit more challenging. This story was inspired by all the human migration stories and movies I’ve encountered but I wanted to add a twist—what if something went wrong midway?

In general, I love the chicken-footed house from Baba Yaga’s story. I’ve often wondered how the world might look from the house’s point of view. Is it a bystander or set piece? Could it be sentient? While I’ve treated the house as its own character before, this was the first time that Baba Yaga herself was entirely removed from the story. Chicken-footed houses multiplied, and suddenly the forest was not so empty.

There’s a phrase, “it’s turtles all the way down,” which initially referred to the world theory that there was a flat Earth balanced on the back of a stack of turtles. When asked what was beneath the turtles, this was the answer. So here, it’s if you’re looking at what’s happening on the internet, there’s more and more algorithmically generated content, and it’s algorithms responding to algorithms responding to algorithms responding to algorithms . . . it’s bots all the way down.

It’s explicitly a response to the ways that trans women are dehumanised, commodified, and othered in this patriarchal society for our lack of reproductive capabilities, which itself is inherently misogynistic, by enforcing a cis woman’s only value as being her reproductive capability, which is neither permanent nor guaranteed. Sadly, a lot of cis women don’t realise this is a shared struggle (read Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, girl).