It may be worth mentioning here that the idea from the story came from a real incident. After the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London, I took the train up to Edinburgh, which is one of my favorite cities, and stayed there for a week. One day I was hiking by myself on Arthur’s Seat and heard someone ask, “Are you all right?” When I turned, I found a cop next to me. He and his partner patrolled the base of the park, and when they saw a woman alone, he left the patrol car to climb up and assess the situation.

In the case of stories like “Tongue,” I hope to shock readers by presenting a real world issue that’s so common, so routine, and yet so horrific, that it hopefully makes supernatural horrors pale in comparison. At the same time, “Tongue” is a science fiction story, because the technology that exists to make Revathi possible (in the form she is when the story opens) doesn’t actually exist yet. It’s an attempt to write SF that’s about real world problems, as against “first world” problems like most SF seems to be historically.

But what I was thinking about when writing “How To Find A Portal” was suicide. I had been struggling with depression and suicidal ideation for a while and was having trouble figuring out how to make this world feel like enough to keep me here. Suicide seemed as attractive to me as any portal would be, a path to another life maybe or at least the absence of my current life. Because suicide is such a scary topic for many people, the attractiveness of suicide is so rarely acknowledged.

I had the title written in my notebook for a long time. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it. Who were the dead boys? How can the dead send someone a mix tape? Was that literal or metaphorical or something else entirely? When I started noodling around with band names, I knew the story would deal with sound and perception, and that was when a friend led me to the idea of images embedded into songs. Which, on its own, sounds like fiction, but it’s something bands have actually done in our world.

Adam-Troy excels at the kind of moral complexity you’re talking about, and at showing how something that appears fantastic may in fact be horrendous upon reflection (see, for example, his recent kicker of a story, “James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter” in the May issue of Lightspeed). I think we were both on the same page about Su’s character from the start and didn’t feel the need to change it much from draft to draft.

Personally, I find the way that legal matters infest our daily existences utterly depressing. At the moment, thanks to a recent spell in the hospital (congestive heart failure, since you ask), I’m dealing—or, rather, my superbly patient wife is dealing—with bureaucracy gone mad in the form of the American healthcare system, so I imagine that if I were to rewrite “The Law of Conservation of Data” today, this preoccupation would show through even more clearly.

Most of us don’t consider the long-term ramifications of having so much of our private data being sent into the cloud. I’m not talking about what porn sites we visit. I’m talking about our highly personalized psycho-emotional profile. There is evidence this kind of deep psychological profiling was used to influence the recent presidential election in the United States. People’s psychological profiles—created without their consent or awareness—were used to manipulate their voting behavior.

I actually encountered an old man climbing over the chain-link fence at 22nd Street Station in San Francisco. The rest is imaginary. Except, of course, for entropy and the heat death of the universe. Those are real, I’m sorry to say. My father really did try to explain difficult physics concepts to me when I was ten or so. Not the heat death of the universe exactly, but I remember a long discussion related to the conservation of energy. As a ten-year-old, I contended that if I put some heat in the freezer, I could destroy it.

My job allows me to be around smart people with diverse interests, which is great fun. I can skip across the surface of many fields, rather than focus on just one. The kernel of this story was a financial oddity that I found intriguing: the strange fact that student loans are the only major loan type that isn’t collateralized. It’s obvious why, of course, since you can’t repossess an education. But what if you could?

The bird’s been nesting in my brain since 2009, and this is the seventh story she’s in, but before this, humans were always part of the intended audience. So this is me exploring what mechanicals might say when we’re not around—which is a deliberate mirror on marginalized human experiences, but it’s the only thematic aspect that was deliberate. My conscious brain isn’t in charge of that stuff. I was just writing in December 2016-February 2017, as a chronically ill non-citizen US resident with many friends in scary situations.