I remember first seeing the trailer for Detective Pikachu and feeling like it was a sign that we’d reached a new stage of what my friend Jay Springett calls “cultural fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past. I wanted to jump ahead a few stages, to a future where this process had been mostly automated and was now just mashing together genres and franchises more or less at random.

The title came to me first and I envisioned a woman inserting her toes into the bottle openings and dancing on them like a ballerina on toe shoes. That got a little complicated, so I changed it to her rolling on the bottles. The roaches came into the story because she was practicing in the yard and they would naturally be out at night. I had to do research on roaches, look at pictures of them, because I wanted the readers to like Treevia and Oswald so I had to like them too.

The story came about because I was reading about the Trolley Problem, a philosophical thought experiment—basically, the Trolley Problem asks you whether you would pull a lever to save five people from a runaway trolley . . . if it meant guiding said trolley toward one person instead. So: would you, could you, be responsible for one person’s death if it meant saving five more? It’s since sparked a lot of debate as to its usefulness, but for the story, I wanted to explore the personalities this thought experiment brings out in people.

The most important part of the story, for me, is the concluding section where Schyan and “the other woman,” Varabhata, sit down for a chat. When a relationship ends, there’s always two sides, two injured parties, to tell their stories. “Love and Marriage” grew out of an anxiety about this: How do you know that, in the other person’s eyes, you weren’t the bad guy? That your self-absorbedness hid the consequences of your actions for someone you loved?

This is that splendid thing, the story that arrives as a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night reeling from the image from a man skateboarding down a mountainside with an avalanche of boulders chasing after him, only to be paced by a rickety dented robot bearing a birthday card to whom he would snarl, “Fuck off.” I woke having absolutely no idea how this situation would come about, and everything else was reverse engineering.

The serial becomer comes from this phenomenon that I’ve heard called “relationship chameleoning.” It’s the practice of changing yourself to accommodate a romantic partner, then doing it again for the next partner, then the next. Adopting their interests, friend groups, mannerisms, etc. until you forget you ever had your own. Nora is that to the extreme. This story is, in part, about the dangers of that kind of shapeshifting.

To be honest, I can’t remember how it started, but at some point I came across The Jazz of Physics author Stephon Alexander. Listening to him play and analyze John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” gave me a map for this story. From there, I could record the odyssey of Dr. Charlene Jenkins and explore what it means to take risks and break free (or not) from the structures we’re born into.

About a year ago I was having lunch with a friend and journalist who mentioned that trucking was one of the largest employers of non-college-educated white men in America. A little while later, he made a completely unrelated comment about the best cures for terrorism being employment and purpose, while its most effective instigators are idleness and injustice. About half of “The Gamecocks” came together walking away from that lunch. The other half was borrowed and embellished from stories I heard from an uncle of mine in North Carolina.

I think there’s something within Western culture that trains us toward a kind of cynicism from an early age. Perhaps it’s the way we’re advertised to from the cradle with a survival-of-the-fittest ethos (Leggo my Eggo, Who ate all the Cracklin’ Oat Bran, Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids). Or the dog-eat-dog capitalism we witness adults subjected to. Or the Kafkaesque bureaucracy we sense beneath standardized testing. Or the massively depressing “classics” we’re given to read in public school.

I wanted to write a story driven by that anger, that sense that the people who have come before us have ruined everything, that reveals what we’ve lost. But I also wanted to see a generation that tried to fix some things. People resist so many arguments to fix things because of the short term. We’d rather poison ourselves, kill what sustains us, if short term it gets us something good. Population growth boosts economies even while it pushes communities to pave over green spaces, pushes agriculture to keep up with increasing demands.