I’m interested in the notion of sentient A.I., and got more and more into the character as the story developed. I tried to make him real and unreal, to give him attitude, particularly in his view of humans.

At the back of my mind I’d had an idea about how contact with the alien would lead to us becoming progressively more alien ourselves. All I did was bolt that notion onto a simple war story and “Scales” was born.

He “saw” what he said he saw: Zeus in a toaster pastry. Rather, that’s what he perceived, since sight is a combination of what photons strike our retinas and how we interpret the resulting signals to the brain.

Angela also feels generic. She can’t compete with Bibi’s exoticism in a culture that pits girls against one another.

The action of the latter half of the story is set around a particular stretch of road in Cherokee National Forest. That road is the exact last place I’d ever want to run into hungry dead things, so of course I had to stick my characters there.

Some years ago Roger Penrose proposed the idea that the human brain relies on quantum properties for computation, using this to explain away self-awareness and intelligence (he was not the first or only person to express similar ideas, but he’s the best known).

The story is unique because it asks a question like “What would an Internet gift economy look like if it had some strongly Japanese cultural characteristics?” That’s how a story like “Maneki Neko” emerges.

The more information comes to light about how the Vosth behave and why, the less it makes sense, and the more questions there are demanding to be answered. And it’s hard to resist the call of an unanswered question.

Memory is suspect, but I did suffer the image of a woman leaving a room and then not returning for a great long while. I think I was watching TV. Maybe something on the screen triggered the image.

The current situation in Nigeria is highly volatile. There are militants in the delta region who are kidnapping and sometimes killing oil workers, they are blowing up pipelines and assassinating officials. This kind of situation cannot last long. Change is inevitable.