This was the story I wrote … while quarantining after traveling back to my hometown in Kerala, India. I remember that I was trying to challenge myself to write a chaotic, peopled world full of sensations that were in direct opposition to the sterile confines of my room.

I wrote the first draft of this story in late 2022, a few months after the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively removing the nationwide right to abortion. Around that time, my first kid had just turned one, and I was feeling retrospective about that first insane year of parenthood. I was also starting to debate whether I wanted to have a second kid and go through the nightmare that is pregnancy again, especially in the aforementioned political reality.

“Over a Long Time Ago” is part of a series of short stories centered on an interstellar penal colony called Amends. In the series chronology it’s the second story, though I wrote it next to last. The story’s title is a line from a great Steely Dan song, “Pretzel Logic,” this wonky blues ballad about time travel. There’s this sad feeling of inevitability to the song that I hope to evoke in readers, which is a totally appropriate emotional tone.

I’ve worked some bad jobs before. I figure we all have. So it came from that, to a degree.

My academic background is in psychology, and when I was trying to get this story to come together I started reading a bunch of articles on attention, working memory, language acquisition, and more generally how we learn new skills and information. As I was researching, I got it in my head that what I really wanted was to somehow train people to do something that, cognitively, we simply do not do.