Food replicators have always bothered me. I get that for us to enjoy watching a bunch of people who are actually on a soundstage pretend they’re traveling through space, we have to shorthand a few technological advances—artificial gravity and inertial dampeners come to mind—but instant food on demand is the only thing that nobody ever really tries to explain, and the one that most functions like magic. I decided I wanted to work out how a scientific explanation for the replicators would actually play out.

The seed this story sprang from was a question I asked myself: what would a coffin look like to immortals who had never experienced death but were about to? Throughout human history, we’ve had myriad answers for how to honor our dead and what to do with their remains. As this story started sprouting from that first question, I wanted to challenge myself on a worldbuilding and narrative level. Why have these people never died before? What exactly has brought about death for the first time in their history?

For inspiration, I definitely had thoughts of the Alien-style “workforce in space” undertones (though with decidedly less acidic drippings in my result). I like the idea of a person just trying to carry out a normal life in space, and the economies that crop up in that “landscape.” I thought of how tired that person might get with so much darkness stretching between them and the nearest human. How burnt out on the daily grind. How old they could feel while still so young. And—depending on the profession they took up—how chronic injuries might be a huge part of their life.

I often draw from the Russian folklore I grew up hearing, and with this particular story wanted to try working with an invented myth rather than an established one. Lake Baikal is of course a real place, and one that’s special and fascinating to me, as I have family living in the nearby city of Irkutsk and visited occasionally as a child. The seals, or nerpa, endemic to the lake are real as well, and though some mystery surrounds them—like how they came to be there in the first place—the queen and her mythology aren’t part of that mystery (not in our world anyway).