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.

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?

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.

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.