By placing the story in India, I was hoping to do two things. First, I wanted to evoke a near-future, fairly plausible world, which I hoped would heighten the emotional realism of what is, admittedly, a not-very-plausible premise. The other idea I had was that by setting it in India, which is, of course, a major outsourcing center in our real world, the story might be able to explore some of the socio-economic and psychological consequences of exporting our crappiest jobs to people on the other side of the world, to wonder a little bit about the limits of outsourcing.

We’re already seeing the emergence of fringe groups who call themselves Otherkin, or therianthropes, or parahumanists. But, I think the point is, there are humans who do not see themselves as humans.

I wanted the structure of the story to mimic the time-jumps that Hwang endures over and over again, in order to evoke at least a ghost of that instability, that sense of unease. I also had some ideas that I wasn’t sure how to make use of individually.

Halfway through writing “Ej-es,” I emailed Janis Ian to tell her that I had turned her ballad of love and longing into a story about a retro-virus in the brain. She emailed back, “How did you know?”