The germ of this story was born in the 2021 stage of the pandemic, while watching a panel on lost Doctor Who episodes during a virtual version of our local Doctor Who convention, CONsole Room. I wanted to write about the way that seemingly frivolous things like fandom still persist.

I tried to give the narrator and his ancestors a kind of power that forces them to give back. They don’t get to control the elements freely like powerful mages. In the end, they are claimed by the forces that gave them those powers in the first place.

It feels scary to even be hopeful about the distant future, especially because I sometimes wonder if there will even be a “distant” future for humanity, with the devastating consequences of climate change already unfolding.

Resistance is much on my mind lately, with the world in its current state, and I wanted to talk about how communication might shape itself in a conversation about the act of resistance.

Part of what drives this story for me is the lack of control, the chaos—he doesn’t know how it works, he screws up, the machine pushes forward (showing him such strange sights) and it pushes him backwards.