The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older than the word “robot”; Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of emotion. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with emotional coldness; I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to life didn’t portray them as being unemotional. I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic manner.

I began doing a series of stories set at the end of planet Earth, a kind of a slow decline, for a book called Sunfall. And the story of Paris, which is one of Europe’s oldest cities, dating back to old Lutetia, and its relationship to the Seine, and the melancholy of a lot of French literature, conjured a city enclosed, many-tiered, in which the Seine cascades as a waterfall. I then saw one lone figure standing poised for self-destruction on that brink.

My friend Pancha loves to read about plagues, natural disasters, and historical events like the Donner Party—basically, anything about extreme survival situations. We always joke that she’d be the best person to have on hand in a global-scale disaster, because she knows all the ways people can die. But she also has severe fibromyalgia. I wanted to write about a character like that surviving in a post-apocalyptic world through knowledge.

Alsiso may be out there waiting to get his/her revenge on me. Maybe I’ll be turned into a toaster oven or something. I’m fascinated by the rise and fall of mythic figures—ancestors and heroes becoming gods, gods becoming another culture’s demons, the modern mythologies around products. I don’t think our belief in magic has died…

A lot of my stories have vague beginnings, making it hard to say specifically what inspired them, but “Codename: Delphi” is an exception—it was directly inspired by my novel THE RED: FIRST LIGHT. Delphi is an important character in that novel, but because TR:FL is told in first person from the point of view of a soldier in the field, we never have a chance to get inside Delphi’s head to experience war as she experiences it. So writing the short story gave me a chance to remedy that.

A few years back, I was poaching an egg and found myself staring into the pot and got a little lost. I made a note about the experience and then promptly forgot about it. Last summer, I spent some time writing in a cabin in the White Mountains, and I rediscovered that file on my computer. The story poured out of me after that.