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.

“Where did it come from? To be honest it was inspired to a large degree by Chuck Palahniuk’s story ‘Guts,’ which is probably the most disturbing and visceral piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered. It literally makes people pass out during public readings. My goal was to achieve that kind of intensity in a science-fiction setting.”

I think there are way too many places for me to know for sure [where this story came from], but I did grow up in the fifties and sixties, when the fear of The Bomb, was at its height. I also grew up on numerous science fiction and monster stories about creatures created by radiation and so on.

“The idea came to me like a bolt of lightning. I’d been researching technological singularity, and started to wonder, what would happen to us, if we all uploaded at the same time? Would the density of our consciousness create a gravitational singularity, and if so, would we be hastening our own end, rather than avoiding it?”