This story was vaguely fictional when I wrote it in February 2023, but reality quickly lapped me. I’m a literature professor and I am watching universities force professors to use AI to create course materials (usually because “it’s cheaper”). The potential for fascist censorship is horrifying.

The current iteration of AI that everyone is talking about right now isn’t actually “artificial intelligence;” it’s rebranded machine learning, which is very much not new. “AI” is, to me, a marketing scheme, not a technological breakthrough.

Back then, communing with the divine was couched in images or metaphors of violence: you have these accounts of wounds, being pierced or attacked. But such is the nature of divine violence that it’s transformative, illuminating. In the context of this story, though, it’s also shoved up against a more earthly, clinical violence.

I gave my character Sandy a bicycle because riding a bicycle connects you to the landscape you are traversing in a way that driving a car does not. You feel each hill; you rejoice in each valley. You have the time to appreciate the land. When you’re on a bike, you can’t rush the journey.

You have to laugh to keep from crying—policing injustice, ghosts, family estrangement, adultification, systemic racism—none of that is funny. But hard things are made more bearable by sprouting a little seed of joy in your heart and watering it with laughter at the absurdity of every unfair thing.