This story is an example of how sometimes we need to make art in order to make sense of what’s happening around us. For context, I’m currently living in Minneapolis during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. A week after Renee Good’s murder, I was still stuck and paralyzed and I needed to put my energy into something. I needed to put what was going on into words. Because that’s my job.

I’m honored Lightspeed enjoyed “Saint Zero” and published it, it’s such a dream home for this story. The idea behind it was a twofold, very random thought sequence: “What if A Knight’s Tale were sapphic?” and then “No, wait, what if it were set in space?” This was followed by a lot of complicated emotions existing in this current political climate (“Saint Zero” was written in 2025, so these emotions have only intensified since), and then realizing this story wasn’t going to end well for either Zero or Silvi.

One day in the summer of 2024, I was seized by an intense maternal feeling toward a potential future child. From that came the I will, you will—the first-person future tense which contributes to the prophetic, instructive voice. When I think about parenthood, I think about diaspora, generational trauma, and immigration, and writing from the narrator’s voice, traversing these tensions, felt relieving. I’m finding I write about parent-child relationships a lot.

“Terms of Enlightenment” came about after I started dabbling in meditation several years ago. I’d go on Ted Talk or Calm app binges, and during that time, I heard the same Buddhist parables over and over. While listening to “The Tiger & the Strawberries,” I had the (always worthwhile) thought, “How would Terry Pratchett write this?”

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of the quest for immortality, and Chinese legends abound with such tales—Taoist sages “spiritually cultivating” their way to immortality and riding away on cranes; emperors poisoning themselves with “immortality” elixirs that contain mercury and arsenic; an emperor who funds multiple failed expeditions to Penglai, the fabled land of immortals.

If it’s not obvious, I wrote this story during the period last year when DOGE was tearing apart long-standing US government agencies and firing skilled workers by the tens of thousands for a supposed cost reduction, but really to remove federal oversight from private enterprise.