I remember first seeing the trailer for Detective Pikachu and feeling like it was a sign that we’d reached a new stage of what my friend Jay Springett calls “cultural fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past. I wanted to jump ahead a few stages, to a future where this process had been mostly automated and was now just mashing together genres and franchises more or less at random.

The title came to me first and I envisioned a woman inserting her toes into the bottle openings and dancing on them like a ballerina on toe shoes. That got a little complicated, so I changed it to her rolling on the bottles. The roaches came into the story because she was practicing in the yard and they would naturally be out at night. I had to do research on roaches, look at pictures of them, because I wanted the readers to like Treevia and Oswald so I had to like them too.

The story came about because I was reading about the Trolley Problem, a philosophical thought experiment—basically, the Trolley Problem asks you whether you would pull a lever to save five people from a runaway trolley . . . if it meant guiding said trolley toward one person instead. So: would you, could you, be responsible for one person’s death if it meant saving five more? It’s since sparked a lot of debate as to its usefulness, but for the story, I wanted to explore the personalities this thought experiment brings out in people.

The most important part of the story, for me, is the concluding section where Schyan and “the other woman,” Varabhata, sit down for a chat. When a relationship ends, there’s always two sides, two injured parties, to tell their stories. “Love and Marriage” grew out of an anxiety about this: How do you know that, in the other person’s eyes, you weren’t the bad guy? That your self-absorbedness hid the consequences of your actions for someone you loved?

This is that splendid thing, the story that arrives as a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night reeling from the image from a man skateboarding down a mountainside with an avalanche of boulders chasing after him, only to be paced by a rickety dented robot bearing a birthday card to whom he would snarl, “Fuck off.” I woke having absolutely no idea how this situation would come about, and everything else was reverse engineering.