Adam-Troy excels at the kind of moral complexity you’re talking about, and at showing how something that appears fantastic may in fact be horrendous upon reflection (see, for example, his recent kicker of a story, “James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter” in the May issue of Lightspeed). I think we were both on the same page about Su’s character from the start and didn’t feel the need to change it much from draft to draft.

Personally, I find the way that legal matters infest our daily existences utterly depressing. At the moment, thanks to a recent spell in the hospital (congestive heart failure, since you ask), I’m dealing—or, rather, my superbly patient wife is dealing—with bureaucracy gone mad in the form of the American healthcare system, so I imagine that if I were to rewrite “The Law of Conservation of Data” today, this preoccupation would show through even more clearly.

Most of us don’t consider the long-term ramifications of having so much of our private data being sent into the cloud. I’m not talking about what porn sites we visit. I’m talking about our highly personalized psycho-emotional profile. There is evidence this kind of deep psychological profiling was used to influence the recent presidential election in the United States. People’s psychological profiles—created without their consent or awareness—were used to manipulate their voting behavior.

I actually encountered an old man climbing over the chain-link fence at 22nd Street Station in San Francisco. The rest is imaginary. Except, of course, for entropy and the heat death of the universe. Those are real, I’m sorry to say. My father really did try to explain difficult physics concepts to me when I was ten or so. Not the heat death of the universe exactly, but I remember a long discussion related to the conservation of energy. As a ten-year-old, I contended that if I put some heat in the freezer, I could destroy it.

My job allows me to be around smart people with diverse interests, which is great fun. I can skip across the surface of many fields, rather than focus on just one. The kernel of this story was a financial oddity that I found intriguing: the strange fact that student loans are the only major loan type that isn’t collateralized. It’s obvious why, of course, since you can’t repossess an education. But what if you could?