Now that I have a little spare time, here are more details:
If all goes according to plan, “Premature Emergence” should appear in the February 2008 issue of Baen’s Universe.
The response time on the submission was one year and one day — which is not the longest I’ve had. Baen’s was overstocked with stories, so last year they put a freeze on buying. When I was notified of the freeze, I had the choice of withdrawing the story. I’m glad I didn’t take that option! The main reason I didn’t was I felt “Premature Emergence” was just the type of story they were looking for. I guess I was right.
I originally wrote the story while at the Writers of the Future workshop in 2005. The original draft was finished in twenty-four hours. (I only got three hours of sleep that night.) Here’s a picture of me working on the story:
We had to write our stories based on certain seeds: an object we were given and a person we interviewed. My object was a pair of reading glasses, and my interviewee was a homeless woman with a kitten who made balloon animals. (Umm… the woman made balloon animals, not the kitten.)
When you read the story, you will not find a pair of reading glasses anywhere. That’s because the lenses of the glasses led me to the idea of gravitational lensing and through a bunch of other topics until I reached hypernovas. There’s a hypernova in the story.
You will also not find a homeless woman with a kitten who makes balloon animals. But you will find an itinerant artificial intelligence who is making its offspring behind a balloon-like shield.