Imaginary Enemies

This was one of my first published stories. The original inspiration came from a friend on IRC who I think was doing film studies (this was a long time ago, and the details have become very foggy). She hoped to make some homebrew films with a friend of hers, but was lamenting that there's few stories they could tell with a cast of two women and very limited equipment and locations. I felt sure there were loads of stories that could be told within those limits, and started writing some. This one grew outside of its "two women in a room" mandate (the other product, "Guardian Angel", stuck more to its remit, although I admit that I flunked the location question there too).

Imaginary Enemies is more optimistic than anything I'd write nowadays, it concludes that people can be made to accept the personhood of 'the other'. But experiences in the science-fiction community have convinced me that this isn't true of most people.