Good question: I originally worked out the story over the course of a three year long D&D campaign in my mid-teens. I had been wrestling with the implications of determinism since I was fourteen, so the whole dichotomy of meat and spirit was front and centre in my thinking. I kept picking at the story for years afterward, marbling in more and more thematic concerns the deeper my knowledge of philosophy became. But the master theme, and the dilemma that cracked apart my Christian worldview, remained constant, primarily because no one had any answers to my questions, then or now. I write about this in "Outing the It that Thinks" which should be coming out this summer in a Nietzsche anthology called "Digital Dionysus."