"Inside" began life as a story that was pretty much linear, running from the earliest to most recent event. At about mid-point it got very very boring. It wasn't until I messed with the chronology of it that I found a structure that worked (for me), and also found the type of ending that had the effect I wanted.

Like a lot of my stories, the story is centred around a few lines of dialogue, and the story exists primarily to get the characters in the position to utter them.

Thematically, it's based a lot around the ideological questioning of my latter uni days, the conflict between idealism and the despair that comes from facing a world that doesn't meet those ideals. The starting point, in that sense, was the fact that so many radicals lose heart in mid-life and become conservative, or, at the very least, lose their hope. In "Inside" I set out to play with a spec-fic conspiracy theory that explained that capitulation, as a way of exploring the internal conflict.

Anyway, I hope you dug it.

  — Ben Payne, March 2007