Oh, no obligation. I swear I'm not fishing for compliments; I'm just super excited. And thanks!

Yeah, my take on writing this story was basically, "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right." A major theme is that you are not defined by what is taken from you; the core of yourself is always there--possibly indeed the principal components of who you are, though there is also serendipitously a statistical technique by the same name that is associated with organizing data along its own intrinsic orthogonal axes. I . . . get a lot of mileage out of math metaphors.