'Aileen-' I begin, but she silences me with a gesture.
'Yes, Inverness was like a giant Tetris game. Nerds and machines did it. And so we killed them. And do you know what else we saw? Babies. Babies bonded with the godplague. Babies are cruel. Babies know what they want: food, sleep, for all pain to go away. And that's what the godplague gives them. I saw a woman who'd gone mad, she said she'd lost her baby and couldn't find it, even though we could see that she was pregnant. My angel looked at her and said that she had a wormhole in her belly, that the baby was in a little universe of its own. And there was this look in her eyes, this look-'
Aileen's voice breaks. She storms out of the room the same instant Malcolm starts crying. Without thinking, I go after her.
'I was just asking…' I hear Craig saying as I slam the door shut behind me.
I find her in the back garden, sitting on the ground next to the angel, one hand wrapped around its leg, and I feel a surge of jealousy.
'Hi,' I say. 'Mind if I sit down?'
'Go ahead, it's a free patch of grass.' She smiles wanly. 'I spooked everybody pretty badly back there, didn't I?'
'I think you did. Malcolm is still crying.'
'It's just… I don't know. It all came out. And then I thought that it doesn't matter if he hears it too, that he plays all these games with much worse stuff going on all the time, that it wouldn't matter. I'm so stupid.'
'I think it's the fact that it was you telling it,' I say slowly. 'That makes it true.'
She sighs. 'You're right. I'm such an arse. I shouldn't have let Craig get me going like that, but we had a rough time up north, and to hear him making light of it like that-'
'It's okay.'
'Hey,' she says. 'I've missed you. You make things make sense.'
'I'm glad somebody thinks so.'
'Come on,' Aileen says, wiping her face. 'Let's go for a walk, or better yet, let's go to the pub. I'm still hungry. And I could use a drink. My first leave and I'm still sober. Sergeant Katsuki would disown me if she knew.'
'We'll have to see what we can do about that,' I say and we start walking toward the harbor.
I don't know if a girl like Aileen would ever have taken an interest in a guy like me if it hadn't been for the fact that I used to be a god.
Two years ago. University cafeteria. Me, trying to get used to the pale colors of the real world again. Alone. And then three girls sit down in the neighboring table. Pretty. Loud.
'Seriously,' says the one with a pastel-colored jacket and a Hello-Kitty-shaped Fish-interface, 'I want to do it with a post. Check this out.' The girls huddle around her fogscreen. 'There's a cast called Postcoital. Sex with gods. This girl is like their groupie. Follows them around. I mean, just the cool ones that don't go unstable.'
There's a moment of reverent silence.
'Wow!' says the second girl. 'I always thought that was an urban legend. Or some sort of staged porn thing.'
'Apparently not,' says the third.
These days, the nerd rapture is like the 'flu: you can catch it. The godplague is a volition-bonding, recursively self-improving and self-replicating program. A genie that comes to you and makes its home in the machinery around you and tells you that do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. It fucks you up, but it's sexy as hell.
'Seriously,' says the first girl, 'no wonder the guys who wrote Fish were all guys. The whole thing is just another penis. It has no regard for female sexuality. I mean, there's no feminist angle at all in the whole collective volition thing. Seriously.'
'My God!' says the second girl. 'That one there. I want to do him, uh, her. It… All of them. I really do.'
'No you don't,' I say.
'Excuse me?' She looks at me as if she's just stepped in something unpleasant and wants to wipe it off. 'We're having a private conversation here.'
'Sure. I just wanted to say that that cast is a fake. And I really wouldn't mess around with the posts if I were you.'
'You speak from experience? Got your dick bitten off by a post girl?' For once I'm grateful I need the symbiote: if I ignore its whispers, her face is just a blank mask to me.
There is nervous laughter from the other girls.
'Yes,' I say. 'I used to be one.'
They get up in unison, stare at me for a second and walk away. Masks, I think. Masks.
A moment later I'm interrupted again.
'I'm sorry,' the third girl says. 'I mean, really, really sorry. They're not really my friends, we're just doing the same course. I'm Aileen.'
'That's OK,' I say. 'I don't really mind.'
Aileen sits on the corner of the table, and I don't really mind that either.
'What was it like?' she asks. Her eyes are very green. Inquisitive, says the symbiote. And I realize that I desperately want it to say something else.
'You really want to know?' I ask.
'Yes,' she says.
I look at my hands.
'I was a quacker,' I say slowly, 'a quantum hacker. And when the Fish-source came out, I tinkered with it, just like pretty much every geek on the planet. And I got mine to compile: my own friendly AI slave, an idiot-proof supergoal system, just designed to turn me from a sack of flesh into a Jack Kirby New God, not to harm anybody else. Or so it told me.'
I grimace. 'My external nervous system took over the Helsinki University of Technology's supercomputing cluster in about thirty seconds. It got pretty ugly after that.'
'But you made it,' says Aileen, eyes wide.
'Well, back then, the Fish still had the leisure to be gentle. The starfish were there before anybody was irretrievably dead. It burned my AI off like an information cancer and shoved me back into-' I make a show of looking at myself. 'Well, this, I guess.'
'Wow!' Aileen says, slender fingers wrapped around a cup of latte.
'Yeah,' I say. 'That's pretty much what I said.'
'And how do you feel now? Did it hurt? Do you miss it?'
I laugh.
'I don't really remember most of it. The Fish amputated a lot of memories. And there was some damage as well.' I swallow.
'I'm… It's a mild form of Asperger's, more or less. I don't read people very well anymore.' I take off my beanie. 'This is pretty ugly.' I show her the symbiote at the back of my head. Like most Fish-machines, it looks like a starfish. 'It's a symbiote. It reads people for me.'
She touches it gently and I feel it. The symbiote can map tactile information with much higher resolution than my skin and I can feel the complex contours of Aileen's fingertips gliding on its surface.
'I think it's really pretty,' she says. 'Like a jewel. Hey, it's warm! What else does it do? Is it like, a Fish- interface? In your head?'
'No. It combs my brain all the time. It makes sure that the thing I was is not hiding in there.' I laugh. 'It's a shitty thing to be, a washed-up god.'
Aileen smiles. It's a very pretty smile, says the symbiote. I don't know if it's biased because it's being caressed.
'You have to admit that sounds pretty cool,' she says. 'Or do you just tell that to all the girls?'
That night she takes me home.
We have fish and chips in the Smuggler's Den. Aileen and I are the only customers; the publican is an old man who greets her by name. The food is fabbed and I find it too greasy, but Aileen eats with apparent relish and washes it down with a pint of beer.
'At least you've still got your appetite,' I say.
'Training in the Gobi Desert teaches you to miss food,' she says and my heart jumps at the way she brushes
