her hair back. 'My skin cells can do photosynthesis. Stuff you don't get from the fancasts. It's terrible. You always feel hungry, but they don't let you eat. Makes you incredibly alert, though. My pee will be a weird color for the whole weekend because all these nanites will be coming out.'
'Thanks for sharing that.'
'Sorry. Soldier talk.'
'You do feel different,' I say.
'You don't,' she says. 'Well, I am.' I take a sip from my pint, hoping the sym-biote will let me get drunk. 'I am different.'
She sighs.
'Thanks for coming. It's good to see you.'
'It's okay.'
'No, really, it does mean a lot to me, I-'
'Aileen, please.' I lock the symbiote. I tell myself I don't know what she's thinking. Honest. 'You don't have to.' I empty my pint. 'There's something I've been wondering, actually. I've thought about this a lot. I've had a lot of time. What I mean is-' The words stick in my mouth.
'Go on,' says Aileen.
'There's no reason why you have to do this, go out there and fight monsters, unless-'
I flinch at the thought, even now.
'Unless you were so angry with me that you had to go kill things, things like I used to be.'
Aileen gets up.
'No, that wasn't it,' she says. 'That wasn't it at all!'
'I hear you. You don't have to shout.'
She squeezes her eyes shut. 'Turn on your damn symbiote and come with me.'
'Where are we going?'
'To the beach, to skip stones.'
'Why?' I ask.
'Because I feel like it.'
We go down to the beach. It's sunny like it hasn't been for a few months. The huge Fish that floats near the horizon, a diamond starfish almost a mile in diameter, may have something to do with that.
We walk along the line drawn by the surf. Aileen runs ahead, taunting the waves.
There is a nice spot with lots of round, flat stones between two piers. Aileen picks up a few, swings her arm and makes an expert throw, sending one skimming and bouncing across the waves.
'Come on. You try.'
I try. The stone flies in a high arc, plummets down and disappears into the water. It doesn't even make a splash.
I laugh, and look at her. Aileen's face is lit by the glow of the starfish in the distance mingled with sunlight. For a moment, she looks just like the girl who brought me here to spend Christmas with her parents.
Then Aileen is crying.
'I'm sorry,' she says. 'I was going to tell you before I came. But I couldn't.'
She clings to me. Waves lap at our feet.
'Aileen, please tell me what's wrong. You know I can't always tell.'
She sits down on the wet sand.
'Remember what I told Craig? About the babies.'
'Yeah.'
Aileen swallows.
'Before I left you,' she says, 'I had a baby.'
At first I think it's just sympathy sex. I don't mind that: I've had that more than a few times, both before and after my brief stint as the Godhead. But Aileen stays. She makes breakfast. She walks to the campus with me in the morning, holding my hand, and laughs at the spamvores chasing ad icons on the street, swirling like multicolored leaves in the wind. I grow her a Fish-interface from my symbiote as a birthday present: it looks like a ladybird. She calls it Mr. Bug.
I'm easy: that's all it takes for me to fall in love.
That winter in Prezzagard passes quickly. We find a flat together in the Stack vertical village, and I pay for it with some scripting hackwork.
And then, one morning, her bed is empty and Mr. Bug sits on her pillow. Her toiletry things are gone from the bathroom. I call her friends, send bots to local sousveillance peernets. No one has seen her. I spend two nights inventing nightmares. Does she have a lover? Did I do something wrong? The symbiote is not infallible, and there are times when I dread saying the wrong thing, just by accident.
She comes back on the morning of the third day. I open the door and there she is, looking pale and dishevelled.
'Where have you been?' I ask. She looks so lost that I want to hold her, but she pushes me away.
Hate, says the symbiote. Hate.
'Sorry,' she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. 'I just came to get my things. I have to go.'
I try to say something, that I don't understand, that we can work this out, that nothing's so bad she can't tell me about it, and if it's my fault, I'll fix it. I want to plead. I want to beg. But the hate is a fiery aura around her that silences me and I watch quietly as the Fish-drones carry her life away.
'Don't ask me to explain,' she says at the door. 'Look after Mr. Bug.'
After she's gone, I want to tear the symbiote out of my skull. I want the black worm that is hiding in my mind to come out and take over again, make me a god who is above pain and love and hate, a god who can fly. Things go hazy for a while. I think I try to open the window and make a three-hundred-meter dive, but the Fish in the walls and the glass won't let me: this is a cruel world we've made, a lovingly cruel world that won't let us hurt ourselves.
At some point, the symbiote puts me to sleep. It does it again when I wake up, after I start breaking things. And again, until some sort of Pavlovian reflex kicks in.
Later, I spend long nights trawling through the images in Mr. Bug's lifecache: I try to figure it out by using the symbiote to pattern-match emotions from the slices of our life together. But there's nothing that hasn't been resolved, nothing that would linger and fester. Unless I'm getting it all wrong.
It's something that's happened before, I tell myself. / touch the sky and fall. Nothing new.
And so I sleep-walk. Graduate. Work. Write Fish-scripts. Forget. Tell myself I'm over it.
Then Aileen calls and I get the first train north.
I listen to the sound of her heartbeat, trying to understand her words. They tumble through my mind, too heavy for me to grasp.
'Aileen. Jesus, Aileen.'
The god hiding in my mind, in the dead parts, in my cells, in my DNA-
Suddenly, I want to throw up.
'I didn't know what was happening, at first,' says Aileen, her voice flat and colorless. 'I felt strange. I just wanted to be alone, somewhere high and far away. So I went to one of the empty flats up at the Stacktop-one of the freshly grown ones-to spend the night and think. Then I got really hungry. I mean, really, really hungry. So I ate fabbed food, lots and lots. And then my belly started growing.'
With the Fish around, contraception is the default state of things unless one actually wants a baby. But there had been that night in Pittenweem, just after Christmas, beyond the Wall where the Fish-spores that fill the air in Prezzagard are few. And I could just see it happening, the godseed in my brain hacking my cells, making tiny molecular machines much smaller than sperm, carrying DNA laden with code, burrowing into Aileen.
'It didn't feel strange. There was no pain. I lay down, my waters broke and it just pulled itself out. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,' she says, smiling. 'It had your eyes and these tiny, tiny fingers. Each had the most perfect fingernail. It looked at me and smiled.'
'It waved at me. Like… like it decided that it didn't need me anymore. And then the walls just opened and it flew away. My baby. Flew away.'
The identification mechanism I used to slave the godseed was just my DNA. It really didn't occur to me that
