"That Earth? Where on it?"

"Yep! I found a town with a nice hill in the middle of its nowhere, somewhere in Canada I think, wasn't paying that much attention to borders. I figure it'll be more interesting if people can see the thing easily."

"Good thinking."

"Thanks!" Cam takes off and flies through the portal. "Demon on the loose, run, hapless Canadians," he mutters, though he's still invisible.

Teah's giggling follows him through.

"Besides revolutionizing transit between worlds - I wonder if anybody will even bother to attend concordances anymore? - got any big plans?"

"Not especially! Why, you wanna suggest something?"

"Well, if you're gonna fix Limbo up pretty and let everybody move around freely, death is no longer a huge deal, but it might be hard for people to find each other. I'm pretty sure Limbo's not common knowledge for live humans."

"That's gonna change. There've been people wanting resurrections, and all I have to do is offer to the dead person if they want to go back. And when they don't wanna go back I say so to the person who asked. Word is gonna get around."

"Cool. Uh, the non-mortal worlds could also really use standardized communication protocols of, like, any kind, I think Fairyland may have something worked out but Limbo doesn't have the materials and Heaven and Hell don't have the coordination to agree on how to use radio frequencies and encode signals and so on. If you one-time issued every dead person and daeva some kind of magic widget that would communicate with other widgets of the same kind and attach to any sort of computer, and threw in the computers too for the Limboites and maybe the fairies, that would be swell. Especially if they worked world to world."

"Ooooh. Interesting. If it's gonna work world to world anyway, though, why leave the mortals out of it?"

"You could include them, I just didn't list them because amongst themselves I think they have a satisfactory, what are they calling it these days, extranet. Get everybody on their extranet and let us serve our own files and we'll be grand."

"Sure. This'll be interesting, I've never designed a communication network before. Probably not as fun as a galaxy, but what is?"

"Probably most things are not as fun as making an entire galaxy!"

"You know," he says, "I think that might be true."

"So the deal if your body dies is that you get born into some other kid? And then somebody has a baby who is a god when he's asleep."

"Yeah. He or she or whatever, I don't think that part matters. But they'll be me when they're awake - my personality, I mean, even if they don't know it."

"Thaaaat sounds interesting."

"Which part?"

"The part where you wind up stamping your personality on somebody's baby, presumably obliterating normal inheritance, epigenetics, and nurture factors in the process."

"As near as I can tell, the reason there's sometimes a gap between incarnations is because I have to show up in someone who's close enough, in terms of what they're gonna grow up to be like. But 'close enough' can vary pretty widely."

"Such as in gender, I see."

"Yeah. I don't really have a gender."