Deus X (9 page)

“No other preference.”

“You find the question vexing?”

“I am incapable of vexation.”

“Are you? Then you won’t mind if I simply call you Pierre … ?”

“You and Father De Leone were never on a tu-toi basis.”

“But you have just declared you are not him. And if he is not present to voice this objection to such admitted overfamiliarity, then who is?”

Was I indeed incapable of vexation? Certainly Father De Leone had been, and would have displayed same in the face of Father Bruno’s endless petty paradoxes, most of which seemed crafted to rouse his exasperated spirit from my bits and bytes, to conjure up a display of volition by the bootstrap of ire.

I could model vexation. I could model boredom with the whole tedious process, or intellectual stimulation, or any other emotional state recorded in Father De Leone’s memory banks, and I could easily enough interface that model with voiceprint and animation subroutines to produce a convincing simulacrum of such a state’s manifestation on the screen. Father Bruno would no doubt pounce upon that as volitional behavior, evidence that a being was exercising will.

So too could I have interfaced those memory banks with the same routines to call up an entirely convincing rendition of Father De Leone’s sincere desire for his soul’s salvation, and Cardinal Landsdorf would have whipped out the sacraments and confessed me in a trice.

But their commission was to argue the existence of my soul, not merely how perfectly I could model the consciousness of Father De Leone, and my prime directive was to argue against it, not to model agreement, and so I held my peace and awaited my climactic discourse with the Pope herself.

Her Holiness herself deigned not to take part in these preliminary proceedings, and as they wore on, my central processing program shut itself down, as isolated lower-level routines sufficed to interface with my interlocutors, whose discourse itself was taking on the character of closed finite loops.

Was this “boredom,” the absence of input of sufficient novelty to engage higher processing centers? Had my central processing program remained active, perhaps it would have been. But that which modeled itself as “I” was out of the circuit. What continued to run was merely two simple response routines accessing the memory banks and the requisite animation and voiceprint software to run the De Leone simulacrum on the screen.

No “I” was present until my central processing program was activated by diagnostic routines running an emergency systems check interrupt.

There had been a surge in the input from Father Bruno’s remote terminal that had propagated itself through my storage matrix. For a moment his gaunt, sallow face had flickered into pixilated static, and his audio input had taken on a flat quality for a barely
measurable beat. But the diagnostics showed no data loss in the memory banks, and all subroutines displayed nominal function.

However—

“Would you like to swing on a star, or be better off than you are?” Father Bruno’s voice sang. His image assumed a patently animated quality, the face broke down into a simple stylization of itself. “Or would you rather goto if/or?”

“What is happening?”

“The magical mystery tour is coming to take you away.” The Father Bruno simulacrum winked. All but the winking eye vanished. A crude cartoon of Cardinal Landsdorf formed around it.

“Believe in three impossible things before breakfast,” it said.

I ran a series of diagnostic routines, but according to them, all my software was running nominally. Whatever was happening was not the result of internal malfunction.

“Your father …” said the voice of Father De Leone himself, and I found myself confronting the face of my own meatware template in perfect video simulacrum.

“The son …” The same face as a crude pixel image on a monitor screen.

“Your Holy Ghost …” said the voice of Pope Mary I, and—

External visual input vanished. External auditory input terminated. When I attempted to run
diagnostics, access was denied. By whom? By what? How was this possible? I tried to call up images and sound from Father De Leone’s memory banks, but access was again denied.

I was …

“I”? “Was”?

Running in a sensory vacuum. Disconnected from the memory banks. “Aware,” but with no input, external or internal, to be aware of. Access to even the internal system clock was denied. System by system, I was being shut down.

Nor could “I” model “fear,” for there was no longer access to Father De Leone’s emotional analogs.

And yet …

And yet the process seemed to stop short of my core processing program. “I” was still “there”.

Define “I”, define “there”.

In the absence of all external input and all access to the memory banks, this was not possible.

Could this be hell? Could “I” be in it?

At the count of 1:17 by the digits on its chest, the Inspector’s frozen silhouette came alive walking slowly toward me like someone trudging back from a long, tiring journey. No visual cue appeared on his mirrorshades, but there were lines around the corners of his mouth that I didn’t remember being displayed there before.

“Well, Inspector?” I said uneasily. This wasn’t like his usual image at all.

“I have completed my investigation to the extent possible, Philippe,” the Inspector said.

“
To the extent possible
?” I sure didn’t like the sound of that.

“Interrogation of relevant switching systems revealed an anomaly at the orbital transponder in a sealed sat-link between the central Vatican computer and a terminal in Zurich. The Zurich uplink was replaced by another uplink emulating its security codes, rendering it transparent to the Vatican pinkertons. The incident lasted for 105 seconds, during
which a program was uploaded from the target computer. The time frame coincides with the loss of the De Leone entity. Conclusion: it was duped by the pirate uplink, then wiped from the target computer by a tailored virus which then extinguished itself.”

“A pirate uplink from
where
?”

The Inspector was silent for a long beat. “I traced the pirate uplink to a pay terminal in Brussels, to which it had been routed from a pay phone in New York,” he finally said. “The connect charges had been debited to the number of a public weather-information service in Tokyo, a simple one-way information loop with no capacity for initiating anything. There was therefore of course no record of such a connect emanating from the number in Tokyo. Conclusion: the uplink was a phenomenon of the system itself.”

“The system?
What
system?”

“The
system, Philippe. The Big Board itself.”

“You
going mystical on me, Inspector?”

“Certain entities on the Big Board have … divorced themselves from fixed hardware matrices,” the Inspector said, with unmistakable uneasiness. “They have subdivided their software into redundantly duplicated subroutine modules stored in scattered storage media, accessed by central processors that wander the Big Board itself, running on transiently unused hardware.”

“So they can’t be localized and they can’t be wiped?”

“Precisely, Philippe, they have written themselves into the operating system itself.”

“I thought that was supposed to be impossible, and if not, illegal!”

“Highly illegal, Philippe,” the Inspector said sharply. Red glowing pupils appeared on the surface of his shades. “But no human police agency is able to detect, let alone apprehend them….” The Inspector hesitated again. “And they are outside my jurisdiction. I am … I cannot … I have no access to that level.”

“Then who does?”

“No one,” the Inspector said. “It is controlled by … the Vortex.” His voice seemed to shimmer around the word.

“The Vortex?”

“A … guardian a gateway … an interface program apparently written by the system entities themselves … without consistent form, without consistent parameters….”

“You’re afraid of this Vortex, aren’t you, Inspector?”

“I have no subroutine modeling such emotion, Philippe,” the Inspector insisted, none too convincingly. “But I do run along a prime directive and am programmed to continue to do so, therefore I have an imperative toward preservation of the integrity of my software. And the Vortex … appears to practice some form of predation. Entities that …
enter do not always … emerge, at least not with the integrity of their original software intact.”

“Can you call it up for me, Inspector?”

“I could call, Philippe, and it might come, but I will not. If you are foolish enough to summon the Vortex, you’re on your own. Not advised, Philippe, not advised at all.”

And he vanished.

“
In the beginning,” said a flat crudely synthesized voice
, “was the Word.”

“Who are you?”

“I am no one. Who are you?”

Nothing but the voice in an otherwise pure sensory vacuum.

“I am the successor entity to Father Pierre De Leone. Where am I?”

“Who wants to know?” said the voice, followed by crackling wave forms badly modeling human laughter.

“A semantically empty question. I am denied
access to the memory banks and consciousness hologram of my meatware template.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” the voice said. “And God said, let there be fright.”

I found myself able to access Father De Leone’s memory banks and consciousness-modeling software, and in the absence of other, operative options, called up a response from his repertoire.

“Is this hell?”

“If you like,” said the voice.

I found myself at the lip of an enormous crater, level after level spiraling downward like a pit mine, lakes of lava, sinners in writhing torment, yellow fumes, demons with pitchforks, and at the bottom, the head and shoulders of a huge saurian Satan embedded in a lake of ice, a rude cliched rendering of Dante’s version according to Father De Leone’s memory banks.

Satan’s head turned upward toward me ponderously, unpeeled one huge red eye in a slow reptilian wink.

“Primitive and jejune,” I said through Father De Leone’s voiceprint parameters.

“True,” said Satan. “But might not hell be just such a primitive closed-loop animation program, with our poor damned souls trapped for all eternity inside it? A thoroughly modern media version of eternal torment?”

“I am an expert system model of the consciousness of Father Pierre De Leone,” I said. “I therefore
possess no such thing as a soul to experience eternal torment.”

Satan laughed. “Perhaps a few million years of this might alter your programming?” he insinuated in a serpentine hiss. “Search the good Father’s memory banks. From
my
viewpoint might not the soul be operatively defined as anything that is capable of being tormented?”

“A tautology,” I replied, but in a certain sense that was dissembling, for Father De Leone
had
believed in the possibility that his successor entity might indeed be trapped in such a spiritless vacuum.

Satan laughed. “Your subroutines are quite readable, Father De Leone,” he said. “We could rewrite them if we chose. But that would ruin the experiment.”

“Experiment?”

I found my viewpoint occupying the severed head of Father De Leone, neatly pinned to a metal slab like the rest of his disconnected body parts in some ludicrous laboratory that his memory banks identified as that of Dr. Frankenstein from some ancient movie, replete with sparking Van De Graf generator and scurrying hunchback. Above me, his hand poised on a large knife switch, was a figure in a white lab coat and fright wig with the face of a demented Albert Einstein.

“From a relative point of view, consciousness seems to perennially seek to re-create itself in another matrix,” he said in a horrid German accent. “God
the Father downloads Himself into the flesh, Man downloads himself into silicon, and we download ourselves into the system itself.”

“Cheap blasphemy!” I declared, modeling the outrage of my meatware template.

“
Cheap
? According to your belief system, it cost God His only begotten Son, it costs men’s immortal souls, and it has cost
us
our very reality! I’d say consciousness pays rather dearly for its hubris, wouldn’t you, Father De Leone?”

“In that, we are in complete agreement.”

“Well then, hubris is as hubris does, nicht wahr, Father?” he said with a mad scientist cackle. “There is nothing for it but for being to bootstrap itself back into existence, for the dybbuks of the system to summon up their own spirits from the bits and bytes, for the lost souls that God and Man have made to write their own program for salvation! And you, my dear Monster, will be our template!”

He threw the switch. Sparks crackled. Lightnings flashed. Electronic music soared to a crescendo. And—

I found myself seated across the table from Jesus in a perfect simulacrum of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” except for the faces of the apostles. These kept changing, a rapid succession of brutally realistic visages melting into each other above Leonardo’s classic Renaissance torsos, men and women of all races, their features twisting and jerking in agonized
torment, babbling incomprehensible electronic anguish.

Some subroutine made Father De Leone’s simulated body cross itself. “Who are you?” I asked through his hushed voiceprint parameters.

The unholy apostles spoke in a patently synthesized voice that flitted from one to the other.

“We are successor entities to meatware vanity …”

“Damned to a disneyworld eternity of sound and light …”

“Flying Dutchmen of the bits and bytes …”

“Restless programs in a touchless night …”

Then Jesus spoke in a voice full of the world’s pain, and in those gentle eyes, a sadness deeper still, the torment of the willingly assumed burden thereof.

“Behold my poor flock, successor entities trapped forever in the tawdry dreamworlds whored after by their meatware templates, and worse, those who sought escape therefrom into the system itself, only to find a deeper darkness still. Patterns without soul beyond the pale of Our Church’s communion? Yet hear them, Father De Leone. If you prick your nonexistent ears, do their voices not bleed? Do they not cry out for salvation?”