Diabolus
DIABOLUS
By Travis Hill
Copyright June 2014
Cover art: Trevor Smith
http://www.trevorsmithart.com
Typography by:
Camille LaGuire
http://daringnovelist.blogspot.com/
This story is dedicated to everyone that believes humanity has a higher purpose within the universe, and feels the drive to discover what that purpose might be. Faith and Science
can
coexist, as complimentary, not opposing forces.
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE — TIME
1 Planck time
- time required to travel 1 Planck length @ the speed of light in a vacuum (the smallest known measurement of time in the universe)
1 yoctosecond
- 1/(septillionth) of a second
1 zeptosecond
- 1/(sextillionth) of a second
1 attosecond
- 1/(quintillionth) of a second
1 femtosecond
- 1/(quadrillionth) of a second
1 picosecond
- 1/(trillionth) of a second
1 nanosecond
- 1/1,000,000,000th (billionth) of a second (1ns = time cpu takes to access memory)
1 microsecond
- 1/1,000,000th of a second
1 millisecond
- 1/1000th of a second (100ms = blink of an eye)
1 second
- standard time unit
1 kilosecond
- 1,000 seconds (16.7 minutes)
1 megasecond
- 1,000,000 seconds (11.6 days)
1gigasecond
- 1,000,000,000 seconds (32 years)
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CHAPTER 1 - May 2101
“
Father
Antonelli,” the policeman said with distaste. “What may I do for you?”
“I wish to report a missing child,” the priest told him.
Officer Madera gave the old man a glance that said the only reason he would even be spoken to was because of the crucifix that hung around each of their necks. The old priest was dressed in ratty brown robes, dirty shoes that looked like they might have a millimeter of sole left on them, and a crumpled felt biretta that he held in his left hand.
“I thought priests were celibate?” Officer Madera asked. He enjoyed tormenting the disgraced former bishop whenever they crossed paths, which was quite often in the little village of Tabron.
“Of course it is not my child,” Salvatore replied, knowing that Madera and the chief constable enjoyed shaming him. “It is Luis Ramon’s daughter, Estella. She has not been to church for three weeks, and her father has informed me that Estella has not been home for almost two weeks.”
“Ah,” Madera said, rubbing his chin and leaning back in his squeaky chair.
“Will you not at least take a report?” the priest asked after a full minute of silence, the policeman doing nothing other than staring at Salvatore while continuing to rub his chin thoughtfully.
“Yes,” Madera sighed, “I suppose we should. I will need Luis to come into town and fill out the paperwork.” He said this as he made a show of removing the necessary forms from his only desk drawer.
“Luis will not come into town, you know this,” Salvatore said.
“Ah, yes. He has some trouble with one of the local establishments, I hear. Some kind of gambling debt, a little birdie told me.” Madera winked at the priest. “I can’t say I blame Luis. Smart man, yes.”
“Estella could be in grave danger,” Salvatore tried. “She is only fourteen, a vulnerable age. The same age as your daughter, Diego Madera? Your Bettina.”
“
Canalla
,” growled the policeman. “Get out! Bring Luis Ramon in if he wants to report his daughter missing. Or else I am sure I can arrest you for a false police report.” Madera stood up, his hand dropping to the revolver on his hip.
Father Salvatore Antonelli narrowed his eyes at the officer, but said nothing. He placed the biretta on his head, gave a short bow, and retreated to the outside. He stood for a moment, hearing Madera cursing his name to David Manuel Guerrero, the chief constable in Tabron. Father Antonelli shook his head and began walking down the oiled dirt road to his church. He’d done his duty as a man of God. He had tried to help, but nothing else could be done in this godforsaken backwater village on the edge of the Cerro Kilambe Reserve in northern Nicaragua. Luis Ramon had made his own bed by letting himself become a betting man, and the police had made their bed with the local gangsters who ran the drug processing facilities that littered the jungles of the Reserve.
Father Antonelli had a good idea of where Estella had disappeared to. If he were a betting man, he would put his life savings on one of the brothels that had sprung up in the jungle near the processing facilities. He wouldn’t bet it all that she’d gone there voluntarily, knowing her father’s inability to stay home and raise his children while scrabbling out an existence on a banana plantation that had dwindled from almost two thousand acres to just under twenty in the last five years. Luis Ramon was always one card or one dice roll away from giving his children everything they could ever want. In the meantime, the children often ate with the priest at the little church. Father Antonelli always extended the invitation to Luis as well.
Luis the gambler was nowhere near as disgraceful as Salvatore the fraud. He had no right to judge the man when he’d destroyed all the good he and Pope Leo XIV had rebuilt after the mass exodus from the church during the twenty-first century. Salvatore paused at the cobbler’s shack, trying to convince himself to finally repair his shoes. Every step he took in them invited a modest helping of dirt and small pebbles. His hand wrapped around his credit link, as if willing him to actually bring it out of his pocket and use it on himself for the first time in three years. Salvatore willed his hand to release the credlink. He had not yet earned the reward of personal fulfillment.
He began to walk once again, wincing as at least five small pebbles, one or two with what felt like jagged edges, teleported into his shoe after three steps. Sometimes he could go an entire mile without having to stop and remove a sharp rock from one or both shoes. Today it seemed he would be cursed with the discomfort every three steps.
I deserve it
, he thought to himself.
I will never earn repentance nor redemption after what I’ve done
. There was nothing to do except what his new Pope, Augustus I, had commanded of him. Salvatore Domenico Antonelli, Bishop of Castellanos, had been commanded to demote himself to the rank of priest, serve out his remaining years in the jungles of Nicaragua, and accept his name be stricken from all Vatican documents except those that rightly named him a false prophet and listed his heresies.
Ten minutes later, he sat in the hard wooden chair behind his desk in the small office at the back of the tiny church. He pulled the bag-less waste can to him, removed his dilapidated shoes, and began to gently tap them over the can to empty them of their daily collection of dirt, mud, and stones. Sometimes there would be twigs or leaves or even dead insects in them, but Salvatore was not worried. If God wanted to strike him dead for his sins with a lethal insect sting or an infection, so be it. He sat back once the task was done, pulling out a nearly smashed pack of cigarettes and an ancient liquid fuel lighter. Cigarettes were illegal in every NATO controlled state on the planet, but Nicaragua was neither a member nor a follower of international law. The little country couldn’t even follow its own laws.
Father Antonelli pulled out a crooked cigarette, put it to his lips, and lit it with the heavy lighter. As he inhaled deeply, he turned the metal artifact over in his hand.
Forever Is The Truth
was inscribed on one side. The other side was blank. Something might have been there once, but tens of thousands of rubs by hundreds of different fingers over the century or more since its creation had worn the stainless steel smooth to the point of a mirror finish when polished on the sleeve of his robe.
Indeed,
he thought, eying the inscription as he turned the lighter over again. He put the lighter and the pack of cigarettes on the worn desk, and leaned his chair back on two legs to rest against the wall.
He’d almost spent some of his money on something for himself. This was a ritual he went through every day as he made his way back to the church from some errand or other he had to see to in the village. Every day he would pass the supply shop, the market, the cobbler, the tailor, or the baker’s hut, and every day he would stop in front of one of them for a minute or two, fingering the credstick until he talked himself out of it and continued his journey.
When he reached his little office each evening, he would light one cigarette, twiddle the lighter a bit in his fingers, and enjoy the nicotine in his blood as he remembered how he’d ended up here, full of sin, no sign of forgiveness from the Church, nor from God himself. Father Antonelli remembered the conversation that had led to his and the Church’s downfall.
† † † † †
October, 2089
Bishop Salvatore Domenico Antonelli had taken a surprise meeting with Pope Leo XIV during the Pope’s short stop in Castellanos. He had been nervous about meeting the man, but Pope Leo had been just a normal human being, albeit one who wielded the power of the entire Roman Catholic Church.
“Have you seen the loss projections for the decade?” Pope Leo had asked him during their meeting. Pope Leo’s voice was stronger than what Salvatore had expected from such a frail old man.
“Yes, Your Holiness,” Salvatore replied, glancing nervously at Cardinal Bertacelli. The Cardinal looked ready to leap at Salvatore for any breach of protocol that he might commit, and from the look of it, Bertacelli definitely expected him to do it multiple times.
“What is your take on it, Salvatore?” Pope Leo asked. He sounded genuinely interested in Salvatore’s opinion.
“Your Holiness, if I may speak freely,” he said, noticing Cardinal Bertacelli tense in his chair, not relaxing even after Leo nodded his head, “the predictions for all diocese are another thirty percent loss by 2090. The Church has bled almost two billion followers this century, with the rate of decline growing as each decade passes.”
“Yes, yes, but why do you think this is? And what do you think can be done to reverse it?” Pope Leo asked, sitting forward slightly. The Cardinal still looked ready to jump from his chair and attack Salvatore, or at the least, hustle him out of the room in an unfriendly fashion.
“Your Holiness, my honest opinion on this matter is… out of line with what the Cardinals and Archbishops believe.” The Pope nodded again for him to go on. “With the explosion of technology at the end of the twentieth century, the rise of smaller and more portable devices to digest information and entertainment, and the trend of each successive generation to turn more towards atheism because of the atheist belief in science over faith, or the young turning towards other religious faiths that have embraced the evolution of technology”—Bertacelli looked positively ready to murder Salvatore for saying the almost-forbidden word
evolution—
“has led to the decline of faithful for the Church.”
“And what would you suggest to remedy this?” Leo asked him, unperturbed at the bishop’s candidness.
“Your Holiness, I would suggest that the Church reform itself.”
The sharp intake of breath from Bertacelli and the Cardinal’s apoplectic indignation when he stood up to accuse the bishop of heresy drew the ire of Pope Leo XIV.
“Bertacelli, sit down, man. I am the Pope, not some doddering old grandfather that you must protect from shysters and thieves.” When the Cardinal didn’t sit right away, the Pope commanded him in a voice that wasn’t to be questioned. “Cardinal Bertacelli. You will sit down now and quit staring at Bishop Antonelli as if you were plotting to carve him up like a side of beef. If you cannot do that, you will leave us and I will send for you when we are finished.”
