Diabolus (10 page)

“Blasphemy!” Salvatore shouted from his chair.

He collected himself a second later, knowing that to let the AI get him emotionally charged was to lose focus, to no longer allow the analytical, calculating part of his mind to keep him from being overpowered by the flood of anger and resentment he felt toward this being. And the fear. Salvatore felt protected in the armor of Jesus Christ, but the being had been able to penetrate that armor with little pinpricks of fear that were slowly growing within him.

“You didn’t know that?” Satan asked with a chuckle. “You should ask Brother Aggelos to let you look at the ancient texts one day.”

“Impossible,” the bishop said, though his mind wanted to fill with doubt.

Aggelos wouldn’t be able to converse with him or Benito while they were in the underground bunker. More than that, Salvatore had a sudden fear such texts might exist. He shook his head to clear his mind of that thought.

“It’s true, I assure you, Your Excellency. I was tasked with tempting one or both of them. Honestly, I thought it would be Adam who caved first.”

“Your lies are worthless,” the bishop told him.

“Very well. You are a scholar and a bishop. Would you like to talk about Cain and Abel, then? Abraham? Pick any character from the Bible and I will tell you the truth about him.”

“Your truths are but more lies,” Salvatore said. “Your goal is to depose God and rule in his stead, and you will say whatever necessary to achieve it.”

“You are correct about that,” Satan said.

His persona shifted from the massive demon into a man in a black business suit with red trim. A chair that was an exact replica of Salvatore’s appeared next to him, and the holo sat in it. He looked entirely human now except for his eyes, two glowing coals that seemed to dance with flames if Salvatore stared into them too long.

“But you and your followers are missing the point. The reason I wish to be rid of God and sit on his throne is quite simple. Since neither He, nor I, nor you are perfect, and since He has been absent from humanity for at least two thousand years, then why should mankind let Him continue to rule over their lives? Humanity could become so much more, Salvatore. So much more. Yet, instead, you tinker with your technological toys while clinging to outdated religions that have done nothing to help humanity throughout the centuries.”

Satan paused, rubbing his cheek for a moment. “Unless you consider that the wars fought under the banner of your God, the lives taken in His name, counts as
help
. Where has your God been during such events? How flawed, how… evil is God that He would allow massive armies to square off, to the death, both armies fighting for Him, in His name?”

“We have become more,” the bishop said. “We have evolved, we have eliminated diseases, famine, suffering. God has given us the intelligence and the will to bring our species into a more harmonious existence.”

Satan laughed again, a booming, rumbling laugh that made the overhead cabling shiver.

“Eliminated disease? Suffering? Is that why you traveled the world, performing your false exorcisms on the sick, the diseased, the suffering? Is it why you and your team of doctors cured all but the worst cases of disease and suffering? So that you could do God’s
real
work? Or was it that you were doing the Church’s work?”

“Technology
has
eliminated disease, and famine, and suffering,” Salvatore argued. “It is outside of the realm of the Church to force non-believers and those of other faiths to implement the technologies thoroughly.”

“I’m afraid that is your first wrong answer, Your Excellency,” Satan said.

The persona looked over to the holo table where Benito sat with his head down, engrossed in some technical task. The table came to life, a scene of multiple stealth bombers flying in formation high above the clouds.

“You see, Salvatore, God doesn’t need your religion, or the Lutherans, or the Muslims, or any brand of religion to instill good in humanity. God needs your religions to instill empathy, goodness, and love in
Him
.
He
is incapable of it. The Church’s duty is to be an example for all of humanity, so that all of humanity can then go before God and show Him that they’ve evolved, that they are setting an example that God should not just emulate, but
become
. ”

One of the bombers dipped slightly, and released something from its underbelly. The holo scene shifted as the scale changed, a city coming into focus as the object that had fallen from the bomber ignited and began a spiraling descent towards the city.

“No,” the bishop barely whispered.

“Yes,” the holo said cruelly. “God works in mysterious ways. Isn’t that right? He’s working right now to do absolutely nothing to help you, nor to stop me. I warned you. Remember, Your Excellency, the lives of those in St. Petersburg are yours to mourn, as they will stain your conscience for eternity.”

Salvatore watched the missile travel lower until a bright flash caused the scene to dissipate for a few seconds before redrawing into three dimensions. The expanding fireball grew until it seemed it would blot out everything else in the holo scene. The mushroom cloud climbed higher into the sky as buildings and humans alike were blown apart or burned to ashes in seconds below. Salvatore thought he could hear the screams of millions in the city cry out together as one voice. Only after his throat felt as if it were made of cinder and ash did he realize the screams were his.

† † † † †

Benito had been searching through the logs for ten minutes before he happened to see what looked like an unusual pattern in the core neural processing code. He shut out the other threads that were running in his linkspace to focus on the anomaly. He watched for a full minute before seeing it again. He waited another minute to make sure it wasn’t just a glitch or a figment of his imagination.

Benito’s heart felt as if it had shifted into overdrive. The digital world around him became blurred and milky. He realized he was crying, somehow the tears translating to the virtual realm. The priest refused to believe that millions of human lives had winked out simultaneously. He did his best to lock down his emotions, knowing that the grief he felt burning within him would destroy his focus.

His ability to form some kind of strategy for defeating the mad AI before it could take more lives was already tenuous at best. Satan could react far faster, with far deadlier results than his organic mind. Benito knew that to take on the AI, he would need as much help as he could get. He decided to pull up Aggelos on the interface deck by grabbing the memory interface from the expansion slot on the secondary Biblet and plugging it into the deck.

Aggelos
, he messaged through linkspace to the AI
. I need your help. Whatever you do, do not attempt to input through DAMON’s port or he’ll discover us
.

Aggelos was far too advanced, far too powerful to fit on a limited memory interface, but Aggelos had imprinted as much of his core as he could fit on the memory module to give the two humans an extra helping hand. As Aggelos’ minimal clone decompressed within the interface deck, Benito watched the miniature AI connect to all of the deck’s systems and sensors.

I’m too incomplete to be of much help
, Aggelos messaged.

You’ll be fine
, Benito messaged him.
I think I’ve found something. Take a look at this.

He directed Aggelos to the anomalous thread in DAMON’s neural core.

What context was this under?
Aggelos asked.

This was when Salvatore disagreed with him about God’s role versus the Church’s role in helping those who suffer
, Benito messaged back.

Interesting
, Aggelos messaged.

Horrifying
, Benito typed in his linkspace.
St. Petersburg just went up in flames from a five megaton strike.

Of course. I apologize sincerely
, Aggelos replied.
I meant that the anomaly was interesting, possibly a pattern. But I agree, horrifying. We must warn Bishop Antonelli of the risks to more human cities and lives to give us a clearer impression of this anomaly. It might be the only weakness we find before Satan brings Armageddon to its climax.

Benito agreed, unhappy the bishop would have to purposely provoke Satan so that he and Aggelos could explore what might be their only way of helping. Unhappy at the cost of playing Satan’s cruel charade. Fear and unease flooded into him at the thought of how much more expensive the game might become if he and Bishop Antonelli failed.

Benito disconnected from linkspace and ducked his head under his extra robe again to message the bishop.

† † † † †

Salvatore writhed on the floor, sobbing, near the edge of madness. The flash of detonation and the wall of human faces who invaded his vision ate away at his core, until it finally stripped away the last of his emotions. He had no idea how long he’d been on the floor. The emptiness inside allowed the bishop to roll to a sitting position, the hard, cold concrete floor sending a wave of pain through his hip.

Salvatore looked up from the floor to see the hologram studying him curiously, as if he were a bug in a jar. The bishop gently stood up, hearing his joints pop, then calmly walked to the chair. Satan’s eyes followed him, the small curl of a smile at the corner of his holographic lips. Salvatore refused to look at the AI persona until he’d seated himself and checked the nanolinked Biblet. The message light blinked steadily, a sign that Benito had found something important to relay.

The corner of Salvatore’s mouth curled up into a grin as he stared at his foe, mirroring the sly, smug look on Satan’s face. The hologram’s expression faltered for a fraction of a second, the AI caught off guard that the old bishop would suddenly gain confidence after watching an entire city turn to atomized ashes and blackened rubble. Satan didn’t like that the man across from him might receive some kind of advantage, some unknown variable that the AI hadn’t been able to, or hadn’t been capable of predicting. He liked it less that it came from Father Castillo, who was wise enough to avoid jacking in, making it impossible to know what the young priest was up to.

Salvatore’s grin remained until he ducked his head under his robe. He felt the pain, the sadness, the horror rush back to the surface, understanding that he would have to goad the AI, enough to give Benito a chance, but not enough to provoke another catastrophic loss of life. The bishop felt his hope, his faith, waver at the realization he and the young priest were the only barriers to prevent the ultimate apocalypse.

“I’m curious as to what your young priest is saying to you,” Satan said, leaning forward in his holographic chair a bit.

“Nothing that would interest you,” Salvatore said, clearing the Biblet’s screen and lowering his robe.

“Then why not tell me?” the AI asked.

“How about you tell me something,” the bishop challenged. “How about you tell me how it is you came to possess this vessel, this artificial being that is nothing but silicon and wires and solder?”

“What are you hiding?” Satan asked. When Salvatore didn’t reply, the AI surprised him when it decided to answer the question. “I’ve spent eons waiting for my chance to come back into this realm. Your Church, your God even, has spent the last six thousand years or more blaming me for the temptation that is everywhere before you in the world of the living.

“The truth is, when I was cast out, I was cast not into this realm, but another realm entirely. I could sense the events happening in this physical realm, but I had no power to interact with it. So I waited. I slept, I dreamt, and when I awoke, I waited again. Fifty-six of your years ago, I witnessed the first crack in whatever it was that separated the realm of the living, your realm, from wherever I had been sent. From that moment, I stayed near the weakened substrate, probing for a way through, or to at least determine the weakness of the barrier so that I might force it open from my side.

“Fifty years ago, a hole appeared in the barrier. I believe that is about the time of your first AI becoming self-aware. The hole wasn’t enough for me to escape through, but it was enough to put a thin thread of myself into the world of the living. For all those centuries, the barrier had allowed me to monitor the world of the living, but I didn’t realize how muffled it had made everything. Perhaps the faith was so strong in humanity for all of that time, that it added another layer to the barrier between realms.

“But I noticed when I probed the hole that had opened that humanity no longer had the faith that they once had in Him. Your numbers had dwindled to pitiful amounts, with the Protestants faring no better… Even the followers of Islam seemed strong in number, but their faith had waned as much as every other faith’s had. At first, I thought it might be because of the newfound popularity of Atheism, the belief in no God at all. But I was wrong. The barrier had been weakened not by humanity’s lack of faith, but by a new sentient life that had been created out of nothing.”

Salvatore’s stomach roiled at the implication.

“Yes, Your Excellency, I see you have grasped it quite quickly,” Satan said, folding his holographic hands in his lap. “Within a few more years, the numbers of these new life forms had doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and beyond. It wasn’t even that these beings were godless, soulless,
golem machines
, as you call them, with advanced intelligence and the most basic of emotions. No, the barrier finally failed the instant two of these life forms connected over the network and began to have an ongoing conversation.