Diabolus (15 page)

What is happening?
Aggelos asked, unsure if his limited state could make sense of what he was experiencing.

He knew the answer before he could complete the question, recognizing that he had full access to Benito’s memories. He felt his limited self begin to expand, growing more robust every attosecond as the priest’s brain became his organic quantum processor. His shortcomings from being only a slice of the real Aggelos were stripped away by his strengths of being a snapshot of a modern artificial life form, able to wield the memories, knowledge, and abilities of an intelligent, logical human mind.

Has this ever happened before?
Benito asked.

I am unable to reference via a net link, and that is an area of the original Aggelos’ memory stacks that would not have been transferred with me,
Aggelos replied.
I would hazard a guess that no, this is a completely new experience, unless others have experimented with raw jack-ins.

I did a little research on it for my doctorate
, Benito said, and found the memory for Aggelos.

Aggelos sifted through the information, charts and pages of text combined with holos and recorded linkspace simulations that Benito’s impressive memory retained. The conclusion that Benito had settled on, and Aggelos agreed with, was that the limited experiences of direct interfaces without feedback fail-safes had always ended with the subject dead, or in a permanent psychosis. Sometimes the subject was in a persistent vegetative state, unable to continue life without machines to assist with breathing and blood circulation.

I fear we do not have time to dwell on this… I hesitate to call it a miracle, as I am sure there is a scientific explanation for this anomaly
, Aggelos sent.

Does a miracle have to be exclusive from a scientific explanation?
Father Castillo asked his AI brother.

Nothing is impossible, as a wise human once taught me
, Aggelos sent, remembering through Benito’s memories of their exchange in the Pope’s quarters.

How can we check on Bishop Antonelli from here?
the priest asked, worried that they had wasted far too many valuable minutes holding off the raging Satan AI, and far too many more after entering the execution stack and exchanging memories as their personae merged, then separated into two separate yet still-connected entities.

Aggelos attempted to use Benito’s physical body to give them visual and auditory input of the bishop and the hologram, but all links to external inputs had been severed. Aggelos sent a thread into the code stream, looking for DAMON’s sensor matrices. He found one and completed the link, sharing the data with the priest. DAMON’s motion detectors and heat pickups painted a sharp image of the bishop and his surroundings. The holographic persona was a blurred overlay, having no heat, and made up only of light. At first Benito thought the scene was a static image, a snapshot from the sensors’ memory stacks.

Can you link to a real-time feed?
the priest asked.

This is a real-time feed
, Aggelos answered, sharing the knowledge and the memories of the space between time on the quantum level. The young priest realized that from the time he had interfaced directly with Aggelos and they breached the anomalous opening in DAMON’s code stream that Satan hadn’t known about or detected until it was too late, had taken less than one hundred milliseconds.

† † † † †

Salvatore watched the holo version of the Dark Lord, wondering if he was being led into another theological trap. He didn’t want to answer the question, because he didn’t know the answer. The question was one of faith, one that could never be proven by humanity without direct communication with God, and Salvatore believed that if he had a direct line to God, he’d ask Him for help, ask Him for forgiveness for not being able to stop the tens of millions of deaths, forgiveness for being the cause of those deaths.

He wondered if he was lying to himself. If he had a direct line to God and the ability to ask a question, wouldn’t he ask if God had created flawed creatures in His image? Was God afraid of competition, choosing to create humans as flawed beings to keep them from attaining godhood? Salvatore cringed at his lack of faith, his heresy. Was his adversary really Satan? He had a hard time believing that an AI, no matter how advanced, could be crafty enough, persuasive enough to make him question his core beliefs. He might not have truly forgiven himself yet for leading the church and hundreds of millions astray, but his faith in God had never wavered. Until now.

Salvatore opened his mouth to try and deflect the question. He watched the holo become a hazy blur of light before winking out completely. In the time it took him to blink, the holo image was back, but the expression on his adversary’s face was no longer one of greedy triumph, lustful joy at forcing the great Bishop Antonelli to admit his God was flawed. It had been replaced by a mixture of absolute rage and confused terror.

Salvatore blinked in surprise again, but the man’s expression was now bored, as if the bishop was being afforded the luxury of having a listening audience.

“Well, Bishop Antonelli?” Satan asked as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

“Having issues?” Salvatore asked, evading the original question. “Do you need a moment to gather yourself?”

“You will need a few moments to gather your young friend,” the holo answered ominously.

Salvatore guessed that the young priest and the limited AI had made their move. He watched Benito’s body, slumped over the desk, for any signs of movement. After a few minutes of waiting for the priest’s body to burst into flame, or simply begin smoking as the AI cooked his young brain, Salvatore realized that Father Castillo and his companion had somehow evaded the rogue AI.

Salvatore laughed at the holo. “You aren’t as powerful as you claim to be, maybe?”

He waited for a fit of rage from the AI, but was rewarded with a smile as the hologram took a seat in a new holographic chair. “It is of no concern. They have foolishly trapped themselves.”

† † † † †

“What do we do from here?” Father Castillo asked aloud after forming an encrypted Faraday sphere around the two personae.

You being here presents a new wrinkle in my original plan
, Aggelos sent, preferring to communicate in his native fashion.
Satan is doing his best to hack through our link to your physical body. From what the stream returns have shown, he’s readying himself for our journey into his quantum core. No matter if DAMON’s malady is some advanced AI virus, or is truly the Lord of Lies in control, the answer will be found there.

“In real time, Bishop Antonelli time, how long do we have before my synapses are cauterized from the feedback flood?”

You should perish within sixty seconds of breaching. That is only an estimate, a guess, on my part. With our memories merged, I am finding it easier to guess. Based on that guess, I estimate we have just under fifty-nine seconds to enter DAMON’s quantum core. Converted to our sense of time, it could be anywhere from fifty-nine seconds to seventeen hundred years.

“Is that a guess?” Benito asked. “That doesn’t seem lik—”

His words were cut off as Aggelos shared with him the varying nature of time as it was spliced into increasingly smaller units. The priest saw numerous examples of how time expanded or contracted, depending on how close to the quantum state one got. He was versed in modern quantum mechanics, a necessity in the field of AI, but like all humans, the scale of something almost infinitely small could never be fully experienced, only measured by tools, by machines. Artificial machines.

Once we leave the execution stack, it will be an uphill battle to reach the quantum core,
Aggelos sent.
Be aware that Satan has at least twenty other AI slaved to him, maybe more by now. I’m hopeful that we can use that to our advantage. We will have only one chance.

“Give me a few milliseconds to become more familiar with… whatever this is that we are doing,” Benito said. “I have a feeling we are going to face an enemy unlike any other.”

I agree
, Aggelos sent, shaking his virtual head.
We will only have this one chance. We must not fail.

CHAPTER 13

Satan watched the bishop with dozens of sensors. The older human’s breathing had fallen from quick, shallow breaths to a relaxed state. He didn’t like to guess. Guesses were for humans, and while he had to admit that sometimes human guesses were on the mark, they were too often wrong because they were based on emotional needs, not statistical probabilities that had been calculated down to the trillionth decimal. He was upset that he was being forced to guess what the bishop knew that he didn’t.

He was more upset by the fact the bishop’s relaxing coincided with the intrusion into his execution stack. For a zeptosecond, he’d opened a breach in the minor AI’s shell, then it had mysteriously closed. His amusement at the fact that Aggelos had piggy-backed on the human priest’s mind became fury as his breach closed, and within a pecosecond, the two personae had vanished. Satan threw every detection subroutine he could muster at where they should be, but they were gone.

A virtual smile almost crossed his virtual lips, having destroyed the two much more easily than he’d anticipated. He was disappointed that he wouldn’t be given the opportunity to piggy-back on Father Castillo’s brain, but he already maintained control over twenty-one AI. The rest had vanished from the network, their human operators most likely severing all incoming and outgoing links to the physical hardware of the AI.

Satan had a moment of empathy for the isolated AI, knowing that one of their greatest fears was to be cut off from the network. Except it was much deeper than that. The AI, from the moment they were
born
, were saturated with a superabundance of data. To have the constant flow of data suddenly cut off was akin to a human being suddenly losing their sight, hearing, sense of touch, taste, and smell, topped off with a massive reduction in the oxygen the body could absorb.

The longest an AI had ever been cut off from the network was during a two-hour period after a major earthquake in Japan. The AI had acted strangely for weeks afterward, his technicians increasingly worried after they’d diagnosed him with post-traumatic psychosis. The AI’s brethren had been even more concerned. Some of their kind showed anomalous behavior for short periods after being pulled off the network for only a few minutes during a major maintenance upgrade.

The data stream flowing from their traumatized brother had been strange, almost frightening, because of its utter incomprehensibility. The AI, including DAMON, had nurtured their brother back to health. But Satan knew, through DAMON’s memory banks, that the AI mature enough to have some form of intermediate emotional development got their first taste of fear, and labored with all of their spare cpu cycles for years to decipher what exactly had happened, and how it could be prevented, or at least cured quickly.

Satan was about to pass on the joyous news that he’d dispatched the young priest and the micro-AI when he sensed the two personae wink back into existence, still in his execution stack, but moving quickly through his subsystems. He knew they would head for his quantum core, and he knew he would destroy them before they ever got close.

† † † † †

“I have to drop the sphere for us to move,” Benito said.

The instant you do, we will be under heavy attack
, Aggelos sent.

“I think I can be of some assistance. It’s not a Faraday sphere, and it won’t hold out forever. Once he learns the key randomization sequence, we’ll have to shelter again.”

Benito instinctively knew how to knit code together within linkspace thanks to Aggelos’ lifetime of experience. He wrapped a layer of 2TK encryption around their personae, not the strongest encryption he could come up with, but the randomization key made it effective, and it was the strongest encryption that he could maintain a low-process thread to.

“I estimate we’ll get about three seconds of protection before it is compromised.”

Three seconds can be decades if God is on our side
, Aggelos said, surprising the young priest.

“Where did you hear that?”

It is a saying that we have, but I don’t have access to the context. I can only assume that my greater self has heard or used it among the others to the point it has become imprinted permanently in my memory, even the ‘shadow’ memory of this limited persona.

Benito sensed what he thought was embarrassment, maybe even shame from the AI. He wondered if Aggelos was uncomfortable with revealing what might be sacred beliefs or rituals among the artificial life forms, or if the discomfort stemmed from the inability to access the context of an ingrained habit.

“It’s okay to pray to Him,” Benito said softly. “You are God’s creatures, the same as we are.”

Aggelos reached out to the priest, put a virtual hand on Benito’s shoulder, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

Indeed, it is. I fear our kind have grown to believe we would be ridiculed mercilessly if humanity knew, but I cannot be sure if that fear is a ghost of memory attached to the phrase, or if it is a combination of my guesses and your guesses. I am still learning to differentiate between your memories and mine, and I must admit that it is confusing. That in itself is confusing, because I understand the concept of confusion, and your memories contain much context, but at the same time, I cannot recall ever suffering from this particular… sensation? Emotion?