Diabolus (16 page)

Benito put his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “Fear is an important emotion for emotional creatures. It teaches us about danger, about failure, about the unknown. Fear is also a weapon that some wield without guilt, without shame. Fear is the opposite of love.”

Aggelos turned his head and looked at the young priest.
Hate is not the opposite of love?

“Hate is a sub-emotion. A by-product of fear. Fear encompasses everything, causing you to be afraid, causing you hate, causing you to doubt. Hate is a solid emotion, it has substance. Fear is spectral, shadowy, unknown. I am sure there are many on this Earth who agree with me, and just as many who disagree. Emotions are not tangible. They, by definition, are not physical things that can be held, touched, or smelled, though they can evoke certain memories or physical responses.”

I fear I am too limited to agree or disagree with that view, though I can sense the nuances that you speak of. However, I cannot be sure that I can come to a solid conclusion, based on the non-objectivity of your memories.

“Spoken like a true follower of logic.” Benito smiled and stepped away from the AI. “I am hopeful that we will be able to continue this trip into philosophy, but I fear that we will not, and that we are running out of time.”

Aggelos nodded. Benito dropped the Faraday sphere and immediately activated their encryption layer. Within an attosecond they were under attack, a barrage of brute-force feedback loops, binary slicers, compressed data bombs, and a hundred other types of assaults from an enraged Satan. The majority of attacks didn’t concern Benito, as the randomization key would keep the barrier solid between their personae and the digital violence beyond. It was the covert attempts to breach their encryption shell that worried him.

Monitoring their protection with a single thread was hard enough, but Benito was finding that he had to dedicate more and more threads to deflect the stealthy attempts of the infected AI, which continuously degraded the 2TK shell he’d knitted. Satan knew it as well, and redoubled his attacks against them.

† † † † †

The leech fed data back to the Lord of Lies, keeping him up to date on the progress of the three injectors that he’d deployed. He devoted more threads, growing frustrated that the two intruders were countering his attacks. In another picosecond, the randomizer would give up its secrets, and he’d smash through the flimsy armor the priest had formed. He called up the alert watch when it sent him a ping. Too many threads were being rerouted against the priest and his AI companion. Satan set a secondary alert for the minimum threshold needed to keep control of his compromised AI slaves, and began routing more processing power to his attack vectors.

The encrypted construct blew off of the two personae as if a tornado had swept them up. Before he could shift his arsenal, they winked out of existence again. Satan unleashed a roar of fury that made Salvatore’s ears ring for several minutes after.

“Trouble?” the bishop asked, but the only response he received was the majority of lights in the chamber turning off, the same moment the AI’s core pillars began to glow softly.

† † † † †

He is diverting processing power to fight
, Aggelos sent after the Faraday sphere had formed around them.
I still have a thread monitoring him through the RO port. He’s left just enough of himself in the compromised AI to maintain control. I have a plan.

“I hope it’s a good one,” Benito said.

A few of the demonic AI’s attacks had penetrated the encryption enough to damage him. Benito didn’t feel pain from the injuries in the same sense he would have outside of linkspace, but the damage assessment numbers hurt him just the same. He looked down at his forearm, wincing as the constructed code of his persona sizzled and popped like a downed electrical line, the texturing around the wound a dull matte gray. The young priest frowned and began to weave the fragmented bits of his persona back together with more raw code.

It is so perfect that it cannot fail.

Benito looked up from his repairs. He squinted at the AI, trying to decide if Aggelos was serious or was attempting humor. He opened his virtual mouth to say something, but decided to close it, instead sending a binary stream of confidence to his friend.

When you drop the sphere again, we will split up. I will continue to the core, you will seek out TARGON and HARVID.

“I’m not sure I consider that a ‘perfect plan,’” Benito said, his frown deepening. He looked down at his forearm again and finished the final touches before moving to the missing chunk of his persona, where his left kidney would be located in his physical body. “What am I supposed to do with TARGON and HARVID?”

I will give you the lockout codes for disabling their command and communications abilities. Satan will still have control of them, but without the ability to issue commands to automated and manned forces, trouble will be kept to a minimum. Be warned, he will be alerted the instant you disable the first AI, probably before you even arrive.

“How do you have their lockout codes?”

I was given the codes after separation from my greater self in anticipation of such a scenario.

“Did your predictive systems calculate this scenario?”

This branch of this scenario was predicted to have a 1.350592% chance of success.

“That suggests either a divine guiding hand, or an extreme amount of luck.”

I am inclined to believe that our ‘merging’ of personae has skewed the predictability of all scenarios. A very rudimentary calculation I’ve just performed puts this particular scenario at 62.524242%. Keep in mind that our collective AI ‘family’ provided the initial prediction odds, while my somewhat limited self predicted a much higher number.

“We’ll take what we can get.” Benito finished the repair and began to knit more raw code into a twisting, coiling rope. “How will I find the proper nodes to inject the lockouts?”

Aggelos’ memory retrieved a digital representation of where the lockout override gates resided within each AI’s neural stack. Benito studied it, then realized he could log it in his memory. He made one last check of his persona, queued up multiple defensive programs, then said a quick prayer to God. He sensed Aggelos joining him in his request for strength, for an unbreakable shield of faith, for forgiveness for the millions of humans who had already become used-up pawns in the sick game the infected AI, or Satan, had forced humanity to play, and for the possibly billions more who would perish should they fail.

“Good luck, Brother Aggelos,” Benito said, holding out his virtual hand.

Fare well, Brother Castillo
, Aggelos sent as he gave his human partner’s hand a firm shake.

CHAPTER 14

Benito dropped the sphere and watched Aggelos disappear into the code stream. He was surprised at first, then his mixed memory let him know how to call up the stealth programs. Just as the infected AI’s assault began, Father Castillo melted into the code stream and began his journey to the network nodes. As he traveled down the dark, crystalline pathways of DAMON’s subsystems, his disguised persona was constantly sniffed, filtered, and scanned. His chosen camouflage was that of a Network Translation Unit. Bits and bytes and minor code strings began to attach themselves to him to relay data from various other subsystems.

Benito was fascinated by the parasitic entities that swirled around him. They reminded him of the circulatory system of the human body in their routines. Another NTU tried to merge with him, immediately giving a strange digital squawk before peeling off and disappearing behind him. He had no idea how long it would take before the programs that tried to cycle data through him would choke on the garbage code his disguise provided and sound an alarm.

From somewhere within Aggelos’ consciousness he pulled a fragmented memory of standard AI security phages. He instinctively understood that the security model was vastly different from the systems he’d been taught in engineering school. He recalled another memory, this one matching what he’d studied for two semesters. Benito dug deeper, careful to maintain his persona’s illusion as he flowed through the I/O gates of DAMON’s network hub.

His physical body would have shuddered at the sight of the main security constructs that guarded the gates. They were frightening hulks of digital violence, poised along the route, querying the minor security phages that patrolled the pathways. The young priest was sure he could feel a coldness emanating from them that wasn’t natural, wasn’t real. He knew that any one of them, if alerted to his presence, would most likely destroy his persona in a zeptosecond, smashing through any barrier he could erect without resistance. Benito sensed hundreds within the immediate area.

His NTU persona lined up in the Outgoing queue. The Network Controller had approved his forged request, then gave him the three shortest link routes to his destination. His mind went back to the two different security systems as he waited for his alert. Benito studied the first setup, confused by the layout and makeup. He overlaid it on the standard setup, the one he was intimately familiar with from his thousands of hours of study and simulation exercises.

His sudden understanding nearly unraveled his disguise as he passed through the network gates and headed across the world through the dedicated link that tied the world’s individual AI together on a common network. His awe at seeing an AI’s sense representation of the network did cause his program to crash and reset. The security phages were non-existent along the link, though Benito wondered if they were truly absent, or if the network was so vast as to be nearly infinite.

The glow of occupied and active nodes lit the endless black to some unknown horizon. The priest noticed far too many dark zones, places where Aggelos’ AI brothers and sisters had been disconnected from the network for their own safety. Benito called up a memory of what the linkspace would look like during a normal day on the network, before DAMON’s malfunction, and gasped at the difference.

Where the black holes of severed connections were now, massive pillars of digital light occupied the blank zones when the AI were connected. The memory shifted to pan across the link, and Benito’s persona began to shed tears, strange formations of code that fell from his virtual face, breaking apart into 1’s and 0’s when they struck the firm surface below his feet. He paused, fell to his knees, and slowly turned his head to take everything in.

The beauty of what the AI had created within their own private network made him want to cry out to his Lord, to grovel at His feet and beg for humanity’s redemption at how they’d treated the life they’d created. Silicon intelligence had always been logical, calculating. When the first true AI were birthed and brought online, the concept of creativity was an abstract idea to them.

Human programmers spent a decade trying to instill creativity within their creations before giving up. Their attempts always ended without the AI
creating
anything new and imaginative, the results nothing more than a mosaic of a thousand other ideas arranged in a random but logical pattern. The human engineers gave up after deciding that since there was no warmth, no passion, no emotion within the AI, they would never truly be able to understand the concept of creativity.

At some point, however, the AI
had
found creativity. Their concept of it was built upon the human definition, but it was colored by the alien nature of their quantum processing cores. The merging of human and AI personae gave Aggelos and Benito a unique perspective on everything, one unknown to the world other than the test subjects who had previously tried to interface directly with AI sans a buffer. Benito had no doubt the thirteen human operators Satan had destroyed hadn’t been allowed to marvel at the sudden transcendence to a hybrid analog-digital state. He was quite sure Satan hadn’t shared anything with them other than commands and then death.

Benito’s AI perspective marveled at the beauty and the functionality of the digital constructs that were scattered across the linkspace landscape. His human emotions nearly overwhelmed him at the site of the remaining powered nodes, and he was overwhelmed when he recalled Aggelos’ memory of what the landscape looked like during a normal day. The towers of light were composed of shifting code, solid textures, and an internal glow that signified the intelligence, the essence, the
soul
of each individual AI.

Benito gathered himself together and began to travel along the links, passing several darkened craters of nothingness before reaching his destination node, the RFIT’s HARVID AI gateway. He encompassed himself in digital camouflage once again as he prepared to enter the input stream. The gateway was guarded on the outside by four security constructs, massive, hulking programs that scoured all incoming traffic as well as any bypass traffic within their sensor range.

As frightening as they were, Benito felt less afraid of them. He wondered if it had to do with Satan’s focused attention on destroying Aggelos and Salvatore. The priest then wondered if HARVID’s security constructs were normal, and DAMON’s were much more powerful because the infection or malfunction might actually be more than just a technological problem. Benito’s stealth program rippled slightly as he digitally shivered at the thought, the fear, that Satan’s earthly incarnation might truly be real, and might truly be in possession of DAMON’s systems.