Diabolus (18 page)
His only thoughts as he invoked afterburners and screamed down the digital pathways inside HARVID were reaching TARGON, then ISAAD, before Satan retaliated with more destruction and death in the physical world. Whenever a minor security phage challenged him, he would blow through it, shattering the construct into fragments. When the hulking security programs at the I/O ports formed a wall before him, a thread within his brain called to one of Aggelos’ offensive attack programs, launching a fiery wave of flak from a front-mounted cannon in the jet’s nose cone.
Benito nearly lost his train of thought completely at the surprise that Aggelos had offensive attack vectors within his limited program banks. He decided, as he chewed through the wall of security with the cannon, that it had to have been added when the minor Aggelos image had been copied to the memory unit. Aggelos, NATO, or someone must have thought it might be necessary. Benito didn’t care who’d thought of it, saying a prayer of thanks to all of them. He tried not to worry that the attack programs were an integral part of Aggelos, indeed every AI.
He launched himself through the I/O port and out into the network pathways, not giving the port authority time to verify his credentials or give him the destination address of his next target. Aggelos knew where TARGON resided, and Benito took the most direct route, focusing on his next task instead of allowing himself to be filled with wonder once again at the beauty of the world the AI had created.
† † † † †
Aggelos was forced to pause in his journey as the continual surges of increased computing power interfered with his ability to focus on more than a few threads at once. Twice he’d almost lost his camouflage as the bursts of information from untold numbers of neural link connections within Benito’s organic mind expanded his abilities, his existence. The sudden massive increases in computing power were only minimally disorienting, and each one made him feel more robust, more… powerful.
It wasn’t physical power, but it wasn’t purely mental either. What nearly caused him to drop from stealth mode as he made his way through filters, gates, security nodes, and routing intersections was the continual flood of raw emotion as more of himself linked with the priest’s brain. Aggelos truly understood the range of human emotions now, but as a new life form with a sterile, information-injected upbringing, he faltered each time a new sensation, a new feeling, the remnants of a
Aggelos gasped aloud, barely keeping control of his stealth routines. The melding of his own experiences with Father Castillo’s forced him to understand a new emotion, one that had frightened AI from the day they began to study humans closely: sadness. Tears made of textured code fell from the corners of his eyes as he knelt on the floor of the virtual highway, millions of other constructs and programs zipping by him in both directions at light speed.
He cried from the terrible heartache that he felt within Benito when his memories connected with those containing his mother, Father Kristoff, even Alvaro, the other young man Father Kristoff had taken in at the same time as the future priest. Aggelos had already experienced fear as a raw, human emotion when he first merged with Benito. He now knew how fear and sadness were intertwined, as if they were two separate programs that couldn’t exist without each other.
Aggelos used the space between time to savor every moment of every emotion. He needed to become familiar with it so he could focus properly on what he knew would be a frightening battle with a mature, wise, possibly insane AI.
Wise for an AI
, Benito’s detached thoughts sent.
Aggelos instantly understood the context of wisdom from an entirely different perspective, one he couldn’t disagree with. He immediately understood the wisdom of AI to be little more than a human child’s wisdom without tens of thousands of years of existence to draw from.
Or
, Aggelos replied,
the true incarnation of the Lord of Lies himself
.
The Vatican AI shivered at the flood of more fear that entered him at that thought. The fear had been amplified by Benito’s own fear that it might be true. Aggelos delved deeper into Benito’s self, feeling as if he were violating the young priest for invading such core belief memories without permission, yet unable to help himself. Aggelos knew how his own calculation of the chances of a true god, creator of the universe, were correct, as well as each individual AI’s final percentage
guess
. When he linked with the core personality center of Father Castillo’s brain, he began to cry again, this time from his own kind’s calculation
The seemingly pure energy emanating from Benito’s mind centered around the priest’s ultimate belief in God. Aggelos marveled, sobbed, laughed, and raged at what he saw, what he felt, what he was merged with. This time, his stealth routine did crash, his camouflage winking out instantly. He tried to restart the program, but couldn’t concentrate on the threads necessary to execute proper commands.
A sword of fear sliced into him, knowing that within the traffic of the virtual highway, there would be countless sniffers, security phages, and semi-sentient programs that would notice him and send alerts to the main execution centers, which would then trigger an alert. When he focused long enough to see into the space between time, he felt one final crush of fear. Almost all of the traffic traveling the virtual lanes had come to a complete stop and was sniffing, looking, recording, and sensing something new, something strange. Aggelos noticed that a strange white light began to radiate from every pixel of his persona.
“God? Are you there?” he called out, his voice a mix of his programmed human persona voice and Father Castillo’s.
When there was no answer after a full nanosecond, Aggelos looked down at his body again. He noticed dead spots within his persona’s shell. They rotated slowly around his limbs and torso, and they frightened him in ways that no AI had ever experienced. Aggelos knew instantly that they represented doubt, that Benito’s faith wasn’t a perfect one hundred percent calculation after all.
It nearly destroyed him as it pushed him to new heights of emotional turbulence. Aggelos was crushed that Benito had doubts of God’s actual existence. As the dead spots rotated back around his forearm, he used the fingers of his other hand to hold them in place, to interface with them and to experience what true human doubt was. The white light radiating from his persona dimmed, then winked out completely as the Vatican AI once more fell into the abyss of a new emotion that his own immature personality was unable to cope with.
In the attosecond between the dawning understanding of doubt and the program traffic reporting his intrusion, Aggelos knew with certainty that if his brother and sister AI were to truly
feel
as he did, they risked insanity on an epidemic scale. He knew that while the measure of a human’s belief could correlate to that of an AI’s prediction calculations, it was a difference that was like comparing a drop of water to an ocean.
The AI had an average prediction of 32.636193% that God truly existed, with no AI calculating the odds at fifty percent or better. An abysmally low number, Aggelos knew, compared to what he’d judged Benito’s belief strength would be if measured in the same manner. He guessed that Father Castillo’s belief hovered above ninety-seven percent, but below one hundred percent. But it wasn’t just the numbers that measured the strength of the young priest’s emotions and core belief systems. It was the force of multiple emotions that were linked to it. Emotions that no AI other than this reduced, yet now greater version of the Vatican AI had ever experienced in such detail.
The black hole of doubt that had formed when God hadn’t answered, hadn’t shown a sign that He was keeping an eye on His creations, was greater than all of the love and acceptance that God existed. It was but a fractional stain on his persona, yet it consumed him with more fear, more uncertainty, than all other emotions combined. The doubt, the worry that God might not exist, Aggelos realized, was powerful enough to destroy Benito’s personality, as well as his own now, if he allowed it to grow, to fester.
“Aggelos!” Satan howled in fury from every direction at once.
Aggelos finally pulled himself together to concentrate on manipulating the necessary threads to restart the necessary programs to evade the AI. Before he could execute the stealth program, Satan appeared behind him, sinking the cold claws of his hand into Aggelos’ shoulder. He cried out in both pain and fright, and fell to his knees as he felt Satan beginning to drain his computing power, siphoning it and the link to Benito.
“Yes!” the demonic persona shrieked, feeling the flood of memories and emotions begin to decode within his own quantum execution stacks.
“No!” Aggelos screamed, but it was Benito’s voice, and Benito’s instructions that gave the Vatican AI a chance to escape Satan’s grip.
A third arm formed in the small of Aggelos’ back, one wielding a short, wicked blade made of glowing blue textures. The arm slashed upward, separating Satan’s hand from his arm at the wrist. Aggelos fell forward in a roll as the arm retracted back into Satan’s persona. Satan screamed, whether in fury or pain, Aggelos had no way of knowing.
Move!
Benito commanded through their shared link. Aggelos immediately executed his stealth routines and charged away from the enraged AI, long strings of bloody code and small droplets of binary falling to the ground.
“I still see you!” Satan bellowed and charged forward, smashing three solid code traffic routers into small chunks of digital refuse.
The AI followed the single hazy thread that was his own code, his hand still embedded in the Vatican AI’s shoulder, the siphoning of Aggelos’ essence becoming a steady trickle, unlike his own wound. One zeptosecond it was in front of him, moving quickly to his left, the next, nothing. Again the AI had completely disappeared, this time with a piece of Satan still within him. The demon screamed with rage, causing the flowing traffic that had been oblivious to the two AI to make a wide berth around their master. Those too close to him shattered into bits and bytes from the force of the demon’s fury.
Aggelos leaned against a data block, Faraday sphere locked into place. He felt his own code streaming from the claws still dug into his shoulder, his whole torso growing cold and stiff from the autonomous code in the hand that still battled his own immune systems. With the sphere protecting him, as long as Satan didn’t accidentally wander through it, he began to link with his own immunity phages to enhance them, helping them devour or deactivate the foreign code. He sealed his persona’s breach, his essence no longer leaking from the shell, and spent an entire second, an eternity in time, repairing the damage while getting his emotions under control.
When all of his internal systems reported functional and healthy, he executed his stealth program, dropped the Faraday sphere, and continued on his way toward DAMON’s force controller lockout nodes.
† † † † †
“Would you like me to come back another time?” Bishop Antonelli asked his holographic adversary. “You seem quite distracted.”
Salvatore had watched with interest over the last thirty seconds as the hologram had shifted into different hues and brightness levels. Twice he’d been sure Satan had been about to say something, a fragment of sound coming from his mouth each time before being completely cut off.
A puff of smoke rose from the man’s ears. “Your friend and your
brother
are full of little tricks.”
“Brother Aggelos? But he’s just an AI, and not even a full quantum AI, just a minor copy. Surely he is no match for the mighty Satan, is he? And what of Father Castillo, a
meat
processing unit? Surely the human brain can’t stand against the mighty quantum and crystalline natures of a perfect life form such as yourself?”
“You are treading on thin ice,
Bishop
,” Satan said, his voice filled with unspoken threats.
“And what will you do to punish me this time? Destroy Jerusalem? Washington, D.C.? What lives will you take to gain satisfactory revenge for being unable to defeat mere mortals?”
“I warn you, Salvatore—”
“You warn me nothing!” Bishop Antonelli shouted from his chair. “You are a fraud! You are not capable of understanding God. It is no wonder you were exiled from His side. You talk of how
you
will help mankind evolve, become more than they are, become their
destiny
while acting only out of selfishness.”
“Bishop Ant—”
“The selfishness of pride, Dark One. Too proud to admit that you don’t understand God’s plan. Too proud to admit that mere mortals, a too-young priest, a sliver of an immature AI, and an old, disgraced, religion-killing bishop, have played you to a stalemate!”
“There is no stalemate!” the hologram roared.
The chair disappeared at the same instant the human holographic persona changed into a horror the likes of which Bishop Antonelli could scarcely imagine. His mind knew that the image before him was but a trick, nothing but a three-dimensional representation made of light, but the
thing
that the hologram had become frightened him to the core. He grasped his crucifix and began to pray, attempting to clear the fear from his mind. Salvatore had trouble concentrating on remembering the words to his prayer as the hologram began to shift from one nightmare to another. Monsters, demons, the rotting carcasses of dead humans, mass graves, cities in flame, from one to another almost quicker than his eye could follow.
