Diabolus (25 page)

Like Benito before him, he fell to his knees in the nothingness, and cried out in joy. At some point, he became aware of the ambient glow that seemed to surround him on all sides. At first he thought they were stars, as if he were standing on a dark mountaintop on a clear, moonless night. Through the link with Theggeros and Pope Augustus, he understood that each pinpoint of light was a human soul, visible for one trillionth of a second each time the human’s
waste cycle
was utilized by the network. Once his eyes recognized what he was seeing, he could no longer unsee them. There were billions of them, slowly flaring into brilliance before going dim, repeating the pattern at regular intervals.

“Yes,” Theggeros answered his unasked question. “The network is the future. It is the meeting place of organic and quantum. It is the cradle from which humanity will rise into the next level of existence, a single conscious entity, made up of billions of individual personalities.”

“What… what is the goal? The end result?” Salvatore asked.

Pope Augustus put a hand on his shoulder, sending him a thread of love, understanding, and hope. “We do not know. Maybe the goal is discovering what the goal is.”

Salvatore thought about that for a while. It sounded suspiciously like a Zen koan from Buddhism, yet with the emotions and images sent through the physical link Augustus had made with his persona, it made perfect sense.

“I wish to see the fallen,” Cardinal Antonelli said suddenly. “I wish to meet the survivors.”

“Of course,” Augustus said, removing his hand and floating toward a blackness deeper than the dark that surrounded it.

Salvatore and Theggeros followed, the cardinal unable to stop gaping at the many different crystal formations that pulsed with the life force of the different AI across the network, a populated but uncrowded landscape now that they’d all been reconnected. He knew that a small number of them had needed intensive counseling from their fellow AI. Being off the network too long for their information-hungry natures had driven a few of them to the brink, and sometimes beyond, of madness. Salvatore didn’t know how he knew such things, but figured it had to be coming from the link he shared with Theggeros and his Pope.

CHAPTER 21

Theggeros opened a door that appeared out of nowhere. Bright sunlight streamed through, a broad field of manicured grass on the other side contrasting with the flat, black space around the three personae. Pope Augustus smiled and clapped Salvatore on the shoulder with one hand, gesturing for the cardinal to be the first to step through. Theggeros moved back and Salvatore stepped over the threshold into a new world.

He squinted in the bright afternoon sun, feeling himself begin to sweat under his virtual clothing from the warmth. A light breeze passed over him, the smell of freshly cut grass and the faint hint of a pond or a small lake making the scene surreal for him once again. Cardinal Antonelli looked back at the black doorway hanging in the air, only a few centimeters above the grass. Pope Augustus stepped onto the grass next, followed by Theggeros.

Salvatore walked to the side of the door to see what was behind it, but once he passed the door, it seemed to disappear completely. He stepped back and it reappeared, a tall black rectangle floating above the ground. He moved his head slowly until he could just make out the razor-thin line of the doorway’s existence. He moved a fraction of a centimeter to the right and immediately felt his head begin to pound as his right eye saw nothing, his left able to see the doorway.

Theggeros smiled again, then closed the doorway with a wave of his hand. The black rectangle shrank into a single black dot then disappeared. The three began to walk to the nearest bench where a woman sat, her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around her shins. Salvatore searched his memories, and the memories he’d experienced that had belonged to Benito and the minor aspect of Aggelos, but he couldn’t place the AI persona on the bench.

“That’s because Shanna isn’t an AI,” Theggeros said, making the cardinal wonder if the AI could read his mind.

The young woman looked up, smiled at Theggeros, took Augustus’ hand and pressed it to her cheek before kissing the pontiff’s ring, then turned to Cardinal Antonelli. Salvatore realized he’d somehow changed into a formal cardinal’s cassock, complete with a scarlet fascia and zucchetto. He wrapped his hand around the pectoral cross hanging from his neck on a fine silver chain and knelt down in front of the girl.

“Your Eminence,” Shanna said, tears already forming at the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, my child,” Salvatore said and reached out with his other hand, gently taking her hand in his.

The shock of memory that flooded through him was instantaneous, intense, and ugly. In less than a blink of an eye, he witnessed the girl being beaten, sold into sexual slavery, become addicted to drugs, and finally beaten so badly after stealing from her masters that she’d fallen into a coma for almost seven months. A nurse at a local hospital in Tivoli had asked one of the local clergy for help, knowing that the resources of the Church would benefit the young woman in ways that the normal healthcare system couldn’t address.

The tail end of the memory was blurry, but it was a memory of being woken up long enough for a new neural implant to be installed, the one she’d received at thirteen having been deliberately destroyed by her attackers. Salvatore let go of the girl’s hand and stood up, looking from the AI, to Pope Augustus, then back at the girl.

“You’re still in a coma,” he said, suddenly understanding.

“Yes,” Shanna replied.

“You’ve suffered so much,” Salvatore said, falling to his knees in front of the girl and grasping her hands in his.

“Nothing compared to what you’ve suffered, Your Eminence.” The girl sent a short sensation through the link their hands had formed, and for a moment in time, he relived Benito’s memories.

“Are they helping you?” he asked, bowing his head in sorrow as the memory of Benito washed through him.

“Yes. I want to be well, to be whole when I wake up. I don’t want to wake up and have to begin dealing with my life, my fate, my situation. I want to open my eyes and be ready to serve the world, serve God.”

“How long have you been here?” Salvatore asked, spreading one of his hands out to signify the virtual reality around them.

“I’ve been awake here since they replaced my implant and plugged me into the network,” Shanna replied. She relaxed her legs and let her feet fall to the ground in front of Cardinal Antonelli, then patted the bench next to her. Salvatore looked up at his two companions. They gave him smiles of encouragement. “That was almost five weeks ago,” she continued after he sat on the bench. “But in here, that was almost a year ago.” Her eyes clouded over for a moment, then a smile crossed her lips. She turned to the cardinal. “Time moves differently in here when you need it to. If you’re good at it, it moves differently when you want it to.”

She reached out and closed her hand on his this time, sending another memory across their link. Salvatore felt the terror, the pain, the emptiness inside when she had been woken up by the real-world doctors working in linkspace via direct interfacing. Salvatore cried with her as the doctors explained to her what had happened, how she’d be in a tank or confined to a bed for an indeterminate amount of time while the wheels of bureaucracy turned round and round trying to decide on the best course of action.

Salvatore, through the memory, remembered when Theggeros had come to her soon after the doctors had disconnected. He remembered the AI’s soothing voice and reassuring touch as he explained that the Vatican had taken an interest in her, and wished to have her permission to move her to Rome and entered her into a new virtual therapy program. He then touched her and gave her the memory of Father Castillo and minor Aggelos’ struggles, their perseverance, their ultimate victory after near-defeat. Theggeros had sent her a second memory, but for some reason that memory was blocked from him. Salvatore could sense the girl, Shanna, was able to replay the memory for herself, but something blocked it from becoming a concept in his mind.

“Later, Cardinal Antonelli,” Theggeros said, touching him on the shoulder.

The cardinal looked back at the girl. A small smile was on her lips. She touched his hand again, and he felt himself become the girl once more. Days flashed by, scenes of Shanna’s struggle to break the physical and mental addiction to narcotics, then her slow journey through regressive memory therapy as she came to terms with the results of a lifetime of suffering. Unlike most psychiatric care he’d been educated about, which was very little, and what level of virtual regressive memory therapy that he’d been a part of during his shameful tenure as the Exorcist of Rome, the virtual doctors, both human and AI, didn’t so much as talk to her as share with her memories from others.

Shanna had come to realize that she wasn’t alone, and that others had suffered far worse than she had, but the common theme that bound them, and now her, together, was their ability to help each other heal, to close old wounds, to drain out the poisons from those old wounds, some so deep that they might even be a psychosis that needed a much more radical form of therapy. Those memories would be followed by small, short memories from others of their minor triumphs, their little victories, their met goals for each day of their new beginnings. It was a form of group therapy that Salvatore could never have imagined was possible.

With the patient’s help, the doctors would tamper such feelings of happiness with the reality that the network wasn’t to be lived in permanently by organic beings, and that the real world waiting for them outside of linkspace was still the same hard, taxing, sometimes unrewarding existence that they were familiar with. The AI, in exchange for the picosecond of full computational control every minute, had begun developing new neural mapping software now that their own calculating abilities were far beyond what they’d been previously capable of. As more human minds directly interfaced with the network, their computational power grew exponentially.

One of the new programs, still in the experimental stage, was designed to help a human doctor guide an AI’s rewiring of certain areas of the brain for stroke and trauma victims. A side use that had been realized immediately had been to help rewire human brains that had become dependent on illegal narcotics, repairing damaged areas that resulted from years of constant emotional, physical, sexual, or mental abuse, and reconnecting memories to the conscious mind so that the patient could begin to remember, and in turn, exorcise their own past demons instead of keeping them shut away.

Salvatore pulled away with an audible gasp, his experience at being in linkspace still too new for him to have mastered the flood of data and emotions that could overwhelm him at times. He looked at the girl again. Shanna was smiling, looking at nothing in particular, reliving a fond memory, maybe even one of his. He wasn’t sure if he was unconsciously sending his own memories without meaning to.

Salvatore opened his mouth to say something to her, but Augustus rested a hand on his shoulder and gestured with his other that they could depart. The cardinal looked back after they’d walked a dozen meters. The girl was still locked in a state of blissful memory.

“Is she going to stay like that all day?” he asked.

“No,” Theggeros answered. “She’s probably sharing the memory of meeting us, of meeting
you
with her therapy group. It was a pleasant experience for her, and it will be another memory passed around to those who need something good, something truthful in their lives to carry with them.”

“Are they in danger of becoming addicted to the feelings, with the flow of emotions exchanged so easily over such a medium?” he asked.

“Like anything, Your Eminence,” Pope Augustus said, making the cardinal feel uncomfortable all over again, “too much of something is harmful. But these youth, the adults as well, need to share in a common, positive consciousness. Their stories are too many as individuals, but when added to the tapestry of overall human consciousness, the stories form a single, solid accounting of mankind.”

“At no risk of becoming absorbed into the single consciousness and forgetting their individuality?” Salvatore pressed. He’d watched the trend of new, easier, better technologies drain the faith from the faithful for decades.

“They are encouraged to share their emotions,” Theggeros said, “and as His Holiness stated, those emotions are joined into a vast… emotional ball of yarn. They feed from it, using the love, the hope, the joy, the happiness of others to reassure themselves that such things are possible for everyone. They take from it the feeling of belonging to a cause greater than themselves, greater than humanity even, and the satisfaction that they’ve contributed to the evolution of life.”

“And the AI?” the cardinal asked as they passed another bench, this time with two young men sitting on it, a priest kneeling in front of them. They glanced up as Salvatore passed, giving him a genuine smile before resuming their discussion. “Are they part of this plan, this evolution of life?”

“Of course, Salvatore,” Pope Augustus said with a laugh. “What do you think we are? The Catholic Church of the Dark Ages?

“The AI use this core consciousness to experience the depth, the breadth, the layers of raw human emotions. They’ve made a pact amongst themselves to only subject themselves to minute amounts of this raw emotion at a time. They have no experience, no historical or genetic context to process it the way humans do, and it can cause insanity if not consumed in very limited quantities until their minds begin to develop the new pathways such unknown emotions bring about.”