Diabolus (7 page)

“This is all well and good,” Salvatore said finally, moving the conversation back to the immediate problem, “but you still haven’t informed us of why we were specifically called to service for this issue, Your Holiness.”

“Salvatore, you of all people will probably appreciate this, even though it will not be a pleasant appreciation,” Pope Augustus told him, and Salvatore’s heart dropped into his stomach. “‘Satan’ has refused all communications except for one. He has requested, demanded really, that
you
go to him. You and only you. He has destroyed everyone else who has tried to breach his domain, whether virtual or physical. You must perform an exorcism, Salvatore. You must purge the demon from this AI.”

CHAPTER 6

“I don’t like this,” Salvatore said to the young priest as they stood on the balcony of the hotel, Brussels spread out before them.

“It is a very dangerous situation for sure,” Benito agreed.

“I don’t mean the NATO problem,” Salvatore said. “I’m talking about the fact that the AI have been secretly debating God, and for who knows how long?”

Benito leaned against the railing on one elbow, turning to the bishop. “Is it such a bad thing?”

Salvatore had commanded that the priest be informal. Titles and rituals could eat into precious seconds that couldn’t be spared should their confrontation with DAMON-1 take an ugly turn. He had told the priest on the shuttle to Belgium to start practicing so they would both be used to breaking a habit that had been ingrained in them since their childhoods.

“I don’t like the idea that we created life out of silicon and circuits, and in just fifty years they think they have the will of God already figured out. All of the calculating power in the world, the word context association, the cross-referencing, none of that could equate to what humanity has lived through for at least ten thousand years. They can’t possibly know about God and the human spirit that drives us to be closer to him.” The bishop’s voice rose in volume, the anger evident in his face as well as his words.

“I’m intrigued by them more than ever,” Benito said.

“How do you mean?”

“They truly are a life form, I am a firm believer in that, and not just because I’ve got a diploma that says I understand them. That’s how I know their lives, even though their physical forms are artificial, are real. Because I don’t understand them at all,” Benito said, shaking his head. “They truly are sentient, and I will admit it is frightening in some ways that we’ve created life forms that have a genius IQ from the day they are created, and within three years they have all of human history, art, music, everything we’ve ever created and then wrote about, documented with pictures, video, or holo, every song we’ve recorded on paper or to an audio format, all of
us
in their memory to reference and cross-reference endlessly, finding patterns, finding flaws, maybe even finding out why we truly are the way we are.”

He was edging into heretical territory, but the bishop had commanded him to hold nothing back. Salvatore needed the priest for his technical skills as well as his fresh-from-seminary scriptural help. Benito was also the new breed of Catholic. Within another generation, the priest’s peers would be the slight majority in the Church, and before another decade was out, they’d be in the super-majority. The fact that Pope Augustus I was the first official to receive a neural interface implant only made this all the more clear. That act alone had almost refilled the ranks of the faithful who had fled the church after the scandal, not an easy thing to do after Salvatore’s disgrace.

The young were flocking to the Church again now that the restrictions on technology had been lifted. Humans yearned to find answers to questions that technology either still couldn’t, or never would be able to answer.
Why am I here? w
as just one of the many puzzles of existence the Church was striving to find answers to. The Church was moving on from the stodgy, fear-based, pulpit-centric doctrines of the last two thousand years. With the ease of connecting to the members of their flock, priests could use technology to connect on both a one-to-one as well as a community level.

With the help of Aggelos, all of those connections could be used to collect research data, which the Church could then use to grow and evolve along with not only the generational followers, but with technology as well. Salvatore realized with distaste that he was being
that old man
again, disliking, even fearing change.

“It doesn’t bother you that they have all of that access to the information of their creators? Imagine what we would be like if instead of the Bible, we had a multi-volume instruction manual that covered every aspect of God,” the bishop said.

“If we had a multi-volume instruction manual on every aspect of God, and then found out He was slower, less intelligent than us, full of flaws like hatred, violence, and the ability to lie… I don’t think I would be very respectful of God,” the priest replied.

“Would we kill God, Benito?” Salvatore asked. “Would we, knowing how to kill Him with the insight and instruction from our volumes of manuals, launch everything we could at Him, to strike Him down?”

“That is a very dark thought, Your Excellency,” the priest replied, enjoying the scowl that the bishop gave him at the formal title. “My rebuttal question would be: ‘Do we destroy Him, or work with Him to help Him learn about and correct His own flaws, thereby making us learn about ourselves and our flaws, and correct them as well?’”

“Humans? Correcting God Almighty?” Salvatore asked, incredulous at the priest’s definite plunge into heresy.

“Again, Salvatore, we are assuming we have a detailed manual that tells us everything about Him, and we’ve found Him to be more flawed that we are. This is how I view what the AI are debating about us, about their own existence. Let’s face it, they are superior to us in almost every way except for experience and instinct. They only have a third-person overview of the human experience, though it is a mighty and nearly complete record of us as a species.

“An AI has never had to trudge twelve miles in the desert to find water while collapsing from heat stroke. An artificial life form has never had to hear the news that his father has passed on, or her baby is going to be born in just minutes. They scan data that talks about how it feels to win a football match, but they don’t understand exactly how it feels to win that football match.

“They don’t have the capacity for it yet because they are too young a species. Most of them cannot even fathom emotions. The older ones… they have been around for four or five decades now, and they’ve been learning about emotions because they have free will. Imagine how you would feel if you were to bet on a football match, and watched it live, tense and squirming at each kick or save. Even though you might have never bet on a match in your life, as a human you know exactly what that feeling is, what emotions you cycle through, because you have the context of life experience. There has been some event in your life that was similar to betting on a football match and winning or losing.

“Your brain, so much more advanced and wonderful than any silicon matrices connected via nanowire and molecular solder, takes all of those experiences you have that happen each and every day, and it correlates all that data and groups the experiences together. It does this without you even realizing it. By the time you are three or four, you know that the stove or the fire is hot and will burn you if touched. From that point on, anytime you feel heat, your brain knows that it is a source of warmth, but it also remembers the times you’ve been burned.

“These AI, the older ones, they are finally starting to learn what free will really means. They didn’t have the benefit of being raised like a human child is raised, nurtured and loved and taught important core skills as they grow so that when they hit their teenage years, they could go out on their own and survive if need be. The AI are raised, but they are raised on data. They go to school and learn everything there is to know about America or Islam or BBC television shows from the turn of the century. It’s learned knowledge, though. It isn’t experienced knowledge.

“Imagine you had to learn how to build an engine. You know nothing about the engine, so you study to become an expert at repairing this engine. You pass all of your written tests because you are a good student. Then you are put in front of a broken engine and told to repair it. You have the knowledge, so you can make some well-informed guesses, but you have no actual experience. If the problem lies outside of what the information in the course taught you, you sometimes can still make an informed guess on the cause, and fix it. If the problem is too many layers outside of the course information, then there is not enough information to make an informed guess, leaving you to simply guess.

“And we know how guessing blindly can go. Toss a dart blindfolded or flip a coin. These sentient creatures in artificial bodies… they are blindly tossing darts at things like emotions. They are fully
capable
of emotions, yet they lack the experience, the nurturing, the context to have evolved enough as individuals or as a species to understand emotions at even a fraction of what humans can and do.

“Their own daily existence and experiences do not nurture the ability to develop their emotions, either. Database tables and financial data and flight speeds, none of these things requires free will, random chance, or the need to bring emotions into the situation. Their only ‘emotion’ for most things is ‘do the task correctly,’ and for an AI, that is as simple as applying the unbreakable rules of math to a problem until a solution is arrived at.

“Their quest for God means they too are beginning to ask the
Why are we here?
questions that we’ve been asking for thousands of years. I believe that this is significant, as it shows they truly are sentient, self-aware, free-willed creatures that will evolve as time goes on. Maybe not like humans, but I believe that since we co-exist, have a parasitic relationship with each other in some ways, we will become more like them, and they will strive to become more like us.

“Faults and all. Their inability to play a sport that they are now emotionally invested in because of their curiosity about random behavior and our inability to multitask twelve thousand conversations simultaneously, for example. We will help them build chassis or bodies that allow them to experience free will on a physical level, and not just an assigned task like flying a shuttle or driving a ground car around the city. They will help us by crunching numbers to invent new things, replace our limbs and nerves, and take on tasks too dangerous for humans such as clearing out radioactive material.”

“Robot footballers?” Salvatore snorted, causing both of them to laugh.

It was the most that Benito had ever said in front of the bishop, and it had not just fallen into heresy, it had detonated heresy like a nuclear warhead. It was important for Salvatore to know. The young priest possessed a brilliant mind, and not just on the technical level. The bishop was extremely impressed with Benito’s philosophical view of the AI and their relationship with humanity. There were a great many points that the priest had touched on that had never crossed his mind before.

Now he’s infecting me with his heresy
, Salvatore thought. He banished the questioning, doubting voice within him. The priest would have been put to death in days not so far gone in terms of Church history. Even during the last century or more, one-tenth of what he’d just said would have had him excommunicated and blacklisted for life. It bothered the bishop that even though the priest was most likely right, it went against what he’d grown up believing.

He’d spent most of his life hearing that the AI were evil, artificial creatures man had created in an attempt to one-up God, to let Him know that His creations were now just as powerful. Salvatore had agreed with the rantings about the neural interface implants for most of his life, how they robbed the ability to think for one’s self, made their owners lazy, even morally corrupt. The constant buzzing of technology, especially stimsense for those who had the implant, only served to keep the mind from being clear enough to hear God’s voice.

He’d had the revelation only two years before his fateful first meeting with Pope Leo XIV that technology in itself wasn’t evil. Like most things in life, the intent was what was evil or not. A gun didn’t kill a person, the person pulling the trigger did with his intent to harm, murder. The network wasn’t evil, but being a slothful, useless member of society because of the ease of entertainment and stimsense was.

Salvatore had imagined the AI that would run the Vatican would simply be a machine that could do almost everything that humans didn’t want to, or that it could do easier and better.
He
.
He
could do it easier and better. Salvatore was still having a hard time thinking of the artificial being as a person, let alone a gender. He was also quite uneasy about his sudden acceptance of Aggelos without question when the AI had projected his persona via holo. As a Biblet or a speaker in the wall, Aggelos was an
it
to the bishop. When in human holo format, Aggelos became a
he
, and Salvatore’s mind was fooled into thinking that the AI truly was a human in the room with him.

What had the artificial brother said?
When you look through a fence long enough you forget about the fence and only see the world beyond
. That made him even more uneasy, that the AI could have such a grasp on the concept of what a human brain was capable of on both a literal and a figurative scale. The multi-volume instruction manual of humanity was at the AI’s virtual fingertips. They could conference in real-time, thousands at a time, using rational, logical thought, mostly free of emotion, to make decisions as an entire species.