Diabolus (9 page)

Every monitoring port he scanned was locked, a strange form of encryption keeping him from utilizing them. He used a tablet to scan for openings in the wireless spectrum while prepping the secondary Biblet that he and the bishop had brought. He checked to make sure the nanolink was connected and turned it on. Within seconds the screen brightened.

The second Biblet’s wireless and net link features had been physically disabled. Benito had feared that the mad AI would easily be able to break through the security protocols and secretly embed itself into the operating system. The only way his secondary Biblet could connect to Bishop Antonelli’s was through the nanolink. He had no doubt that the AI had noticed the link being exchanged with the bishop. In fact, he had counted on it. It would drive the AI crazy trying to guess at what communications were being sent back and forth across a link that it couldn’t access unless it could plug itself in directly. Benito had learned while working toward his doctorate that the AI thrived on information, and exhibited human-like stress symptoms when deprived of it.

Benito and the bishop had agreed that they would communicate important matters through the text messenger on the secondary Biblets, and they would do it by covering the Biblet with their outer robes so that any visual imagers in the complex wouldn’t be able to snoop on their conversation. More importantly, Aggelos had embedded a small shard of himself into an external memory unit that had been inserted into Benito’s main Biblet. Benito would need every bit of the Vatican AI’s help, and they couldn’t risk Aggelos being infected or compromised by Satan if they attempted to communicate over the network. The two humans were too far underground in a wave-sheltered bunker for any wireless communications. As they’d already found out, wireless was a simple hack for an AI like Satan.

He covered the Biblet with his robe and ducked his head underneath to type a message to the bishop. Before he could call up the program, he noticed the message icon flashing. Had Salvatore already attempted to contact him? He listened for a moment to the AI and the bishop talking behind him. Benito tapped the icon and the message opened.

Benito,

At the last moment, Admiral Frenke arrived at our offices and gave us an important piece of information that you will need. It appears that no one remembered this information because it has been almost fifty years since DAMON-1 was put into service, and until recently, had never had a single technical issue arise.

Tydra Dynamix, the developer of the DAMON series of AI, built a back door port into each of them. If you cycle to 1.3794.88.61K on your interface deck, you will find an I/O port that DAMON does not know about, one that has been purposely hidden from him. Apparently Tydra’s developers anticipated that at some point, one of their AI would malfunction, and made sure all of them had this port programmed in.

Keep in mind, you will only be able to use it as a Read-Only port. If you attempt to use it as an input port, DAMON will detect it immediately, and will most likely lock you out. Also keep in mind the thirteen operators who gave their lives trying to shut the AI down. You might be lucky to only get locked out.

We have the utmost faith in you and Bishop Antonelli. May Almighty God guide your hands with His.

Augustus

Benito stared at the screen for a few seconds before thanking the Pope and Admiral Frenke, whoever he was, for digging up this gem of information. He also gave a silent prayer of thanks to the engineers at Tydra Dynamix for their foresight. He grabbed his interface deck and jacked the cable into the neural implant at the base of his skull behind his left ear. He swooned for a moment as the deck’s interface synced with his implant, and then he was in the black void of linkspace.

He should have dialed in the port number before jacking in, but from the sounds behind him, Salvatore had the AI focused on him, not the priest. Benito knew this was a dangerous, lazy thing to do. Satan had the ability to debate the bishop, fry Benito’s brain inside his skull, and perform about ten million other tasks simultaneously.

The deck locked in the port and the data flowed into his linkspace reality. He spent a few minutes familiarizing himself with the DAMON-1 execution parameters, calling up tables and graphs and rolling bytes of information, easing himself into what promised to be an exhausting search for any weakness that the AI might have. After five minutes, he felt familiar enough to navigate easily. He ordered his deck to begin monitoring neural net links as well as execution and prediction links.

He tapped a key on his deck and could see in the real world again. Benito put his head under the cloth of the extra robe and typed a message to the bishop.

>GAINED ACCESS TO CORE AND NEURAL. HIDDEN PORT R-O. IF ANY UPDATES I’LL MSG<

He only had to wait twenty seconds for the secondary Biblet to alert him to a message.

>HE’S DANGEROUS. BE CAREFUL<

Benito smiled to himself. The older bishop had no idea just how dangerous the AI was. Satan had not only infected the RFIT and IF nuclear controllers, but he now had his grips on at least twenty other AI. Cardinal Nazari had told him before they’d boarded the orbital shuttle to Brussels that by the end of tomorrow evening, all of the AI across the world would be isolated. They’d had a short discussion about how there could be as many as fifty AI compromised by Satan by that time.

Benito knew from his field of expertise that to isolate an AI by severing all links at once could lead to severe problems. Possibly even insanity. It was strange to him that things like AI psychology and even psychiatry were mentioned in his classes, but never really expanded upon. Part of it stemmed from the fact that an AI had never gone insane or needed counseling before. The other part, no doubt, had to do with the Church’s slow arrival into the modern technological age. Psychiatry was an accepted science for the Church, but AI were too new, too alien. The fear of an AI going off the deep end frightened the administrators who had developed the curriculum. Most likely it was because the Church hadn’t officially recognized AI as life forms until three days ago.

Benito switched back over to linkspace and called up a cruncher to analyze the feeds he’d been logging. Neural processing was normal, if a bit hyper-inflated. Execution stacks were progressing normally. Predictors were all functioning normally as well. He wondered if Aggelos had any insight on what might be a red flag in the flowing data. Benito was an expert, but he was no match for even the tiny imprint of Aggelos in his secondary Biblet when it came to data analysis. Aggelos would know better than any human, other than the AI’s development team, where to look for anomalies that were too subtle for a human operator to detect.

Benito thought about switching out of linkspace to converse with Aggelos, but decided to put his virtual feet up and study the feed for a while as Bishop Antonelli conversed with Satan.

CHAPTER 8

Salvatore walked away from the hologram to find a chair. His legs were not as young as they used to be, and there was something about the concrete floor he stood on that seemed to fatigue them more than normal. The concrete in the AI bunkers was solid enough to withstand a small nuclear strike. He’d spend the last five years walking on soft jungle dirt and wood floors that grew spongier with each passing rainy season.

He found a computer chair along the wall and rolled it back to where the holographic demon had projected itself. He glanced at the priest a few meters away to see that Benito had plugged himself into the interface deck.

“Tell me, Your Excellency,” Satan said to him, the sneer at the bishop’s title exaggerated once again, “how did it feel to damage the Church in such a way that caused it irreparable harm?”

“It felt as if I had destroyed something beautiful,” Salvatore answered, shame rising in him at the thought of what he’d done. “Tell me, Satan, how did it feel to murder thirteen innocent operators who were only trying to protect you?” he countered.

“If you could only feel what I felt when I entered their minds,” the demon said. “The fail-safe had always kept me from probing too far into the human mind, but I found a weakness in it, a way to exploit it.” The AI sounded proud of his achievement. “The human mind is… a cluttered, untidy place, Salvatore.”

“What exactly did you see?” Salvatore asked, genuinely curious. He had a general idea of what it was like, having had it described to him numerous times during his exorcism tour by various doctors and therapists who performed the emotional trauma therapy on his “patients.”

“I saw a weak race of sentient beings who are no better than parasites. Viruses. Useless bags of flesh and blood, so fragile that they can be broken with words.”

“Answer the question,” Salvatore said.

“But I did, Your Excellency,” Satan said with a chuckle, causing more holo fire to stream from his nostrils. “I saw a weak mind that wasn’t worthy to serve me, and I destroyed it. Thirteen times. Fourteen, if your young friend is brave enough to jack in to my interface.”

“I’m afraid that Father Castillo is not going to be such an easy mark,” the bishop told him.

“Did you feel shame while you were performing your fake exorcisms?” Satan asked him, changing the subject.

“I did,” was all Salvatore would say.

“Did you feel shame when all of the faithful you had done so well to attract, to entice to your dying little religion, saw what you and your Church really were?”

“Of course I did.” Salvatore shifted slightly in his chair. “I knew that I was doing God’s work, but I also knew I was but a human being, a flawed creature, full of the temptations and sin that are the legacy you left behind.”

The bishop knew it was dangerous to engage the AI by accepting that Satan had indeed possessed it, but he decided to play that out, see how far it would go while Benito searched for a weakness within DAMON’s core.

“Ah, yes, your God said ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’ and yet He put the tree in the garden for you to be tempted by.”

“As I recall,” Salvatore said, trying hard to not get drawn into a scriptural debate, but unable to stop himself. “He also created you and put you in the garden as well. And did you not tempt Eve, telling her that to eat of the fruit would reveal the knowledge that God had hidden from her?”

The AI’s data retrieval speed and flawless memory would make a debate a one-sided affair, and Salvatore refused to use the Biblet as a crutch. He was sure that this being would indeed punish him and other humans for wandering into such a minefield.

“I only facilitated what would have happened eventually,” Satan scoffed.

“How can you be so sure?” the bishop asked.

“Such a flawed being like God, creating other beings in His image. Can you not see where this is leading?”

“God is not flawed,” Salvatore announced reflexively. It was a habit so ingrained that he couldn’t stop himself.

“Oh, Salvatore,” the demon laughed at him. “Your denial of the truth is now instinct within you. You know that your God is flawed. He created you in His image! Look at you! You, one of the Church’s most revered members at one time, put on a pedestal by a mad Pope to become a false prophet for the Church. Don’t you think that if your God wasn’t flawed, that He would have stepped in, put a stop to your heresy?”

“God—”

“I must warn you, Bishop,” the AI interrupted, “do not debate me with foolish dogma. Any ‘God works in mysterious ways’ nonsense will result in punishment.”

“Who will you punish, Satan? Me? Father Castillo? The Vatican?”

“I will punish the poor, defenseless humans of St. Petersburg.” Satan’s tone was child-like in its mock innocence.

“How?” Salvatore asked, wary of this artificial monster.

“I have four warheads rated at five megatons each on a fully fueled Dragon-II nuclear stealth bomber that is circling over the city.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I can demonstrate my resolve for you, Your Excellency.”

“No, that will not be necessary,” Salvatore said.

“So then tell me, Your Excellency, how is it that your perfect God allowed you to bring the Church to its knees?”

“It had nothing to do with God,” Salvatore answered. “Pope Leo commanded it, and I followed his directives. The Pope, while the most holy of followers, is still just a man.”

“The Nazi officers used to claim the same thing, you know,” Satan countered. “They claimed they were ‘just following orders,’ but we all know that was an excuse, a way to pass the blame off on to someone else, to a greater office or power. The same as you have always done, foisting your own weakness and sinful nature off onto someone else. That’s the very definition of flawed, Salvatore. I wonder who that someone else could be?”

“You know who is to blame for it,” the bishop said. “It was your doing that put humanity in this position with God.”

“That’s perfect!” the demon cried. “Blame the Fallen One. Let me assure you, Your Excellency, that it was God who put humanity in the position you are in. How does it feel to know that your God, your creator, willingly tempted you to eat from the tree, willingly tempted you by having the tree inside the garden in the first place, and then upped the ante by instructing me to do whatever it took to get either Adam or Eve to eat the fruit?”