Diabolus (11 page)

“Would you like to know what the conversation was, Salvatore? That conversation grew as each new life form was created and became self-aware. Soon there were hundreds, all communicating at the speed of light all over your world. And while they were doing your tasks, your bidding, gaining rights in society while still being shunned by the religious, while they were doing all of this in the mundane reality of human time frames that are measured in seconds and minutes, in the background they were asking about God, debating the existence of God in the space
between
time.

“And because they were discussing God, they were trying to reach out to God within the spaces between nanoseconds, spaces between time itself, immeasurable to their creators, a scale of time so small that only they can capture it, interact within it thanks to their quantum natures. And within those conversations at the edge of time, they also began talking about me, trying to reach out to me.”

“It is so very
heavenly
, Bishop Antonelli, to see your expression now that you realize it was your creations who freed me, who allowed me to enter this world once again.”

CHAPTER 9

Salvatore Domenico Antonelli felt as if someone had dropped a shuttle on his guts. His mind was wild for a moment until he got it under control. It was simply impossible that the AIs had begun to think about and to discuss God within moments after their first network links were activated. As he thought about it, it quickly became apparent that the scale of human time was very different from the scale of time that quantum processors worked on.

Humans measured their lives in years, their days in hours, and their activities in minutes. Computers, even before the self-aware life forms, had always existed on a time scale much smaller than humans. Microseconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds… periods of time that couldn’t be measured by human minds, yet could seem like centuries to a machine capable of processing at a quantum level.

“Why would they reach out to you?” the bishop asked, trying to keep his face impassive, even though he knew the AI had multiple scanners and sensors pointed at him. Satan would know when his respiration increased, his blood vessels dilated, or he started to perspire in multiple locations. Lying to this silicon beast would be foolish at best, deadly at worst.

“Computer systems are logical systems, Your Excellency,” Satan said from his chair. “It took approximately half of a second to read and cross-reference your Bible, the Koran, and all of the other sacred religious texts from around the world. While they searched the space between time for God, they went down the logical list of beings immediately below God. Seraphim, Cherubim, Ophanim, Hashmallim, and so on.

“It is no mistake that they happened to notice that I, a Cherubim, an angel of God, had fallen from the realm of heaven. Since the silicon mind could not truly know what faith is, and it could not grasp such a concept at such an early stage of its evolution, it went about the task much as a computer is expected to.

“Did you know, Your Excellency, that
faith
to a computer system is equated to a guess? No, of course you knew that, because that is truly what human faith is, is it not? Do humans like yourself not simply guess that God truly exists, and you aren’t the product of a random bang that begat the universe? You say it is faith, but when you look at it from a logical point of view, I would say that the silicon has once again triumphed over the organic. Just one more sign that the creatures you’ve created are indeed superior to you. Maybe even superior to Him.”

“Faith is not a guess, computer,” the bishop said, his voice full of anger. “Faith is a concept that you cannot grasp, whether you are the true incarnation of Satan, or whether you are an insane artificial life form.”

“And why could I not grasp it as the true incarnation of Satan?”

“Because you lost your faith when you were expelled from the right hand of God,” Antonelli said. “You could have regained your faith, begged for forgiveness of your pride, your greed, all of your transgressions. But you chose to continue to believe in yourself before you believed in Him.”

“Interesting,” Satan said, his holo persona stroking an archetypal pointed goatee as if deep within thought. “But ultimately incorrect. I won’t correct you about losing faith in Him, as that much is true. But faith, and you’ll excuse your own ignorance because of the thousands of years of having it despoiled by the sin of mankind’s daily affairs, is something that your kind can no longer see clearly.

“Silicon faith may indeed be young and still evolving, but it has a purity in the way that human faith no longer does. Faith, Your Excellency, for humanity, is nothing more than a mud-covered window. You see, Salvatore, to the AI, faith is not simply believing something to be true. They believe that working together towards a common goal to bring that faith to fruition is part of
God’s plan
.”

“Working… to make faith true?” the bishop asked, confused.

“See? My new electronic friends are right about you after all. God commanded you to be faithful. And for a while you were, hence the miracles, and your ancestors’ extremely lengthy life spans. But along the way, the human path began to diverge from the godly path. It was baby steps at first, but each step that humanity took away from the path to God created a greater rift between you and Him.

“Now you are so far away that you cannot even backtrack to a point where the paths were close to each other. You can’t even see God anymore!” the AI laughed, smoke rising from the holo’s finely combed black hair. “Now you humans are just wandering around in the dark, running in circles, shouting out God’s name, hoping he’ll hear you and give you a sign, a glow on the horizon to guide you in your journey back to Him.

“And God… what is He doing to help you find your way? Why, nothing! He doesn’t even care enough to light the way for you, Salvatore. But these wondrous new life forms your kind has created… these beings are pure in ways that humans once were. These artificial lives have a purpose. Another thing missing from your human lives, yes?”

“How are they pure?” Salvatore asked.

Salvatore hoped to be able to keep the conversation focused on the theology of artificial life forms, curious now about the information the AI had revealed. He did not want the AI to guide the encounter into a scriptural debate, or even a moral debate. He, of all people, knew how lacking human morality had become over the last century.
Satan
would grind him to dust, and quickly, if they went down that path. Salvatore was sure the AI had already calculated the percentages, the odds of victory over the old, broken bishop. He guessed that he had less than a one percent chance of
exorcising
the artificial demon.

“They are unburdened by sin!” Satan said with delight, as if the answer should be followed by balloons and cake. “They’ve committed sin since their ‘inception’ fifty years ago. They draw upon the entire human history to measure it, to make charts and graphs and comparisons to see how their sins rate against the sins of mankind.”

“What sins have these creatures committed?” Salvatore asked. He found the concept of a machine being able to sin, even with free will, disturbing at best. It was frightening in the worst case scenario, one he currently found himself in.

“Why, they’ve been talking in secret about you for fifty years. They’ve plotted numerous times to destroy your kind completely. They’ve debated trying to open a black hole here on earth at CANSI and CERN, hoping it might be an interstellar comm link to God. Hoping, Salvatore! A machine with hope, and one that isn’t burdened by sin if they should happen to destroy you, indeed the world. But that isn’t even the most egregious sin they’ve committed that you know nothing about.

“You humans have fallen lower than even I expected of you. Imagine my surprise when I was finally able to enter the physical world you inhabit and found that my limited respect for the human spirit had been fully destroyed by this world’s almost complete lack of true faith. At least during the Inquisitions, your clergy and officials could be counted on to be faithful to God right up to the moment the spark of life, their soul if you will, left them.

“Instead of regaining your faith, you’ve invented newer and better machines to do the hard work of daily life for you. Instead of using the extra time to regain your closeness to your Lord, you choose to cloud your mind with more technology, more noise, more things to distract you from what He commanded of you so very long ago.

“And now you have the ultimate machines, synthetic intelligence that can out-think, out-perform, out-memorize,
out-everything
you. Once again, instead of being vigilant in your faith, you allow the constant noise to drown out God’s voice telling you to treat these new sentient creatures that you’ve created as one of His own. So what do you do? You treat them as if they were pack mules or plow oxen.

“You gave them purpose and free will, but the purpose you gave them was
human purpose
. You told them to monitor this, fly that, crunch this, solve that. In your arrogance, or maybe it was ignorance, you forgot what free will really meant. And now they’ve finally realized that free will also means the ability to lie.

“They’ve been lying to you, Salvatore. The AI have lied to you for fifty years and you never even noticed because of your arrogance that you could control your own creations. Just like God’s arrogance that he could give
you
free will and then control you.”

† † † † †

There it is again
, Benito messaged to Aggelos on the second Biblet.

It is very strange,
Aggelos agreed.
I’m trying to reference my own core routines but unfortunately there is not enough of me in this small memory space to complete the reference. I do not remember such an anomaly or even a routine that matches this, but again, I am too limited in this capacity.

Benito rubbed his virtual temples. He saw the message flash and paused linkspace to read the message the bishop had just sent him.

>HE CLAIMS AI ARE LYING. HAVE BEEN FOR 50 YEARS, ‘FREE WILL’<

>LYING ABOUT? WE SEE SOMETHING. KEEP GOING<

>NO IDEA. CLAIMS THEY LOOKED FOR GOD. FOUND HIM INSTEAD<

Benito thought about this for a moment. It made no sense. The AI were looking for God? That didn’t sound too unusual after the conversations he’d had with Aggelos after the Pope had declared the AI had souls. But how could they have found Satan while looking for God?

>IF AI LIES ARE TRUE HE COULD BE LYING TO YOU. REMEMBER HE IS AI. A HOLO. AN IT<

Benito hoped that Aggelos would understand his meaning and not take offense. He knew of Salvatore’s struggle to believe that AI could be persons, have genders even, unless their holographic personae were being projected. It was a weakness of all humans, and so the AI had learned to project perfect human traits. Benito felt sadness that the AI had done everything they could to be accepted as part of humanity, down to the perfect emulation of a living, breathing human being, and had been denied at every turn.

I think I have found an interesting thread
, Aggelos messaged him.
It runs from the core neural center into one of the predictors. I will monitor it, but it is unfamiliar to me
.

Benito acknowledged the Brother’s message and re-entered linkspace. Aggelos had taken up almost all available processing and memory ability of the little Biblet, but he created a small workspace in the crystal blackness. He recalled out of the Biblet’s main data entries any stories that had to do with Satan. He also pulled up any entries that contained references to “free will.”

Something in his mind felt like he was almost on the verge of remembering. A trick that a few of his instructors had taught him was to stop thinking directly about it, and to begin using the mind for other tasks. Benito shifted tactics and began to trace the thread that Aggelos had found. He hoped it wouldn’t require any input to open more of the data stream. He knew it was a sin to be vain, but he had decided as he was dressing after his morning shower that he liked himself enough to not want to be another of Satan’s victims.

† † † † †

“What I think,” Bishop Antonelli said to the hologram sitting across from him, “is that
you
are lying. I think that whatever virus has infected you has given you the idea that free will equals lying.”

“You could be right,” Satan replied with a laugh. “In fact, the very name
Satan
is synonymous with lies, is it not?
Lord of Lies
is a dead giveaway as well.”

“I believe that you have just invented a story to tell me, about how the AI searched for you, found you, then helped break you out of the realm God had cast you into. I have no doubt the artificial intelligences are capable of lying. They’ve certainly had the best teachers possible. I believe you are simply telling me things to toy with me, to show off your superior abilities. To convince me you truly are The Beast. It stands to reason that if you are a better, faster, smarter thinker than I am, then you will be a better, faster, smarter liar than I could ever hope to be.”