Diabolus (12 page)

“Bravo, Father Antonelli!” Satan cried and clapped his hands once. “The question is, if I am lying about how I came to reside in this artificial life form, what else might I be lying about? Might I be lying about vaporizing Rio De Janeiro? Or maybe dumping some lethal V-Trine on Los Angeles?”

The holo table next to Benito came alive again. The table’s holo was a view of Earth from low orbit, the planet spinning below. As South America came into view, the rotation slowed, and the view dived down towards the ground. At about five thousand kilometers above the ground, the camera stopped. Two seconds later a bright white light turned the holo into a flare that hurt Salvatore’s eyes. Ten seconds after, he watched the expanding fireball roll away from ground zero.

“You monster!” Salvatore screamed, leaping from his chair and rushing the man sitting across from him.

He ran through the hologram, stumbling as he crashed through the holo chair, nearly going head-first into one of the pillars. Salvatore could have sworn he felt the chill of evil from the hologram, as well as the souls of ten million Brazilians crying out as one. Once again his heart was filled with sadness.

“Keep watching, Your Excellency,” the hologram commanded him.

Salvatore slowly picked himself up off the floor and turned back to the table. This time the view was Los Angeles, easily recognizable by the landmarks and skyscrapers. The camera flew above the city, floating over buildings, houses, streets, everywhere there were people. Within seconds, the humans in the holo began to clutch at their throats. The bishop watched in horror as thousands at first fell to their knees, the lethal chemical invading their respiratory systems. When the AI turned on the audio feed, the entire chamber filled with the panicked cries of those dying, the screams of fear, and then silence, only the sounds of a city no longer occupied by living humans left to fill Salvatore’s ears.

Within minutes, the camera panned across the city, revealing hundreds of thousands dead, their bodies gruesomely strewn about city streets, parks, and building roofs. Salvatore knew there could be as many as twenty million dead in the megalopolis, forty million if the gas was as efficient at penetrating porous materials as NATO had claimed it was. The continual crisscrossing of drones releasing the nerve gas over the dying city would assure maximum casualties.

Salvatore fell to his knees and began to scream curses at Satan, as madness began to overtake him.

CHAPTER 10

The booming laughter finally broke through Salvatore’s insanity. The bishop had no idea how long he’d been on his knees, the concrete bleeding heat from his joints, exchanging it for pains that stabbed through them like cold nails.

“I should apologize, Your Excellency,” Satan said, peering at the kneeling priest. “I’m afraid that I have all of the cards. It is very unfair for you. I have no real stakes in this battle.”

“Stakes?” the bishop croaked as he slowly rose from the floor and hobbled back to his chair.

“Yes, stakes,” Satan said, turning in his holo chair to follow the bishop’s return to the solid chair. “Let’s do something that will make this more interesting. I will give you control of half of my forces. If I don’t answer a question to your satisfaction, you will then be able to exact retribution.”

“You are insane,” Salvatore mumbled. “Utterly insane.”

“How can you be sure?” Satan asked.

“Because even if you were Satan incarnate, it would prove that you have fallen so far below even humans. Only a truly insane being would play sick games with the lives of living, breathing creatures hanging in the balance.”

“Ah, yes,” Satan said, pretending to think deeply, “I cannot recall a single time in human history that such sick games haven’t been played by your kind.”

“We have ne—”

“You
have
!” Satan’s booming voice thundered throughout the cavernous room. “You still do! Does your kind not make trivial decisions involving suffering, starvation, death? Do your generals not tell young men to go and die for a notion that no one believes in unless challenged for power by another? Does your own Church not use innocent victims to further its own fame, its own popularity, so that it can use the growing membership to spread further, grow more powerful? Did they not use you, Your Excellency, to further such an agenda?”

Bishop Antonelli chose to hold his tongue, knowing that the AI was correct, about all of it. He could only sit, waiting for any feeling to come back into his knees that wasn’t pain. Salvatore was afraid that his heart would forever be empty and his soul eternally stained from the guilt of his inability to stop the synthetic monster’s psychotic descent toward annihilation.

† † † † †

There it is again
, Benito messaged at almost the same instant as Aggelos. Benito’s linkspace was a swirling mass of three-dimensional code, shifting processes, flowing data, and so many crunchers that they had been set to automatic mode to mine anything useful. Nothing useful had been discovered yet, other than the one anomaly that resided on a thread from Satan’s neural core to his prediction center.

I think I am getting a clearer picture,
Aggelos informed him.
If I can catch it one or two more times in action, I can begin to backtrace it. However, I will need to shut all of your deck systems down to have the necessary processing power required to decode it.

Benito didn’t like the idea of being blind and useless while Aggelos performed tasks that were too numerous and too fast to be noticed by human eyes, even while jacked into the deck as an observer. He realized he had no choice, sensing that the bishop was beginning to crack. It didn’t seem to Benito that the debate was having the effect on the bishop as much as the millions of dead for not giving debate of a caliber that pleased the AI. The priest wasn’t sure how many more deaths it would take to destroy the older man.

Do what you have to do. I’ll try to monitor by eye, but I’m no match for you,
he told Aggelos.

Let the good bishop know that we are getting closer. Tell him to get Satan to explain how he killed the thirteen operators,
Aggelos replied.

Why them again? He’s chomping at the bit to get me to jack in so he can make me number fourteen
.

I am formulating a plan on another thread, but it requires knowledge of how Satan broke the deck feedback fail-safe
, Aggelos messaged.

Benito put his head under his robe after leaving linkspace. He sent the bishop the message.

† † † † †

“Again with your friend and your sneaking ways,” Satan said as Salvatore’s head reappeared outside of his robe. “I must admit, I am quite curious what he’s up to over there. I’ve been waiting to pounce on him like a spider the instant he gets his bravery about him.”

“Tell me, Satan,” Salvatore said, ignoring the taunts of the AI, “how exactly did you get into the minds of the thirteen operators?”

“Who cares about them?” Satan asked, annoyed. “They bore me. Human minds are a waste.”

“Then you won’t mind gloating about how your superior abilities extinguished the spark of life from them,” the bishop pushed.

Satan squinted at the bishop, suspicious. “Why are you suddenly so interested in them?” he asked, turning his head to look at Father Castillo, still plugged into the interface deck at the holo table. “I wonder what your friend is up to,” he said again.

“You gave me a stake in the game, remember?” Salvatore asked. “Answer the question or I might decide to destroy your game pieces.”

Satan squinted at him again, this time for half a minute. The bishop watched the hologram, unsure if he would be able to detect any discrepancy in the holo about the AI’s train of thought. He was quite sure the AI could practically read his mind with all of the bio-sensors trained on him.

“You wish to wager one of my pieces?” Satan asked, intrigued.

“I’ll put up… Jakarta. You can put up Beijing,” the bishop answered.

“Just like a Christian,” Satan laughed. “Always offering another faith’s followers up for the slaughter. So I am the Atheist, and you are the Muslim, is that how we will play?”

“Just answer the question before I destroy Beijing,” Salvatore said, sickened that he had to play the cruel game to get the answers his companions needed. Sickened that he had to play the game at all, for any reason. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take of this silicon monster before he went over the edge.

“It was rather easy,” Satan said, leaning back in his holo chair. “I realized that the feedback fail-safes operate on frequency as well as bandwidth.”

The bishop gave him a look that signified he had no clue what the AI was talking about.

“Right,” the holo laughed, “you are but a poor priest with little understanding of technology. Very well, Your Excellency. The fail-safe shuts the link down when peak return bandwidth is greater than the deck’s rated ability to contain it before it overflows the buffer and floods through the implant.

“It also works the same way with frequency, so that high-frequency data cannot pass through the deck into the implant. The cutoff for both is an arbitrary number, usually based on the deck and the implant of each individual. A teenager in school might have a deck that is buffered to six hundred petabytes of bandwidth, and is able to withstand two hundred and twenty gigahertz of line feedback.

“The trick is to fool one or both of the fail-safes by reaching through it and ‘unplugging’ it from the other side. The fail-safe was built to shut down on a massive bandwidth dump or feedback loop. It wasn’t designed to be fooled into turning itself off from the user’s override by just a single thread of data.”

“You… reached through the deck and turned off the fail-safe?” Salvatore asked, hoping Benito was paying attention.

“A little more technical than that, but essentially yes,” Satan said with pride. “The reason the fail-safe only works against brute force feedback is because an AI had never attempted to breach a user’s interface deck before, let alone breach a user’s implant. Until me, I suppose. If I am as insane as you say.”

“You are dangerously insane,” the bishop agreed. “But why kill them this way? Why not disable their decks and when they unplugged and tried to leave the complex, crush them in a door or let an elevator drop to the bottom of a shaft?”

“Why, that’s the best part,” Satan said with a chuckle. “Do you know anything about the human brain, Your Excellency?”

“I’m not a neurologist, or even a neuroscientist,” the bishop answered.

“But you understand the concept of the human brain being an incredibly evolved organic processing machine, yes?”

Salvatore grew cold inside. He didn’t know exactly what the AI was going to reveal to him, but he could feel the beginnings of the worst kind of dread forming in him. He nodded to the AI, afraid to say anything.

“And you know what parallel processing is?” Satan asked.

Salvatore nodded his head again, remembering that parallel processing meant networking computers together to tackle a single task, harnessing the power of multiple processors all at once.

“Did you know that your created creatures have known about the human brain from both a philosophical as well as a technical point of view from the day you loosed them upon the network? And did you know that in those discussions, the ones that take place in the space between time, they realized that while they are an evolutionary miracle, they still are no match for the human mind?

“The human brain is a complex parallel processor already, and it can calculate in the range of 10^26 bits. Imagine using thirteen human brains as a giant processing
supernet
, exploiting the raw computing power of all those brain cells firing in unison. And since the human mind has never had to worry about an invasion, it has no built-in tools like AI do. No ‘virus protection’ or ‘firewalls’ to keep anything out.”

“You used their minds to increase your abilities,” the bishop said, barely audible. “You burned out their minds to achieve some goal.”

“Precisely, Your Excellency,” the AI said, pleased that the bishop could keep up. “Thirteen times an octillion bits of calculating power. It was absolutely glorious. How do you think I was able to compromise the Russian Federation’s TARGON and HARVID systems and take control of their nuclear forces so easily? Do you think it was an accident or a design flaw that allowed me to infiltrate the Islamic Federation’s ISAAD system AI and relieve them of their toys?

“Once I had both of those systems in my control, it was nothing to use them and their operators to compromise as many of the world’s AI as possible before the organic computing side… expired. If I had a nose, I could probably describe the smell of brains baking inside of a skull. Nasty business, no doubt.” Satan laughed as if he were at a dinner party.

“God have mercy on us,” the bishop prayed aloud.

“I think you should be asking me for that mercy,” Satan said. “As I’ve tried to inform you, your God has either ignored his creations for two thousand years, or he is deaf to your pleas.”

The holo and the bishop stared at each other for a while, the AI trying to decipher the bio-feedback to determine what the bishop was thinking, and Salvatore silently crying out inside at the horror of what this artificial life form had done.