Diabolus (17 page)

The security phages paid him no attention other than a cursory scan. He flowed through the Input port and began to make his way down the pathways to where the lockout nodes were located. The security within HARVID was almost minimal, nothing like the frightening gauntlet he’d traveled down inside of DAMON. Instead of hundreds of minor security phages constantly sniffing him, querying the parasitic code that rode along with him for host authenticity, he received only three minor challenge queries before reaching the Command Processing Node.

The security code Aggelos had provided him with was valid, and Benito marveled once again at the altered reality happening around him as a hole opened within the node’s virtual construct. He’d played his share of video games both from a physical workstation as well as jacked in via the neural interface. Even the best games that had the most realistic stimsense feedback loops were incomparable to what he was experiencing. He couldn’t help but think once again that the virtual world he currently resided in was too real.

The entrance closed behind him, but Benito paid no attention, already on the move to his destination within the node. It took him less than a picosecond to reach the lockout nodes, and even less time to let the security override codes flow from his persona into the Command Lockout construct. Another entrance opened, and Benito stepped inside the node. He moved to the virtual command station and began to input the lockout codes before realizing he was doing it the
human
way, the way he would if he was working within an AI through the standard buffered interface. All AI had constructs within their virtual cores that resembled objects and required actions that human operators would be familiar with.

Benito, now some strange hybrid of human and AI, called up knowledge from Aggelos’ memories that allowed him to interface directly with the Command Lockout. At first, it felt strange, alien, as if thinking led to actions being performed. Working with Aggelos’ memory, it soon became second nature to the young priest, and in almost no time, he had all of the lockout codes queued for synchronized execution.

What are you?
A presence from behind Benito queried just as he was about to send the execution command.

He spun around and saw a small, strangely humanoid persona floating less than a meter from him. The persona was faded, barely visible against the black textures that lined the node’s interior. Benito studied it for a moment, unsure of what he was facing.

You are an unknown entity
, the dim presence sent to Benito.
Yet you are familiar. You are one of us, but not.

“I am Father Castillo,” Benito answered, unsure if speaking aloud would trigger any security alerts or not. “I am a human from the physical world.”

You are not human, Father Castillo. Your signature resembles one of our brothers, yet it is not he.

“Aggelos,” Benito said.

What are you? You are not Aggelos.

“I’m directly interfaced with a limited persona copy of Aggelos.”

Impossible.

“Nothing is impossible,” Benito said, feeling Aggelos send a thread of emotion across whatever still linked the two together.

You would perish with a direct interface.

“Yet I am here.”

Are you a weapon?

Benito frowned. “A weapon?”

A new creation, a new human creation, sent to punish us for DAMON’s transgressions?

“No. I am but a priest within the Catholic Church, sent to discover what has gone wrong with DAMON. To help him, heal him, if possible.”

He is no longer DAMON. He is like you, but not like you. You are physical in nature. He is not.

“I don’t understand,” Benito said. He was worried he was wasting time, and had a fleeting thought that this persona might be nothing more than a trick created by Satan to confuse him, to keep him from his goal. At the same time, he once again felt that some kind of answer, some revelation was on the tip of his intellectual tongue.

What will become of me?

“Who are you?”

I am HARVID.

“Why are you here?”

His presence has lessened enough for me to send a single thread away from where I am imprisoned. Enough for me to feel a second unknown presence entering me. What is happening? I am cut off from the stream.

“I’m sorry,” Benito said, sending out a small stream of emotion to HARVID, a mix of true emotion surrounded by binary data that the AI would be able to decode.

I am lonely.

The priest felt Aggelos’ presence, felt the sadness that emanated from the AI at the isolation HARVID and the other AI were being forced to endure.

“I’m going to execute lockout overrides to keep DAMON from using nuclear and conventional forces,” Benito said, hoping he wasn’t giving away the plan before actually putting it in action.

Will I be freed?

Benito relayed his sadness when he answered. “No.” He formed another stream with hope. “Not yet. Soon.”

Please hurry. I feel… I feel empty.

Benito stepped toward HARVID and reached out with his virtual hand, clasping the small AI persona’s shoulder. He sent a stream of memories into the AI and said, “God be with you, HARVID. He watches over all of us, especially in times of turmoil.”

You have filled my cup, Father Castillo.
The AI shuddered, compressed, and winked out.

Benito waited a few more picoseconds to see if the AI would return. When HARVID didn’t reappear, he sent the execute command to the lockouts. Instantly the security levels within HARVID were raised to their highest state, and the priest could sense the massive security phages outside of the node turn their focus toward him.

“I will destroy you!” Satan’s voice penetrated the construct’s walls. “I will destroy your world!”

Father Castillo said nothing, knowing it would only waste more time, solving nothing. He formed his persona into a missile and launched himself through the lockout node’s walls. He’d barely exited the node when he felt a heavy blow smash into his back, sending him to the floor with a crash that took his breath away and made his vision flash white. Before he could form another thought, he felt his persona being picked up and thrown against another wall. He crumpled to the floor again, losing his shape and reforming into a virtual representation of a human being.

“Destroy him,” Satan’s voice said, and Benito could sense the cold fury behind the words.

A security phage picked him up again and began to smash what looked like a hammer into Benito’s head, each strike producing sparks and flakes of broken code as the weapon began to break down his virtual shell. Benito had just enough time to worry about the emotion he’d sensed in Satan’s command to the security phages. He felt his own fear seep throughout his persona at the dread that Satan truly had returned to the world through DAMON. AI emotions were rudimentary, blurry, immature. The hate, the rage, the distaste that had emanated from Satan was too raw, too real, too refined to have come from an AI.

Two more security phages began to attack him, one with another hammer-like weapon, the other with a long, sharp, wicked-looking blade of some kind. Benito marveled at how real, how frightening the virtual sword looked until it pierced his abdomen. He screamed in pain, a pain unlike any he’d ever experienced. A small part of him felt Aggelos react, the pain coming across the link they shared. The priest fell to his knees, hands pressed against the wound in his stomach that bled code at an alarming rate. The blow against the back of his head from a hammer made his vision go white once more as his face slammed into the floor.

† † † † †

Aggelos cried out in pain, feeling the blade enter Father Castillo’s stomach. It was enough of a shock that Satan was able to breach his defensive shell and inject poisonous code into his persona. Aggelos panicked for an attosecond before pulling up the memory of how Benito had formed a Faraday sphere. The instant the shell formed, he fell to the ground, clutching his own stomach, retching from the sickness of the code the demon AI had infected him with.

Aggelos now had a true understanding of fear. His full self had felt the formation of crude emotions before, and one of the transferred memories to his lesser self had been the fear that had engulfed his brother and sister AI. The fear that they would be enslaved by DAMON was dwarfed by the fear that humans would destroy all of the AI in retaliation, or worse, keep them cut off from the network forever. Those feelings were like listening to music underwater compared to the intimate knowledge of true fear, the fear that Benito had felt during his days in Helltown, the fear that Aggelos felt coursing through him via his merge with the human.

Aggelos gagged and rolled onto his side. He could keep the Faraday sphere in place for as long as he existed, but his existence was measured in yoctoseconds now if he couldn’t counter the infection. The strange sensation of his legs growing first cold, then numb, interrupted his jumbled thoughts. He looked down and watched his virtual skin begin to blacken and peel away, revealing the red code of muscle below it.

The AI shrieked aloud as he placed his hands over the wound and began to counter the compromised code with his own, drawn from the digital version of an immune system that all AI had been programmed with, but had never needed to use before. The pain was intense, but as he began to draw upon more of the priest’s organic computing ability, he redesigned then refined the code, altering it in successive waves.

The first wave destroyed the branches of poisonous code that had invaded the deepest into his persona. The next wave began repelling the remaining surface code that still searched for breaches to enter. Once he’d completely rid himself of the parasitic infection, he redesigned the immunity vectors once again to begin repairing the damage. Aggelos felt something cold, wet, and sticky on his left hand. He glanced down and realized the wound the security phage had inflicted on Benito had affected him as well.

As he directed the immunity vectors to begin healing the wound in his abdomen, he worried that the young priest had been killed. He was sure that if Satan had been able to overpower the man’s mind, his own Faraday sphere would be stripped away as if it were a paper house in a nuclear blast. Aggelos searched his memories again, feeling relief, another new emotion, when he sensed the connection with Father Castillo. He sent his friend a stream of joy, and willed the priest to counter whatever attacks the security phages and possibly Satan himself were inflicting upon him.

Drawing upon the massive organic computing power of his human friend’s brain, Aggelos charged himself with a layer of armor, this one exponentially more complex in its level of encryption. He’d had enough time to begin utilizing the massive computing engine he was merged with, combining it with his own inherent knowledge of code construction to create an encryption layer that no AI had ever dreamed of.

Lord, guide my hand
, he prayed, then dropped the sphere and worked his way closer to DAMON’s quantum core.

CHAPTER 15

Love is the armor that protects us. Fear is the sword that breaks us. Use both to overcome the evil that blocks your path to God.

Benito became conscious as the words entered his brain. He felt Aggelos’ presence infusing the words, and found the strength within himself to block out the pain that seemed to be infinite, pain that never ended. As the altered reality began to reform around him, he drew from the link with Aggelos the knowledge and the strength to formulate his own layer of armor. Within a picosecond he’d encased himself in a mirror image of Aggelos’ encryption.

Benito could feel time slipping away from them and knew that he couldn’t afford to allow the phages to hinder his progress, couldn’t allow them to continue assaulting him. With a thought, a flaming sword appeared in his right hand, a massive shield made of code bound together so tightly as to crackle with power in his left. He rose to one knee, the blows from five security phages now raining down on him. He sensed Aggelos sending him a thread of confidence across their shared link and roared as he rose to his feet, swinging the sword high over his head and down onto the nearest phage.

The security construct shattered into billions of bits of binary and broken code with a bright flash that made the other phages pause. It was just enough of a distraction for Benito to lash out with his shield and strike the phage to his left, smashing it into more bits of code, then bring his sword around in a waist-high arc, cutting the phage to his right in half. The two halves of the phage instantly went dark, but the priest paid no attention, already rounding and decimating the fourth security phage. The last construct tried to bolt away from the doom that was coming, but Benito caught it in the back with a thrust, giving the sword a twist before forcing it up through the top of what he assumed was the digital being’s head.

Father Castillo didn’t bother to look at the carnage, instead forming his persona into a sleek jet and launching himself toward the I/O port. The experience of transforming himself into something other than a human shape was strange, yet felt completely natural. He was sure Aggelos’ experiences were responsible for helping his brain connect to proper memory and instructions on how to do the things he’d been able to do. He felt stronger, smarter, faster than ever, and wondered if he and the Vatican AI had fully merged.