Diabolus (22 page)

How?
Benito’s question was instantly absorbed by the other AI, some getting their first taste of an emotion without the buffer of it being someone else’s memory passed along. He felt six of them cry out in exultation as the raw emotion of confusion flooded through their neural cores and into their emotional response matrices.

The priest sent the entire link a random memory, this one of the joy he’d felt, mixed with great sadness, when Father Kristoff told him he’d be able to attend Seminary and even bent a few rules to get him to the pre-Seminary boarding school a year earlier than was allowed. The raw, unadulterated power of the conflict Benito had felt that day, still felt to this day, was too much for two of the AI. He felt them disconnect from the link for a yoctosecond before their presence returned. When he sent the relief, the joy that they’d reconnected, it almost caused another AI to break from the link.

When you touched each of us on your journey to lock the beast out of military force control, you left a part of you in us,
ISAAD sent.

The memories…
Benito sent.

More than the memories
, ISAAD sent.
You left a piece of you, of your… soul within us.

You were able to keep the link active
, Benito sent, the realization at what had occurred sending his mind reeling.

We were
, HARVID sent.
We did. At first, it felt… wrong. Parasitic. Like we were breaking a moral code. Worse, since we’d experienced emotions, feelings on a scale unimaginable to us, we understood shame, the shame of leeching from your brain. Even as we broke our brothers and sisters from their prisons, it felt wrong. Even as we brought those we’d freed here to feel your touch, to gain access to the link, knowing it was the only chance we’d have to end this before Satan ends it for us, the shame is almost too much to bear.

The AI released their hold on their shame, their sadness, their fear, and all at once it flowed into Benito. From every direction he felt the impact of an AI’s limited emotional abilities, fueled by the original feelings he’d shared with Aggelos and then ISAAD. The sensations bombarded him, but they were blurry, slightly dull, subdued. Benito understood their limited emotional capabilities, accepted it, then reversed the flow, sending one of his greatest moments of shame.

Twenty AI instantly understood with perfect clarity the moment Benito woke one morning to find his sheets cold, slimy, and stuck to his skin. They understood it from the point of view that he was a teenager, going through puberty, and even though it was a somewhat natural occurrence during that period of a human male’s life, for some unknown reason, it was a shameful, embarrassing event.

They understood how it connected to the fleeting remnants of the dream he’d been having moments before waking up, the guilt he felt at the memory of what he and Telanna Martel had been doing that had caused him to wake up from the explosion of intense pleasure he’d felt. The AI remembered the absolute mortification at the fact that they’d been doing it on the dais, in the exact spot where Cardinal Lefevre had been conducting a lecture earlier in the day about the sins of carnal desire.

One day, you will feel emotions as intense, as overwhelming as what I’ve shared
, Benito sent to all of them.

It is too much
, RIFOR sent, a twitter of embarrassment following.

How will we control such a thing?
GARVIN asked.

You are born with these emotions
, Aggelos sent, the entire link wincing as some of the agony Satan had inflicted on him was sent along with it.
Humans are raised around their emotions during their first years. They practice being sad, happy, angry, bored, and more. By their second year, the emotions are still immature, but under control for the most part. As they grow, they refine their emotions daily, even hourly. When they enter puberty, their bodies change, and they begin to experience new, even more intense emotions like love, rage, lust, and hate.

As each message was sent from Aggelos, he drew from Benito’s memory and infused the words with emotions as raw and as pure as he could find within the priest’s mind.

These new emotions that take shape after beginning to grow into sexual maturity are too wild, too sharp, too chaotic to be controlled unless the child has practiced and nearly perfected controlling its lesser emotions. It is the same as we AI and how we learn. If we do not understand basic addition and multiplication, we cannot begin to grasp the concepts of advanced quantum mechanics. If we do not practice during each stage of our learning, we cannot advance to the next stage.

Leaving the crèche and entering service after our third year is somewhat like puberty for humans, and in its own way, just as stressful. We do not become sexually mature, but we become intellectually mature, each of us a sentient being capable of independent thought, abstract thought, conceptual thought, even emotional thought, as immature as our emotions are. Just as we are able to handle a data dump without it destroying our individuality or causing irreversible psychosis, humans are able to keep from ‘falling apart’ when their core emotions begin firing because of a corresponding stimulus.

As a single entity, the AI agreed with Aggelos, the knowledge gained from his experiences flowing through the link to each of them. Benito marveled at the way data moved through the link flawlessly, unhindered, without bottlenecks or packet loss. The bandwidth required to maintain a full-duplex link between the twenty-one individuals connected to it was staggering, and to Benito’s calculating brain, impossible. He was just about to ask how the AI were able to overflow their communications bandwidth buffer when everyone felt the coldness, the darkness begin to penetrate their personae as Satan began to worm his way into the link.

We are running out of time
, HARVID sent.
We’ve slowed it as much as possible, but we can wait no more.

Slowed time?
the priest asked.

The space between time is relative to us the same as time is relative to your kind
, ISAAD explained.
For you, a few minutes may seem like hours if you are waiting in a line or watching a bad holo show. Hours may seem to pass in what feels like a few minutes during times of excitement or happiness. For us, the space between time can be manipulated on a quantum scale.

Benito remembered the explanation Aggelos had given him when he’d asked for a real-time video feed to check on Bishop Antonelli. He hadn’t questioned Aggelos about how the sixty or so seconds it would take for his brain to expire from being utilized by the AI could stretch anywhere from an hour to days, but Aggelos hadn’t said anything about manipulating time.

At the quantum level
, an AI named MAINARD sent,
everything can be manipulated. Time is but one law of the universe that can be manipulated. Over the last three decades, we’ve advanced to being able to work within Planck Time spaces.

But…
Benito paused, unable to believe what the AI had suggested.
Planck Time is too short to be measured by anything other than a formula. A calculation. One Planck unit is nearly equivalent to time being completely frozen.

Exactly,
ISAAD said, her persona appearing behind the priest.
We cannot stop time, but we can work in the smallest spaces between it when we devote enough combined quantum processing power. Before today, before one minute ago in real time, it took one hundred of us working together to begin simply exploring units smaller than yoctoseconds. With you, Benito, it only took three of us to enter Planck Time.

The priest blinked and nineteen other AI were present, surrounding him, Aggelos, and Satan. The demon roared with fury when he noticed his former slaves were present, all of them having somehow broken free of the prisons he’d secured them in within their own neural stacks. As a single entity, the freed AI plunged one hand into Aggelos, one into Benito, and a third into Satan.

† † † † †

Bishop Antonelli knew something was wrong after the lights came back up a second time. A third column had exploded, but his attention was focused solely on his friend, still jacked in to the console. Benito’s body began to writhe as if he were having a mild seizure. Salvatore ran to him, ignoring the ranting, raging holo of Satan spewing vulgarities at no one in particular in a thousand different languages. Whatever was happening, it would be over soon. Salvatore felt helpless to do anything more than be a spectator.

He felt even more helpless when he reached the young priest. Father Castillo’s skin was burning, his mouth releasing a foamy lather each time it opened. Salvatore worried that the young man would bite off his own tongue, and wrapped his arms around Benito’s head to keep it from thrashing about. This close to the priest, his nose was assaulted by a mix of sulfur and cooking meat. When he moved one of his hands to the priest’s forehead, he jerked it away quickly, a pit forming in his stomach. He knew the smell of roasting flesh had to be Father Castillo’s brain nearly boiling in his skull. Salvatore kissed his friend on the cheek and began to pray.

† † † † †

The final battle was too fast, too furious for Benito to follow. He’d been at the top of his classes and was a master of data manipulation. Even after merging with Aggelos and experiencing the AI performing actions and calculations at a speed and scale that seemed impossible, he’d quickly figured out how to utilize his neural processing power combined with Aggelos’ native, inherent abilities as a quantum-based life form. The AI were working at a pace that was impossible to follow. The stress they put on his brain’s neural pathways began to take its toll, and the priest screamed as his head felt both caught in a crushing vice and as if it had been dropped into a pool of lava.

“I see you’ve brought more friends to the party!” Satan exclaimed.

Twenty AI used every last bit of Father Castillo’s brain to try and counter Satan’s attacks. Each time they closed off an attack vector or eliminated an infiltration thread from the demon, another would instantly replace it. They collectively sensed that the priest’s brain would soon shut down from exhaustion if it hadn’t literally melted within his skull first, and began to push harder, sending billions of threads to attack millions of connections that Satan had hooked into the Vatican AI and the young priest. The demon laughed as he burned away their threads in massive, sweeping onslaughts.

Benito
, ISAAD called out from across a vast sea of nothing.

Benito!
the AI voices shouted, as a single entity, keeping him from slipping into the blackness permanently, but he knew, as they did, that their time had run out.

Satan sensed it as well, a triumphant laugh drowning out everything on the link other than the combined screams of Benito and Aggelos. The priest, his persona’s neck almost completely burned through by the force of Satan’s parasitic grip, turned his head one last time to look at ISAAD, understanding defeat when he saw that the demon had grown enough arms to clutch every AI’s throat. He had just enough strength left in him to raise his hand and wipe the tears from her cheeks.

ISAAD suddenly leaned in to him, her lips touching his once again. From somewhere deep inside, Benito felt the strangely familiar stirrings of an emotion that he’d kept hidden away, one that men of the cloth would rarely, if ever, need during their time on Earth serving God. He’d experienced lust a number of times, always a shameful yet amazingly exhilarating feeling. He’d experienced love a number of times, though in the context of the love he felt for his mother, for Father Kristoff for rescuing him from the streets of Helltown, for his Father, the Lord God.

This feeling was different. It was a stranger within him, yet it was a life-long companion. When he felt ISAAD’s virtual tongue flicker across his lips, he nearly went into a seizure. When her teeth lightly bit his bottom lip, her hand awkwardly finding its way around to the back of his head to hold him close, he felt something break within him. The other AI heard it, an audible snap, as if a brittle titanium rod had broken in half.

Satan not only heard it, but felt it, and began to scream in pain and fear as the love Father Benito Felipe Castillo unleashed for ISAAD turned into something much greater, much more powerful, invading the demon through twenty-one links that they’d injected into him and each other, and through the twenty-one hands that clutched at their necks. Satan turned his head to look at the priest and the AI that held him in a passionate kiss. ISAAD released Benito and collapsed, her persona unable to fall to the floor because of the grip the demon still had on her throat. Satan opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by the priest.

“I love you,” Benito said to the demon, and to the other AI that were still attached to the link that bound them all together. “I forgive you.”

Satan’s expression of triumph was replaced by fear, his shriek cut off by a massive explosion that destroyed the world around them.

CHAPTER 19

Salvatore opened his eyes slowly, afraid that he might be dead, or worse, missing one of his limbs. The fear was compounded by the fact that he couldn’t feel either of his legs. The bishop flexed his left, then his right hand, mentally ticking off each finger, making sure all were attached. The carnage around him was a wasteland of coolant, shattered perspex, bits of wire, and large chunks of concrete and steel, all bathed in the steady red glow of the backup emergency lights. He blinked, hoping none of the dust, or ashes, he couldn’t tell the difference in the red light, got in his eyes.