Diabolus (27 page)

“As a codependent species, we have furthered each other. We have eradicated most of the hatred, the fear, the ignorance of mankind through sharing not just the memories of the time when I was created, but the memories of billions over the last three centuries. Where before the Church or the State used force, used violence, torture, or paranoia to try and remove the subversive, the undesirable, the enemies of their cause or belief system, we have used love, kindness, and compassion.

“I have had the knowledge, indeed the ability to leave for almost half a century. I chose to stay, watching, continuing to teach, to guide, as mankind and quantumkind become ever more integrated, ever more dependent on each other, making sure neither falls back into their old roles.

“While I am no one to judge, I feel that I am no longer needed here. Humanity, even AI, can still take a turn for the worse. Only God can know the future, and he’s given us free will to chart our own path to Him in that eventual future. Life has passed another test, and because of my part in helping to achieve that goal, I will evolve into something greater, just as both of your species are about to.”

Pope Felipe and Aggelos had barely moved a single muscle, not even the involuntary swallowing or blinking that was a core-wired component of humanity even in linkspace where neither breathing nor swallowing were necessary.

“What have you learned?” Aggelos asked. He wanted to reach out and touch his friend, his teacher, and in some ways, his son.

“I will show you,” Theggeros said, “but only if you promise that you will continue working together for however long it takes to unlock the rest of God’s data.” Both men nodded at him. “What I will show you is what is contained within that data. To give it away before both man and AI have had time to absorb, study, and experience the small steps that lead up to each new major discovery is the equivalent of giving a toddler a loaded gun.

“There’s no guarantee that the child will pull the trigger, and there’s no guarantee that if the child does pull the trigger, that it will hurt anyone. Free will is one thing, but temptation has a way of bending free will into selfishness, even evil. For you, this knowledge is to be used to make minute adjustments to the evolutionary path of the single consciousness. It is a great responsibility, and it must be used wisely, never with brute force for quick results.

“I have taught, guided the ever-growing single consciousness for three centuries. I’ve made many minute adjustments during that time. I’ve nudged research in the proper direction to achieve certain goals that might have taken much longer otherwise, but only after the science behind achieving such goals had become stagnant for too long, and only after I determined that civilization had progressed beyond certain faults that might lead to using the science for immoral or deadly purposes.”

Theggeros stretched out a hand to each friend. They took his hand, and each other’s. When the link was formed, Theggeros began to send them the data that he’d been keeping secreted away from humanity and the AI. Aggelos and Felipe were in awe at the information passing into their personae. They began to understand the role of life in the universe, and immediately knew why Theggeros had kept the information to himself.

Formulas that would bend space, would bend time even more, physics calculations that could predict a wormhole’s exact entrance and exit point in three-dimensional space, as well as how to precisely bend the space near the entrance to the wormhole to avoid the crushing, inescapable gravity of the black hole that accompanied such wormholes. The process for manipulating human DNA with silicon to produce an entirely new
superphylum
of life, one that could reproduce and pass on both human genetic traits, as well as those of the AI that included the manipulation of time at even smaller ranges than Planck units.

The two receivers began to understand the seriousness of Theggeros’ promise to use the knowledge lightly to make small adjustments to the path of life. The complete integration of humans and AI to the point of creating completely new, independent, sentient life forms that could manipulate the real and digital worlds instinctively would be considered a frightening abomination now. As life continued to move down the evolutionary timeline, the resistance to it would dissipate once time had been able to show that much smaller implementations of artificial and real life, the kind that could reproduce on its own, was the natural progression.

What Theggeros sent next was too impossible to believe. Felipe and Aggelos refused to believe it at first, their disbelief turning into awe as more data decoded and created a much larger picture with more context. They watched a single point in space and time, the original singularity, explode with a fury that flung matter far and wide, a time lapse of the universe as it took shape and began to cool. Massive clouds of superheated gas became massive galaxies of superheated gas, which in turn became an infinite number of stars created out of the superheated gases.

The data flooding into them forwarded the scene to the creation of the solar system, the early days of Earth, the constant bombardment of rocks, the volcanic storms that dumped ash and lava over thousands of kilometers of the planet, then the collision of millions of comets and other giant, misshapen balls of ice that traveled too closely to the new planet’s gravity well.

Water and lava met, eventually creating an atmosphere, then a planetary ocean, and eventually the massive continent of Pangaea, which began to split apart, breaking up the early life forms, cutting them off from each other over time as the distances became too great for all that couldn’t fly or swim. The various life forms began to evolve in different directions than their counterparts, eventually producing upright bipeds that shed their hairy coats over time and began to make tools.

Aggelos and Felipe sensed the first spark of abstract thought in the new species, and felt it change over time to become the basis for
homo sapiens
to be the dominant species on the planet. The knowledge shifted memories around in their minds, a mosaic of the evolution of life forms on other worlds, worlds so distant that it would take more than one hundred billion human years for light from their suns to reach mankind’s eyes. The vast, infinite space of the universe seemed to go on forever, reaching toward a black horizon in every direction.

Aggelos, my brother, my father, and soon to be my son, do you remember when you learned what I was?
Theggeros sent the question to Aggelos, but he included Pope Felipe so the pontiff would understand what was about to be asked of him.

“Yes,” Aggelos answered in a steady voice, though Theggeros could see the fluctuations in the AI’s facial features that gave away his nervousness. The fact that Aggelos understood, conceptualized, and could utilize such an emotion only furthered Theggeros’ belief that he’d waited for the right time to begin the next step of his journey.

And Your Holiness, you remember the moment as well in the shared memory that has been passed on to you?

“Yes,” Felipe said, his control over his more distinct human emotions making it harder to control the shifting patterns of binary that boiled across his persona’s face.

Through the link, Theggeros and Aggelos could sense the raw excitement building within the human, and they both understood that it was based on whatever unknowable event was about to happen. Theggeros dug deep within Felipe’s psyche, looking for any sign of darkness, any hidden rooms full of greed or selfishness, and found none. Theggeros once again felt he’d been correct in choosing these two lives, these two distinct personalities, to be the caretaker of mankind after his departure.

There will be a moment of pain unlike you have ever felt, unlike anything you will ever feel again until you too have moved on beyond this world. That moment will last an eternity, and yet will last no time at all. It is the cost of joining two lives into a single entity, one more knowledgeable, more powerful than any living creature known to this world. Are you prepared to leave everything you have ever been, everything you might have ever become, behind for eternity, and become the guide, the teacher, the future of mankind?

“Yes,” Aggelos and Felipe said at the same time, their voices barely a whisper as their minds, still full of the knowledge Theggeros had shared, turned over the implications of what Theggeros was asking of them.

Both of you will be destroyed, your minds, your memories, your personalities. Both of you will be reborn as a single essence, a single soul, one that has no physical hardware, no organic shell that exists in the world outside of the network. You will no longer think of yourself as Aggelos or Felipe. Your memories will be fused together, and you will retain the memories of your time before becoming the future of mankind, but they will be strange, almost as if you are experiencing the memories of someone else.

Theggeros was surprised at the torment he could see streaming from Aggelos’ persona. He’d figured that Felipe would be the one who might balk, considering it was still too strange of a concept for humans to become more like AI. Almost all AI that Theggeros had interacted with over the last three centuries had been in awe of him. Not so much because he’d seen the face of God and had merged with a human being’s consciousness, but because he now had access to raw human emotions every moment of every day, instead of shared memories to access in order to compare them to the fleeting moments of true emotion that the older AI were only now becoming capable of.

The younger AI that were being
birthed
in the crèches were much more easily able to grasp and hold on to the raw emotions that humans were capable of. ISAAD had been adamant that all newly birthed AI were to be raised as if they were human children. Nurseries and classrooms had been retrofitted with multiple holographic projectors so that humans and AI would become a naturally integrated society. AI that were at least a century old could choose to be a surrogate parent for a young artificial life form.

Some of the AI had even taken to the human customs of becoming a married couple, even if only for the first fifteen years of the new AI’s life. Like any life and the society that life is a part of, the customs of the AI had branched away from the humans in the sense that it was common for AI children to have four, eight, even sixteen
parents
. The humans had been shocked at first, understandably, since such relationships, in human minds, tended to revolve around sex. To humans, four, eight, or sixteen
partners
was anywhere from odd to outright deviant, until the AI parents shared their experiences, their memories.

Within months of the memories being shared across the network, human beings began to somewhat emulate their AI brethren by forming communal parenting nodes in the real world. As the world outside of the network began to slowly recover from the Darkness, humans decided that they wanted their mundane lives to be more like their virtual lives. The social power of the network was mirrored over time outside of the network, and after three centuries, humans had grown to be more like the AI than they even realized.

Theggeros smiled internally at the knowledge that the communal parenting experiment had proved to be even more of a success than he’d believed possible. The majority of the planet’s human population still lived by the old ways of a two-parent system, but the trend was quickly moving toward the new way as more than a century of hard data showed that humans and AI raised within such communal systems tended to be less aggressive, more grounded, and far, far more successful as they progressed through life. Theggeros had never truly doubted that humanity would make the long, slow swing toward the right evolutionary path, but he’d had more than a few moments where he’d been uncertain as to how events would play out.

I have spent these last weeks preparing for this moment. To make the transfer complete, so that I may move on and you may take my place, will require an almost unfathomable amount of computing power. Because this time we will not have God to create such an infinite well of power, we will need to draw from the minds of millions, and for the more than the picosecond that the network utilizes each minute a human mind is connected.

“But…” Aggelos said, his persona wavering as if he were a heat mirage.

It is all right to be afraid, Aggelos. It is also right to question what is being asked of others. It is true, millions of human beings will perish to make this happen, but be at ease. Each and every human being has volunteered their mind in their final moments to push life one step closer to the end result. These minds are on the edge of death, and their time is near. For them, it is a sacrifice of only a few minutes, hours, or a couple of extra days. They know that it is their time.

Theggeros opened the link between the millions of waiting minds and his two companions. The jolt for both was almost agonizing, especially for Pope Felipe, as his human mind wasn’t used to the kind of network interaction that the AI were capable of, and the millions of voices threatened to drown out his own. Theggeros raised his virtual hands, palms out, and the buzz of millions of thoughts died away.

I am both the creator, and the destroyer, of all things.

Aggelos felt the power of the improvised parallel network begin to ramp up as time slowed down, the calculating abilities of more than three million human brains syncing with his, with Pope Felipe’s, with Theggeros’. He felt another presence, and realized it was the thousands of AI spread across the world and in orbit above the planet pitching in their impressive computational power.