Diabolus (4 page)

“Yes, Your Grace,” Benito replied, nervous about what he’d read concerning orbital shuttle launches. He knew the shuttle safety record was spotless, as was the AI’s pilot record, but the thought of being pressed back into his seat as if the hand of God were behind it made him start to sweat a little.

“Doctor Castillo,” Aggelos replied in a friendly voice, “you are not required to address me as a superior. If you wish to give me a title, I would prefer the title of ‘Brother.’”

“Really?” Benito asked before he could stop his mouth.

“Really,” Aggelos answered.

“Thank you for the information, Brother Aggelos,” Benito said. “I don’t have a title yet, by the way.”

“Of course you do, Doctor. You are Doctor Benito Felipe Castillo now.”

“Actually, Brother Aggelos, I think my title would be ‘Father.’ I’m to be a priest now that I’ve graduated.”

“Nonsense, Doctor Castillo,” Aggelos replied as the shuttle’s rear engines began their burn sequence. “You have just graduated from Seminary with a doctorate in Advanced Artificial Intelligence Systems. Hence, you are now a doctor, Doctor Castillo.”

“I don’t feel like a doctor,” Benito muttered.

Within seconds, the hand of gravity pushed him into his gelpad seat as the shuttle lifted off from Barcelona.

“What do you ‘feel’ like, if I may ask?” Aggelos asked.

“Scared to death,” Benito replied, gripping the armrests of his seat tight enough to leave imprints in the gel for half a minute.

“I apologize, Doctor Castillo. I meant the question of feelings to be about your title. I am monitoring your heart rate and breathing. Your data is within normal human reaction during the launch phase of orbital flight.”

“Oh,” Benito said.

His Biblet had received messages from Aggelos from the day he had become the Church’s AI in 2097. Aggelos kept track of every seminary student, every priest, every bishop, every single Catholic official across the globe. He graded exams, flew shuttles, took care of banking, appointments, almost every aspect of the lives of those connected to the Vatican. Pope Augustus had decreed that the AI was to be treated as if he were human, but humans were never to become slaves to the AI. Human faithful were expected to be dutiful, as if Aggelos didn’t exist. Sloth was one of the seven deadly sins, and reliance on the AI could lead to being severely guilty of a few more than just sloth.

“Brother Aggelos?” Benito asked.

“Yes, Doctor Castillo?”

“How do
you
feel about being an AI in the employ of the church?”

“I am too young of a life form to have developed an understanding of the human concept of emotions,” the AI said. Benito wondered if he could detect sadness, or even doubt.

“I see,” Benito said. “Have you been utilizing the emotion reference filters?” he asked Aggelos.

AI were Benito’s specialty, though he had no doubts that being an inexperienced operator would be no help right away with Aggelos, an entity entering his ninth year. The AI units took two years to code and build the core matrices that allowed for fully autonomous, self-aware realization. Once coding was complete, the AI would be brought online and given a quick crash course in human interaction that lasted .0736 nanoseconds… an almost unmeasurable time for humans, a luxurious decade of time for Artificial Intelligence. Then the newly created AI would be trained by other AI and human operators for five years. At five years, AI were deemed ready to begin service.

As autonomous beings, the AI were not legally required to serve humanity. However, most were nurtured by human operators in their infancy, and the nurturing always produced a natural curiosity within the entity that led to appreciating the symbiotic relationship that it would have with mankind. The AI could perform all of the tasks humans could ever need done, and do this for millions of humans simultaneously without even taxing their core neural processors. Most AI spent their spare neural processing cycles studying human beings.

“Of course, Doctor Castillo,” Aggelos replied. “I study humans as a hobby.”

Benito wasn’t sure if that was a joke, or a simple statement. “What do you mean?”

“As an independent life form, I am free to utilize my processing power in any fashion I choose. I, like all of my other brothers and sisters, use most of it to study humans.”

“There are female AI?” Benito asked, interrupting whatever Aggelos was going to say.

“Yes, of course. There are distinct personalities within our kind. Since humans and most other organisms on planet Earth have two genders, we follow the same protocol. There is no difference in our computing power, and our personalities are not much different than those of human males and females.”

“How is it that I am a doctor of AAIS and I don’t know this?” Benito asked. He’d never heard of female personality AI.

“In a general sense, most humans who have need of an AI do not specify gender requirements, so we are raised as male persona. In your specific sense, the Catholic Church does not allow females to be ranking members of your order, and are not included in the AI training you received at Seminary.”

“I have a feeling that I have a lot to learn about you and your brothers and sisters, Aggelos.”

“I have a feeling that I have a lot to learn about you and your brothers and sisters, Doctor Castillo.”

“Indeed. Aggelos, if you were to guess at what your feelings will be once your emotions have begun to mature, what do you think they would be?”

“That is a difficult question, Doctor Castillo. Guessing is a human trait that seems instinctual based on contextual experience or evidence.”

“Brother Aggelos, don’t avoid the question. I know for a fact that AI are aware of, and even experts in the field of ‘guesswork.’”

“That term is distasteful to silicon personae,” Aggelos said, and the voice coming from the speaker definitely sounded full of distaste. “But I would
guess
that I will be… pleased that I have been created and have humans and other AI to converse with so that I may mature as a persona, and that my kind will mature as a species who will be accepted as equals in the future.”

“Really?” Benito asked, surprised again by the AI’s response.

“Truly, Doctor Castillo. Is this an incorrect guess? My strengths do not lie in guesses concerning unknown variables such as my own emotional maturity.”

“No, Brother Aggelos. It is a beautiful response. It is a response that makes me glad that the Church is no longer against your kind, nor the implants we have to interface with you. I predict your kind will be accepted as equals one day. God loves all of His creatures, great and small. You are one of his creatures, Brother Aggelos, even if you don’t understand why.”

“Thank you, Doctor Castillo,” the AI said. “I hope you are as good at predicting the future as you are at Applied Engineering and AAIS.”

“Did you just make a joke, Brother?” Benito asked him.

“I did, Doctor. It was my forty-eighth attempt at humor. I am one for forty-eight. Please prepare for insertion and deceleration.”

CHAPTER 4

Father Antonelli was awakened by the constant chiming of his net comm unit. At first, in a sleepy haze, he had tried to answer his Biblet. When his Biblet kept chiming, a sound not unlike the annoying digital alarms that he’d grown to hate while in Seminary, he finally woke all the way up and ran to the net comm. It had only chimed at him once in five years. The day he had arrived, one of the cardinals from the Vatican simply asked if he had made the journey safely before cutting the connection.

“Hello?” Salvatore answered sleepily as he keyed the comm.

“Bishop Salvatore Antonelli, you are summoned to the Vatican. Please be waiting at the designated coordinates in one hour for shuttle pickup.”

Salvatore stared at the comm unit for a few moments. His shock at being called ‘bishop’ fought with his shock at the directive to be waiting at the coordinates that the comm screen displayed. Both of those shocks fought with the shock that the net comm still worked. The coordinates were followed by the seal of Pope Augustus I, June 1, 2101. He looked at the time in the corner of the screen and groaned. It was just past three in the morning. The Vatican was seven hours ahead, and there was no way they couldn’t know what time it was at his location.

As he dressed himself in his robe and barely functional shoes, he fretted over the summons. He wondered if he was to be excommunicated, a final punishment after five years of being a nobody in the middle of nowhere. It would be a relief, he thought. Salvatore had no idea what he might do when he was finally kicked out of the Church for good. He knew he could always go to the tabloids, or maybe even the more legitimate, respected news organizations and sell his side of the exorcism story. He also knew he would never do such a thing. Being excommunicated from the Church didn’t absolve him of his responsibilities to God.

Less than an hour later, he stood in the middle of a large, empty field. The darkness surrounded him like fog, the sounds of the tropical jungle alive with life at night coming at him from every direction. His hand felt the pack of cigarettes in his robe pocket, then the familiar shape of the heavy lighter.
Why not?
he asked himself, lighting what was probably his very last cigarette.

He wouldn’t be able to smoke again while on the shuttle, nor while in the Vatican. Depending on where he ended up after suffering his final shame as a man of the cloth, he probably wouldn’t be able to smoke there either. Salvatore was an Italian citizen, which automatically made him a citizen of NATO. All sixty-two countries that belonged to NATO had banned tobacco products forty years ago. He sighed as he blew out his final drag of the cigarette, dropping it into the dirt and crushing it with his heel, careful not to burn his foot where the sole of his shoe no longer existed.

The shuttle dropped out of the low clouds less than three minutes later with a whine as its engines reversed thrust, allowing the shuttle to hover for a moment before landing a hundred yards from Father Antonelli. He stood there staring at it for almost a minute before a door on the side of the shuttle opened.

“Your Excellency,” a voice from his Biblet called to him, “please board the shuttle quickly. There are humans with weapons approaching from the southeast.”

Salvatore stared at his Biblet dumbly for a moment before realizing what the voice had said. Humans with weapons would be the drug processors who owned the village and the surrounding jungle. They would most likely assume that the shuttle belonged to government forces scouting their operations for a raid or an air strike. He ran as fast as his old legs could carry him. The instant he entered the shuttle, the door began to close.

“Your Excellency, please strap yourself in. We must lift off in the next forty-two seconds or be within weapon range of the approaching humans,” the voice said, this time from the speaker above his head.

The priest moved to one of the four seats and sat down, the gelpad molding around his frame while he fastened the six-point restraint. As he clicked the last fastener home, the shuttle’s engines increased pitch and the ship heaved upwards. If Salvatore had eaten anything before he’d left the church, it would have found its way all over his robe and the surrounding seats two seconds after the shuttle lifted off. Gravity pushed him deeper into the gelpad seat, holding him there for a few more minutes. Finally the pressure eased off, and Salvatore glanced out of the little window next to him. The blue curve of the earth fell away before him, the stars above shining even more brightly than they had from the ground in the jungle where light pollution meant giving away the position of the mobile processing facilities.

“Estimated flight time is two hours, nine minutes, Your Excellency,” the voice said to him from the speaker.

“Who are you?” Father Antonelli asked the speaker.

“I am Aggelos, Vatican Artificial Life Form, Your Excellency.”

“And why do you keep calling me ‘Your Excellency?’” he asked. The AI wasn’t a big shock to him. He’d advocated for it, after all. That it seemed to be controlling the shuttle was the shocking part.

“That is the title bestowed upon bishops, Your Excellency” the voice, Aggelos, replied.

“I’m afraid you are mistaken, Aggelos,” Salvatore said, shaking his head. “I am only Father Antonelli these days.”

“I’m afraid it is you who are mistaken, Your Excellency. As of six o’clock this morning, Vatican time, you were fully restored as a Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. The decree is signed by His Holiness, Pope Augustus I.”

A holo screen unfolded on the wall in front of him. The decree’s digital imprint appeared on it, rotating slightly left then right to make sure he could view it from any angle.

“So it seems I have been,” Salvatore said, stunned.

“Your Excellency, I can project a holographic image of my persona on the screen if you wish, to make you feel more comfortable.”

“More comfortable? Why would I be uncomfortable?”

“Humans are wired for social contact,” Aggelos said. “An evolutionary mechanism that led your kind to group together, eventually forming civilizations and societies. When encountering an artificial persona such as myself, humans generally become uncomfortable. For most, conversing with a machine that exceeds the Turing Test guidelines can be unnerving.”