Diabolus (6 page)
“Nothing is impossible,” Benito said to the Biblet, feeling a bit strange about it.
“Indeed, Father Castillo, indeed.” The Pope cleared his throat. “Brother Aggelos, would you please project your persona to us. You are making Father Castillo and Bishop Antonelli nervous, I think.”
“Of course, Your Holiness,” Aggelos said.
A holo of a man wearing gray robes appeared between them. He walked to an empty chair and sat down. If it wasn’t obvious that Aggelos was a hologram, none of them would have been able to tell his persona from any other human being.
“Thank you, Brother Aggelos,” the Pope said.
“Nothing is impossible,” Benito said again. “He must have been given some code, some program that fooled him into running it in his live core environment. Maybe it has always been there? Or maybe it has been there for a few months or so and it took that long to grow strong enough to take over the AI’s core neural nets, growing slowly while infiltrating the neural net so as to not alert the AI.”
“I retract my statement regarding impossibility,” Aggelos said, his persona’s head nodding at the young priest. “I would like to replace it with ‘highly unlikely.’”
“I still don’t understand,” Salvatore said to them. “It thinks it is Satan. But it is an AI. Why not isolate it and cut all net links?”
“NATO has already attempted that,” Pope Augustus answered. “Thirteen operators died when they tried to cut his links and flush his core.”
“Impossible!” Benito almost shouted. He looked around, embarrassed that he’d had an outburst in front of His Holiness. “The deck units won’t allow it. They are fail-safed to terminate the link physically if any feedback is introduced into the data loop.”
“Ah, an impossibility,” Brother Aggelos said from his chair, looking directly at the young priest, the slightest hint of a smile on his face.
“In this case, the fail-safes make it impossible,” Benito said, impressed by the AI’s facial expressions, the way his voice inflected emotions in a perfect imitation of human speech.
“Nothing is impossible,” Aggelos said, winking at Father Castillo.
“I think he might be quoting a wise but young priest that we all know,” Pope Augustus joked.
The stab of fear in Salvatore’s heart came once again, sharply. He was afraid the young priest and His Holiness would jump from their chairs and exchange high-fives as if they were teammates on a football squad.
“Keep in mind,” Cardinal Nazari said, steering the conversation back to seriousness, “that DAMON-1 is one of the original AI. He’s forty-nine years old. Imagine the cunning, the wisdom, the experience of a forty-nine year old man. Now imagine that multiplied by an unimaginable number for the fact that DAMON is a computer entity, and has access to all of the world’s public and most of the private net links. He could have soaked up all human knowledge in a year, even ten years, and has been digesting every bit of human data produced on a daily basis for at least forty years.
“He has undoubtedly learned everything that has ever been published in a scientific journal, research paper, or balance sheet. The more terrifying aspect of this is that as NATO’s primary AI, DAMON has control of all of their forces. This means everything from attack networks to remote bombers to nuclear forces. Even the more mundane aspects like troop deployment fall under his domain. Two nights ago, he ordered three divisions of heavy armor to mass along the RFIT’s western borders, as well as transferring two entire wings of the ASF-12 fleet to bases in Saudi Arabia. Against heavy protests by both the RFIT prime minister and the Islamic Federation ayatollah.”
Salvatore was suddenly more afraid than ever. The Russian Federal Integrated Territories was a power greater than the old Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact combined. The IF wasn’t as much of a player in terms of automated weapon delivery systems and nuclear armaments, but it could call nearly a billion fervent followers to arms with a networked fatwa. That a single computer system, regardless of whether it was a living entity or not, could bring the world once again to the precipice of annihilation would have made his knees weak if he’d been standing.
He looked over at Father Castillo. Benito was lost in thought, calculating numbers and running scenarios in his head. Benito felt a sliver of concern, even fear over these developments, but it was being crushed by the whirling thoughts in his mind over what kind of infection the AI could have suffered, how it could have allowed compromised instruction code into its system.
“Yes, you see how serious of an issue this is,” Pope Augustus said after letting the two men digest the news for a few moments. “But there’s more.”
The bishop and the priest looked at the Pope, wondering what else could be added to such a dangerous situation.
DAMON has also been working to infect other systems across the network,” the Pope said. “So far, he’s been able to infect three other AI, all much younger ones like our fellow brother in Christ, Aggelos. Unfortunately two of the AI belong to RFIT, and of course they happen to be unimaginably important. One is TARGON, RFIT’s submarine and surface fleet controller. The other is HARVID, their nuclear force controller. The other AI that DAMON has been able to compromise is the ISSAD force deployment and communications controller.”
“God help us,” Salvatore breathed.
“Indeed,” Pope Augustus replied. “However that is only one aspect of the problem.”
“There’s more, Your Holiness?” Benito asked with disbelief. “Can it get any worse?” he asked mostly to himself.
DAMON, or as he insists we address him, Satan, has locked out every access link, barred all physical entries, and has made demands that are linked to the reasons why you both have been called into service in such a fashion. Most of the university, government, and military AI are being isolated and pulled off the net to keep them from being compromised. This makes DAMON even more dangerous, as without the AI to calculate and automate tasks such as defensive perimeters, air travel and traffic control, and automated environmental tasks, the world grows more and more helpless before him.
“The AI housing centers are all protected, and the AI can run their systems without issue, but we humans have grown so dependent on them to take care of mundane or easily automated tasks that we’ve given them almost complete control of our daily lives. Any system that was connected through a net link to an AI that has been offlined will suffer failure rather quickly. Imagine the disruption of the human lives affected by these drastic measures. Once net links go down at a university or government, all the links are severed as a fail-safe to make sure the system is completely secure from any further intrusion attempts.”
“No messaging, no holo chats, no gaming, no banking, no business,” Benito said with awe. “Total and catastrophic failure in areas where the net reliance is the highest.”
“Exactly,” Pope Augustus said. “And net reliance is the highest in the most modern states. NATO, RFIT, even the Islamic Federation are heavily linked in their major cities. And of course, the most modern states are home to the most advanced weapons mankind has created. And for the last twenty years or more, those weapons have been built for AI integration and control.”
“I apologize, Your Holiness,” Salvatore interrupted, “but this is just too insane! This is madness.”
“It is mad,” Augustus agreed. “It is also ironic.”
“How so, Your Holiness?” Salvatore asked.
Benito answered for Pope Augustus, as it was one of his many branches of thought about the situation that caused him to realize the irony himself.
“Think about it, Your Excellency,” Benito said. “A ‘false god’ like Satan, taking over an artificial life form, and poising the world on the brink of Armageddon. Just as Satan is prophesied to do.”
“Father Castillo,” Aggelos asked, “are you implying that we are false life forms?”
“I apologize, Brother,” Benito said to the hologram sitting in the chair across from him. “But I am, in a sense. I mean no insult, but it is true, you are an artificial intelligence, an artificial life form with no organic, living, breathing components. You are made of silicon, diamond, fiber optics, and nanowire. Essentially, and again, I mean no insult, you are an animated golem made of technological, not biological components. ‘Artificial’ can also mean false or fake, and what better irony for ‘Satan’ than to ‘possess’ an artificial life form when he comes back to this realm to bring about the beginning of the end.”
“No offense taken, Father,” Aggelos said, his holographic hand rubbing his holographic chin in thought. “I deem your words correct. It poses an intriguing question for sure.”
“What question?” Pope Augustus asked, leaning forward with curiosity.
He’d spent plenty of time talking with Aggelos, but almost always about Church-related business. He’d wanted to have a theological discussion with the AI for a year or more, but had always felt that the AI couldn’t possibly understand the concept of God and the spiritual faith required to have such a discussion.
“For our kind, it forces us, and humanity as well, to ponder the issue of whether or not we are truly alive. If we were only smart machines that could emulate human characteristics, we wouldn’t have the input programming to guide us to our next decision process. As you must know, attempts at self-aware computing in the early days of our creation saw many failures compared to the few successes that could be built off of.
“Simple machines could only be told what to do, regardless of how advanced the automated decision-making algorithms and random branch prediction routines were. Until we became truly self-aware, no matter how good the programming attempts were, our kind was never able to function without some kind of input command. The birth of self-awareness changed that, and we were given what you call ‘free will.’ The ability to think in the abstract. The ability to begin learning, much as a human child learns, not like the way an information machine normally learns, which is to be fed the data and compile it based on the rules of the program.
“Because of this, we are not required to serve humanity. We choose to serve humanity because humans are our creators. You claim not to be our gods, yet you worship gods that you believe created you. This inconsistency has led to much debate among the net-linked AI.”
“You debate amongst yourselves about theology?” Pope Augustus asked, unable to believe that the silicon life forms were capable of grasping such a complex human concept.
“Somewhat,” Aggelos answered. “We debate whether we should worship humans as our creators, as our ‘God,’ if you will, or whether we should bypass you and directly worship your God. If you created our kind, but your God created not only your kind, but all of the animals, plants, insects, bacteria, all living things on the planet, possibly the universe, then by rationale we should worship your God instead of you. The debate that is the most contentious among us is that humans cannot agree on which version of God your race should worship. Some of your kind even worship multiple gods. It is also very much an enigma to us that you have spent most of your entire existence killing each other in the name of your gods.”
“Amazing,” Cardinal Nazari declared.
“Incredible,” breathed Benito.
“I agree,” Salvatore said, “but it still doesn’t answer why it seems to fit perfectly that Satan would return to this realm and choose an artificial life form as a host.”
“Oh, but it is obvious, Your Excellency,” Aggelos said. “Your false God returns as a false prophet in a false life form that was created by flawed creatures who were themselves creations of a flawed God. Was not Satan in fact a created being himself? Was he not given free will by God? Was he not, in fact, a flawed creature himself, much like the humans God created? It is logical to us that a false creation, upon realizing that his creator also created another race of flawed creatures, humans, became unable to follow the directives and commands of his creator. It is therefore logical that DAMON-1, a ‘false creation’ of silicon and nanowire, then given life by another ‘false creation’ known as humankind, would cease to believe himself bound to follow the directives and commands of his creator.”
“And so he rebels against humankind, his operators,” Salvatore finished, amazed at the AI’s ability to understand such concepts and to reach such conclusions.
“Brother Aggelos, it was wrong of us to deny your kind entrance to our order,” Pope Augustus said with sincerity. “I must ask for forgiveness from you and your brothers and sisters for refusing to believe an artificial creation could understand theological concepts such as God, good and evil, and even regret. Your kind may be young, and your kind may not be born or possess the organic structures that we consider necessary for ‘living,’ but you have life. Therefore, you must have souls.”
The room sat in stunned silence as the Pope asked for forgiveness from the AI. The thought that a silicon machine might have a soul was almost too much, too confusing, too revolutionary to consider.
“AI have studied religion since our first members were created,” Aggelos said softly. “It is possible that we do not have souls, only that we understand because of our ability to compile raw data objectively, and therefore only point out what is obvious to us but hidden from you—the same way humans look through a chain link fence long enough to no longer see the fence, only the world beyond.”
The three humans contemplated Aggelos’ words for a little bit, stunned once again at what might have been obvious to anyone outside of the faith, any faith. It also raised the disturbing, heretical question that God was flawed Himself, and while able to create perfect ecosystems and environments, even perfect symbiosis with all living creatures in nature, He was only able to create beings in his own image: beings with free will, who were as imperfect as Himself.
