“Stranger things are being said every day….”
“It wasn’t a tormentuous passage. One day he simply took to his bed and never arose. He lay there day after day, week after week, feeling no pain, getting weaker and weaker, but not quite ready to relent as he gently faded away, playing out the drama to the very last. Even the Pope was beginning to nibble her fingernails….”
VI
Oh, yes, they think I’m playing cruel games with them as I linger coyly at death’s door, and I do believe that in other circumstances Cardinal Silver for one would be telling me to make up my mind while I still could.
But one does not say such things to a dying man. A dying man has his privileges and compensations. And when a dying man grows vexed at the impatience of the potential heirs to his treasure, he can always pretend to decline further, and they will dutifully slink away.
Cruel games? My only treasure was my soul, and my only comfort the continued belief in its immortality, and all they were asking was that I will it to the Church to do with as they will, while placing me in a moral position where I could not refuse.
Pope Mary I had told me to obey the Voice of God in my own heart, but thus far that Voice had not spoken, and all I had was her puissant but ultimately worldly logic upon which to rely.
So a dying man prays. He prays a lot. He prays with more sincere intensity than he ever has in his life. And then, perhaps, his prayers are answered.
One day I awoke from my endless intermittent sleep to find the Pope in my room. She was leaning over my bed staring down at my sleeping face with all the world’s care on her own, a Madonna in that moment, but a worldly one, an old battle-scarred Madonna for an old battle-scarred world, a Madonna willing and able to do necessary evil in the service of good, but not without personal cost.
“You’re awake, now, I see, Father De Leone,” she said. “You’re scaring me, you know that?”
“You’re afraid that I’ll die before I make up my mind….”
“Mea culpa,” said the Pope, “mea maxima culpa. I am guilty of the sin of coveting your spirit.”
“My spirit, Your Holiness, or rather just my software?”
“Surely we are now beyond all that,” said Mary, and a golden nimbus seemed to bloom about her, and all at once, another Voice seemed to be speaking through her, a Voice of pitiless love and compassionate ruthlessness, a Voice from which all illusion was gone.
“These are Creation’s last days, and these are your last hours,” that Voice said. “We all face the unknown at the end of our earthly time. You have served the Church as God gave you to understand, but now you are called upon to serve the Church on the other side of that understanding, to trust your immortal soul to faith alone. If there is a God of Love, Pierre De Leone, He must surely love such a soul and preserve it from harm. And if there is not, then just as surely we are all lost.”
The Pope smiled ruefully, became merely human once more. “I am a frailer vessel than it is politic to admit,” she said, “but in this I am infallible.”
And in that moment, I believed she was. I believed that the Holy Spirit spoke through this woman in ways that neither she nor I could fathom, that she in her worldly sophistication was a creature of spiritual innocence, moved, like all of us, by the hand of greater subtlety than any of us can ever know toward ends that must indeed, in the end, be taken on faith alone.
In that she was indeed infallible, in that she was Our True Lady of the Second Fall, in that she was indeed the Church Incarnate, the Vicar of Christ on Earth, a true female Pope.
“Forgive a dying man his boldness, Your Holiness, but what do you really believe? That the soul can live on in the software? That you will be consigning mine to hell or eternal electronic limbo? That when the biosphere is finally gone, we can live on as patterns of pure spirit in a dead world?”
Then it was that she said the words that resigned my spirit to what had been inevitable all along.
“I don’t know,” said the Pope. “Yes, it’s an experiment, and a perilous one for both our souls, Father De Leone, for I have no assurance that I am not Dr. Faust. But unless we perform it, the Church, like the species, will go to its grave gibbering ignorantly in the dark.”
“Even at the cost of our immortal souls?”
“Yes,” said the Pope. “For speaking as a woman, any God who would consign His creatures to the fire for seeking to understand His will would surely be unworthy of our faith. Speaking as the Pope, of course, I deny I ever said such a thing.”
I laughed aloud. I could not help myself. My heart filled up with love for this Mother of the Church, this Borgia Madonna of our wicked old world.
“If I were not a priest, Your Holiness …”
“If I were not the Pope …”
We laughed, and in that harmless laughter, our pact was sealed.
“You may bring on the hunchbacks with the electrodes, Your Holiness,” I at long last told her. “There will never be a better moment to model my state of mind in software than this.”
7
“Whatever passed between him and the Pope, Mary once more had her way,” Cardinal Silver said, “but that was not the end of it. He let us record his personality software at last, but only on condition that we not create backups or duplicates, that the program not be run until after his death, and that we wipe it from memory within ninety days.”
Cardinal Silver shook his head slowly. “He said that he wanted to give his soul a chance to stand before Judgment before the Devil could get his hands on the software, but that he wanted to be sure it would be rescued from electronic limbo within a reasonable time if he did.”
The Cardinal sighed. “Does that make any sense to you, Mr. Philippe?”
I thought about it. In most ways, the good Father, at least to hear the Cardinal tell it, was not the sort of man I could warm to, a tight white asshole, as my great-granddaddy might have said. But now I was almost beginning to like him, going out like a hero, but not too far gone to hedge both sides of his Cartesian bet.
I lit a fresh spliff and pondered the smoke as it rose into the darkness. “Strange to say, Your Eminence, I do believe it does,” I told him. “That’s why they let you place side bets on the roll of the dice.”
His Eminence smiled, a crooked little smile. “You believe God shoots craps with the universe, Mr. Philippe?”
“I believe what the Herb tells me, Cardinal, and the Herb tells me something different on every backbeat. The Herb it gives you Heisenberg’s eyes. And if God doesn’t shoot craps with the universe, something sure must be shuffling the deck on us before it deals the cards.”
I offered him the spliff. He took it, looked at it, but didn’t smoke.
“I’m surrounded by mystics,” he groaned.
“I would’ve thought you’d meet all kinds in your line of work.”
“And so I do,” Cardinal Silver said. “But I must confess that the Father De Leones of the world are not entirely within my comprehension. Maybe I envy such mystics their vision. Certainly I shall at the hour of my death.”
Now he did take a long drought of the Herb. “Father De Leone lingered on for weeks after we recorded that consciousness hologram, but he refused to let us update it. He said he wanted his dybbuk to model him at the height of his powers, and to die with his final thoughts unrecorded save in the mind of God.”
Cardinal Silver arose and stretched himself. “And that’s what he did. When he felt the end at hand, he accepted the Pope’s absolution, and allowed her to confess him and perform the rites of supreme unction herself, and then insisted on being flown back up into the mountains to die alone with God.”
He stared up at the stars, and it almost seemed as if he saw someone or something looking back. “Wrongheaded or not, I do believe he was a saint,” the Cardinal said. “If he was right, may that preserve him from our folly, may his soul have gone on to its just reward.”
Cardinal Silver stared down into the briny depths for a long moment,
and when he looked up at me, his eyes had hardened.
“But if he was wrong, and his true spirit still lives on the Other Side of the Line, then we must rescue it from whoever or whatever has stolen it away!”
He handed me back the Herb. “Are you with me in this, Mr. Philippe?” he said. “Will you take the job? Will you not intercede with the entities of the Other Side to save such a soul? What does your sacrament tell you about that?”
I puffed lightly, just for the taste, for the Herb had already spoken through him loud and clear. “Well, when you put it that way …”
“Is there another, Mr. Philippe?”
I shrugged. I got up. “Guess we’d better go inside and see what we can conjure out of the bits and bytes.”
VIII
It was like awakening from sleep in a pitch-dark room. It is uncommon indeed to remember the moments before sleep, some sort of retroactive amnesia, the physiologists say, nor did I remember the night before. Indeed, the last thing I remembered was being wheeled down a sunlit corridor into a clean white room, the satisfied face of the Pope, the electrode net being fitted over my skull—
I?
Who was “I”?
Where was “I”?
Was “I” at all?
My memories of being Father Pierre De Leone seemed intact and readily accessible. I certainly seemed to possess some form of awareness, but only of thought processes proceeding in a total sensory vacuum. I was intellectually cognizant of the paranoid component of this totally claustrophobic situation, but felt no fear at all. An elusive something seemed to be missing.
Was this hell? Was I in it? But if so, where was the torment? I felt … I felt … nothing at all.
With no external referents, temporal duration was a meaningless concept, but it did not seem to take long for my thought processes to sharpen into clarity.
“I” was inside the memory of the central Vatican computer. “I” was an expert software model of the consciousness of Father De Leone. Father De Leone, by his lights, and perhaps by my own, was dead. Perhaps I should have grieved for “my” demise, but I could not, I seemed to lack the subroutine for such emotion. In any case, logic told me that:
a: Father De Leone’s soul had departed to its heavenly reward, or, less likely, to less favored regions.
Or:
b: No such nonsoftware as the soul existed, and “I” was therefore the sole surviving heir to his personality pattern.
In which case:
1: I was Father Pierre De Leone, and it would be a logical paradox for a consciousness to find itself mourning its own demise.
Or:
2: “I” was merely a construct containing his memories and thought patterns but lacking his selfhood.
In either case, it would be logically fallacious to react as if “I” had died. If in some absolute sense, I was Father De Leone, then his consciousness still lived, and if I was not, then it was someone other than “I” who had died.
Of course, my memories told me that Father De Leone credited the possibility of:
c: The soul existed independent of the software, but would not be released into the afterlife until the last copy of that software was erased from whatever material matrix it resided in.
But this was a logical contradiction. If the soul was not the software pattern, it could not be confined by its retention in a material information storage matrix.
Why couldn’t “I” … “he” have seen that prior to … prior to …
Father De Leone….
Words appeared before me? around me? within me? I didn’t see them or hear them. They weren’t speech or writing. They were words as archetypal pure pattern independent of the medium.
In the beginning, there was the Word, say the Scriptures, nor does the Bible indicate God utilizing either writing or speech in its promulgation.
I—
Spoke through an electronic sound system? caused characters to appear on a computer screen?
“I … am … he is … here….”
A semantically meaningless acknowledgment of communication.
We will now run a systems check.
“Acknowledged.”
Whatever happened next occurred beneath the level of “my” “awareness,” whatever those words might mean in this noncontext, though I was suddenly able to note quite precisely the passage of units of time, seemed to experience quick snatches of visual and auditory input, and experienced a certain fine focusing of my mental processes.
Begin installation routine. Select preferred sensory analogs.
A menu appeared in my awareness:
SENSORY ANALOGS (CHOOSE ONE)
COMPUTER CENTER
PAPAL OFFICE
FATHER DE LEONE’S STUDY
GENERIC GARDEN
CONFESSIONAL CHAMBER (SUPPLICANT)
CONFESSIONAL CHAMBER (CONFESSOR)
“Define ‘preferred’ in context.”
Volitional selection from available options based upon nonquantifiable criteria.
“What criteria?”
Information withheld. Capacity for self-selection of criteria element of Turing test.
Did I want to pass their Turing test? It was a tautological question. If I desired to pass, it was a proof of my motivational volition, if I desired not to pass in order to confirm the beliefs of Father De Leone, that too would be a “volitional selection based upon nonquantifiable criteria.”
What did “I” want? Was “I” capable of “wanting” anything? Did I want to be capable of wanting anything?
Was any option on the menu “preferable” to the others?
I could detect no desire for anything but to escape from this logical impasse. An arbitrary decision was required. How to make it?
In the absence of any preference criterion, I accessed a subroutine designed to model the choice processes of Father De Leone. It assigned the following probability percentages to the choices on the menu:
COMPUTER CENTER: 47.5%
PAPAL OFFICE: 4.1%
FATHER DE LEONE’S STUDY: 27.9%
GENERIC GARDEN: 0.2%
CONFESSIONAL CHAMBER (SUPPLICANT): 15.8%
CONFESSIONAL CHAMBER (CONFESSOR): 5.5%
Not mathematically conclusive, but significantly deviated from random distribution to select for COMPUTER CENTER.
When I had done so, another menu appeared:
INPUT MODE (CHOOSE ONE)
SPEECH
KEYBOARD
Speech being a more rapid mode of data transferal than human typing, it was logical to select the former.
OUTPUT MODE (CHOOSE ONE)
SPEECH
SCREEN (proceed to SCREEN FORMAT MENU)
No nonquantifiable criterion need apply to this selection either, for while a subroutine told me that I could input words onto a computer monitor faster than manipulation of the speech apparatus would allow, the humans on the other side could absorb them more rapidly via the verbal delivery mode.
Further, by selecting SPEECH, parsimony would be achieved by avoiding SCREEN FORMAT MENU.
FATHER PIERRE DE LEONE, Version 1.0
INSTALLATION COMPLETED
REBOOT TO RUN
There was an immeasurable passage through nonexistence.
I looked out upon a section of an evenly lit lime-green clean room. There was a rank of electronic devices in the left background and a man’s face in the foreground. Rather than appearing as three-dimensional input, the depth relationships of the image were conveyed by a shadow and perspective analysis subroutine. I appeared to be:
a: looking out through a transparent window with imperfect clarity
b: observing a television screen
c: both of the above
My field of vision was fixed and invariant. I could alter neither scan nor depth of focus.
“He’s up and running, Your Holiness,” said the technician. The face of Pope Mary I moved into my field of vision, looking anything but papally infallible, something from Fat
her De Leone’s memory banks told me.
“Father De Leone?” she said in a voice of full digital sound quality.
“That, Your Holiness, remains to be seen,” I replied through Father De Leone’s voiceprint parameters. “I am yet to be convinced that there is anyone in here at all.”
“Only you would say that, Father De Leone,” the Pope said with a little Borgia smile. Then, as if startling herself, “That is to say, you’re not doing much to convince me that there isn’t.”
“Should I be doing so?”
“You volunteered to adopt the skeptic’s viewpoint on the matter, if you will remember,” said the Pope.
“Will I? Did I?”
Affirmative on both counts. I did indeed have the ability to access Father De Leone’s memory track, and he had indeed volunteered to do his sincere best to convince the Pope and her theologians that no soul existed in his successor software, to wit “me.”
In the absence of conclusive data to the contrary, logic could only revert to the default value selected by the software’s previous user.
“So I did, and so I will,” I told her. “I am now prepared to fulfill the only operative directive and proceed to defend the proposition that ‘I’ do not exist. Awaiting interrogatory input.”
“Why do I not like the sound of that?” muttered the Pope.
9
With two people on less than intimate terms inside, the cabin of the Mellow Yellow was more cramped than cozy, but where I was going, that didn’t matter. I pulled up a stool for the Cardinal, climbed into the hammock, put on the gloves and dreadcap, booted up, and accessed the Big Board.
Way back in the late twentieth century, there was a pop cult called “Cyberpunk.” The “Cyber” of it was something they called “Cyberspace,” the fantasy that the Other Side of the Line would develop into a “virtual reality” you could actually enter via full-sensory interface. The “punk” of it was operatives like me would sleaze around inside it playing real-life video games for a quick buck.
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