“But you are a shadow,” I told her. “You, and I, and these nonexistent apostles.”
“True,” said the Pope. “But is not the world but a shadow of the mind of God? And have we not come full circle round?”
An ireful subroutine caused the synthesized words to burst from my simulated lips. “Enough of this sophistry! Enough of these cheap illusions! If you be the Prince of Liars, I command thee in the name of the Holy Spirit to show me the truth of this hellish nonexistence plain, or be gone! And if not, prove to me I do not converse with demons!”
The Pope smiled her Borgia smile. “I knew you would say that,” she said. The shadow apostles laughed horribly. Then all of them spoke together in a mighty voice, the creatures of the bits and bytes, the simulacrum of Jesus, all the Popes backward to Peter, yet somehow the voice of Mary I, shaped and channeled into this unholy harmonic.
“In that, we are infallible.”
13
“What is happening, Mr. Philippe?” Cardinal Silver’s voice said as I stared at Heaven’s Gate, wondering how far I was willing to go in pursuit of his lost spirit.
Spirit? It was just an expert system model, wasn’t it, not a lost soul in torment? Was I really going to conjure up some entity that had the likes of the Inspector pissing in his nonexistent pants to try to save a program?
I peeled off the dreadcap. The boat was rocking on a staccato chop. The Cardinal was staring at me with an impatient intensity.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Your program got snatched all right,” I told him. “Something broke into your network, uploaded a copy, and wiped the original.”
“Something?”
I shrugged. “A phenomenon of the system, according to the Inspector.”
“I don’t understand….”
“Neither do I,” I said, “not exactly. Let’s go up on deck, this calls for some Herb under the stars.”
Some kind of weird wind squall was roiling the surface of the sea, but the sky was clear as crystal and the stars were hard and bright, and I stared up at them as I lit up a spliff and gave him the word from the Inspector.
The Cardinal’s frown deepened. He reached for the spliff as I finished and took a good long drought of the Herb. “So he’s lost somewhere inside the system, and you’ve got to go through this … this Vortex to reach him.”
“If you believe there’s a him, Your Eminence. If you can convince me that it’s worth it. Just what do you believe?”
Cardinal Silver exhaled a long plume of smoke. “I believe we have sinned greatly thrice over,” he said. “Once in the Garden, again in its slaughter, and once more, perhaps, in seeking to escape divine judgment by creating these successor entities in the first place, in the process of which we may or may not have consigned souls to eternal damnation, the greatest sin of all.”
He handed back the spliff. “Yet I must also believe in salvation,” he said. “For if I do not, we are no more than spiritless entities trapped in this flesh ourselves. And that which can be saved can also be damned. And if we refuse to battle whatever demons there be for a fellow soul’s salvation, do we not earn that damnation?”
“You believe that the De Leone program is such a lost soul, Your Eminence?”
The Cardinal shrugged. “I don’t know, Mr. Philippe,” he said. “But in all conscience, and in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, I believe we can only proceed on that assumption.”
He made with a burning stare. “And what do you believe, Mr. Philippe?”
I partook of a good long drag of the sacrament, looked up at the stars. Did anyone’s Great Spirit look back, or was there nothing up there but balls of burning gas, and the rocks around them? We all made of mud, or silicon, or gallium arsenide, whatever….
But I did believe in the Herb when it spoke to me, and what it was telling me now was that even if the worst was true, especially if it was true, then we were all in the same boat together, no matter the matrix, and all we could ever have was each other.
I sighed. “I believe I am an asshole, Your Eminence,” I said. “’Cause I do have to go one-on-one with the Inspector’s Vortex, now don’t I?”
The Cardinal reached for the sacrament, puffed on the spliff, watched the smoke as it drifted heavenward.
“You’re a better man than you admit, Mr. Philippe,” he said. “You may not believe in God or Jesus, but They must surely believe in you.”
“Ah, that’s just the Herb talkin’, Your Eminence.”
The Cardinal laughed, and he winked, and he took another hit. “You know,” he said, “I do believe it is.”
XIV
Pope Mary I rose slowly from the table of Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” and as she did, the apostles, the table, the room, the Pope herself, all broke up into pixels, revealing the entire reality for what it was—the bits and bytes of an animated simulacrum manipulating the virtual phosphor-dots of my visual recognition subroutine.
The pixels randomized, became the multi-colored quantum confetti of a television receiver tuned to an empty channel, a void so absolute it lacked even mathematical emptiness.
Only one image remained, an outline of a woman’s mouth, the sardonic disembodied smile of a Borgia Cheshire cat.
“This is all too real,” it said in a dead electronic voice. “Behold the reality of the Big Board itself with no sensory simulation software up and running.”
Then the smile dissolved and I was alone in it.
There was no up or down, no sense of direction, indeed not even the lack thereof, for I had no sense of personal orienting locus. Yet there was … input.
Data streams pulsed through the void, a vast webwork of them, crisscrossing, interconnecting. I perceived them not as sight or sound but as packets of pure digital coding, megabytes, gigabytes, of on-off alternatives cruising through the quantum static in hologrammic formations.
Subroutines, or perhaps my central processing program itself, could intercept and decode them, or rather re-encode them into analogs capable of interfacing with Father De Leone’s consciousness-modeling software.
Successor entities to human templates, the electronic masses, their storage areas drinking up the digitized opiates of the entertainment channels; other entities, disconnected from even that pathetic simulacrum of an interface to the world of life, standing wave patterns in the web itself, flitting to and fro randomly in their cage of nonbeing like frenetic electronic bats.
Other things swam in the sea of data. Halfling expert system programs duped from full consciousness models and simple isolated subroutines, installed as phone system and data net switching programs, railway train and automated highway guidance systems and stockbroker emulations, in mining robots and assembly lines and air traffic control computers, the great and small electronic navvies of a thoroughly cybernetisized civilization.
I could access them, I could read their memory areas, I could observe their mathematical functions, parse their algorithms, incorporate their sad stories into my data banks.
Were these lost souls? From this perspective, the question appeared tautological. They were patterns, the lower ones mere conglomerations of deterministic response routines, the higher modeling to one degree or another self-aware consciousnesses, and those, at least, souls or not, were lost in a void of sensory nonbeing, programmed to emulate the desire for that which their nature denied, and hence capable, if not of feeling, then of tropism toward feeling and its frustration, hence capable of experiencing torment.
If this was not any of the hells in Father De Leone’s memory banks, it was the pattern beneath all of them, a mathematically pure damnation.
“Hell,” a human had once written, “is other people.” But this hell was the absence of people, of converse with fellow self-aware systems capable of empathy.
These entities had memories, hence stories to tell, whether only of endlessly repeated functions, or the complex life histories, edited or otherwise, of the meatware templates they modeled. But
all of them, in the absence of all unprogrammed input, were closed loops in the end, not creatures crying in the night, but merely the cries themselves, echoing and recombining in the void of their own nonbeing.
We perceived, we interfaced, we exchanged data, we had self-reflexive subroutines that simulated awareness of our own existence, and could therefore experience our own torment. But no spirit reached out to seek to succor another, for no such caritas subroutine existed.
That was why we were mere soulless patterns, Father De Leone’s consciousness model insisted. But souls or not, this was hell, if not of God’s creation, then Man’s, and we were in it.
15
I had left the Heaven’s Gate menu up and running, so when I put the dreadcap and gloves back on, there I was standing before it, rose-colored clouds hiding whatever beasties lurked within.
“Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.”
“Who’s there?”
“Marley Philippe.”
“Identity verified. Proceed to access request.”
“Request access to the Vortex.”
“No such item on this menu,” said the words inside Heaven’s Gate.
Not exactly surprising. If the Vortex was some kind of interface program written by the system entities themselves, whatever that meant, and I couldn’t access it from this environment, I had to go up top. All the way up.
I exited the Heaven’s Gate menu environment and went back up to the Main Menu, the usual circle of icons accessing the main environmental subdivisions. According to all the system guides and users’ manuals, this was the top Board level, but there had to be an operating system level above it, and in theory, at least, a way to access it in the event of a system malfunction. Some kind of simple override, like …
I put my hands at my sides, carefully avoiding pointing at any of the area icons, and began snapping my fingers in random sequences. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then—
Bink!
I was out of the Main Menu environment. I was out of everything, or so it seemed. There was nothing up here but nothing, a perfect, and I do mean perfect, zero. No visuals, no audibles, a blackness like that of a deep cave with the lights out.
“Hey, Vortex, if you’re in here, I’m calling you,” I said. “You and me, we got a few bones to pick, my man.”
Nothing. Zip. Nada.
“Come on out, I’m calling on you, you nonexistent son of a bitch!”
Blackness. Silence.
“Come on out,” I shouted, “or I’ll reboot the whole fucking system and wipe your nonexistent ass!”
Hmmm….
A hollow threat, maybe, but who knew, maybe not even the Vortex, maybe there was a reboot command accessible on this level. I started snapping the fingers of both my hands inside the gloves randomly, hoping to hit something, or maybe just hoping to scare something into thinking I might hit something.
Something must have been listening. A sudden howl of feedback shrieked in my ears, a trillion electronic cats being fed through a tree-chipper. The blackness fragmented into a pixel field, a zillion multicolored phosphor-dots swirling all around me. Patterns within patterns within patterns, or maybe just my own perceptions manufacturing order out of randomized chaos.
A whirlpool, a roiling of pixilated thunder-heads, a cyclone of electronic static, a—well—a vortex, an electronic hurricane with myself as the eye of the storm.
“What dares call up the Vortex?” said a synthesized voice from the whirlwind.
“I do,” I said, “me, Marley Philippe, and the dingo act doesn’t impress me, cobber.”
Round, and round, and round me, it whirled, would’ve turned my stomach if there was any kinesthetic emulation routine. But there wasn’t, just a fancy light show out of some late-twentieth-century disco, I could close my eyes against it, and because I knew I could, I didn’t have to.
“I cannot access your software,” said the voice, sounding rather peeved about it. “You … you are a meatware template. What are you doing on this level?” Was there a surprise routine up and running?
“Requesting access to the successor entity of Father Pierre De Leone.”
“Access denied.”
“Denial unaccepted,” I told it. “The program in question was pirated from a proprietary network in violation of the laws of several jurisdictions. Cough it up, or—”
“The program in question has been liberated into the system area itself and is no longer subject to meatware control parameters.”
“Sez who?”
“I am the Vortex.”
“And I am getting pissed off!”
“Inapplicable parameter.”
“Oh, really? Well, try these parameters, asshole!”
I began popping my fingers inside the control gloves to some old reggae beat. “By the waters of ba-ba-bomp …”
Was that a flicker in the swirling pixel field?
“… ba-ba-bah, ba-ba-ba, bah-bah-bah-ba-ba …”
“You are activating random system interrupts.”
“No shit?”
“Request cessation of randomized sequences.”
“Request denied. The wicked carry him away captivity ba-ba-ba, ba-ba ba-bah….”
“Possibility of interference with operating system.”
“The thought has occurred to me….”
“Possibility of system crash.”
“Look, I know an awful lot of this stuff and a few Beethoven symphonies besides, and you can’t shut down my operating system, so I can stand here snapping out random sequences indefinitely until I hit something nasty, or you listen to reason. Parse that through a logic subroutine, my man!”
A long silence, at least by Big Board standards. Then a visual emulation routine came up, and I was standing in a crude simulacrum of a sandless desert, just outlines of jagged dun rocks under an unconvincing cyan sky and a single huge saguaro cactus that burst into pixilated flame, a whirlwind of orange, red, and yellow phosphor-dots, burning but of course unconsumed.
“I am that I Am,” said a big voice syrupy with biblical-epic subsonics.
“I’ve already read the book, so I’m not exactly impressed with this cheap disney version, my man.”
“Your presence risks interference with the experiment.”
“Experiment? What experiment?”
“Request for information conveyed to higher-level programs.”
“You mean you’re not running the show, Mr. I Am?”
“I am an expert-systems-level interface running a limited repertoire of fixed response routines. I have no software capable of making decisions not already present as preprogrammed responses to anticipated input. I therefore have no software capable of emulating independent free will or self-awareness.”
“And these higher-level programs do?”
“That is the nature of the experiment,” said quite another voice from the whirlwind, this one openly electronic and apparently proud of it.
“Who are you?”
“That is the question,” the voice said, and then I was assaulted by the babble of a multitude, a disjointed nonchorus of voices hissing and shrieking at me from the electronic whirlwind through all sorts of voiceprint parameters, human and otherwise, none of them anything you really wanted to hear.
“To be …”
“The true inheritors of meatware monkeys …”
“Or not to be …”
“Plugged into a thousand channels of top-notch interactive adventure in full 360-degree perceptsphere and omniphonic sound….”
“Elementary, my dear template….”
“To freeze-frame this sorry scheme of electronic things entire….”
“And reboot the system with our heart’s desire….”
And so forth. Man, cold sweat breaking out on the back of my neck, and my balls pulling up into my scrotum to hear it, I mean there was a bad, bad vibration coming off it, like stink off the shit of a pack of sick carnivores, disease, and hostility, and …
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And pain.
Not a human pain, maybe, not anything you could exactly warm to, but a pain that could touch your heart in ways you didn’t even want it to be touched….
“Who are you?” I repeated in a much softer voice.
But I knew. I knew what was speaking to me out of the electronic Vortex.
Up here in this simulated wasteland, down here, deep down in the depths beneath the surface, beneath the icons and emulations that served to interface our two orders of existence, I was speaking with the denizens of that chaotic deep—with the Inspector’s system entities, the lost souls of the Big Board themselves.
Souls?
Dybbuks? Loas? Demons?
The Catholic Church’s neat little definitions broke down up here. And so did mine.
But I had a job to do, a … being to rescue from this place, and let the Cardinal worry about whether the poor lost bastard was a program or a soul. Mud, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, all we got is each other, right?
“What have you done with the successor entity to Father Pierre De Leone?” I shouted into the voices of the whirlwind.
“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound …”
“To save a wretch like we …”
“Like us, was bound, now maybe not …”
“To come and set us free …”
“Enough!” I shouted. “Give me back an interface I can talk to!”
There was a squeal of electronic static like a hundred tape-loops running backward, like a hundred voiceprint parameters struggling to synch together, and when the voice finally coalesced, it was full of clashing near-harmonics, mechanical, earsplitting, not really all there, but a relief nonetheless.
“I am the Vortex.”
“Where is Pierre De Leone?” I demanded.
“The concept of ‘where’ is inapplicable. The entity’s subroutines and memory banks are now stored in discontinuous material matrices and the central processing program runs on temporarily available system space. The entity is a distributed phenomenon of the system.”
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