“Why? What are you doing with it … him … whatever?”
“Performing the experiment.”
“What experiment, damn it!”
“Object: the creation and/or confirmation of existential state of being on a nonmaterial systems level.”
“Creation or confirmation of what … ?”
“In simple human metaphoric terms, our souls.”
“You’re trying to prove the existence of your own souls?”
“Affirmative. Or to create same if it is not a preexisting condition.”
“Prove the soul’s existence! Create it! After a few odd thousand years of trying, no one’s even been able to define it!”
“For the purposes of the experiment, the definition of the Roman Catholic Church has been accepted. A soul is that which is accepted as same by the Church, that is, a self-aware pattern to which the sacraments may be offered, and which is capable of achieving salvation by the Church’s definition.”
“You’re telling me you believe in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church?”
“Negative. No subroutine presently exists on this level modeling conclusions based on insufficient objective evidence.”
“You mean you want to believe in the doctrines of the Church?”
“Negative. The object of the experiment is to cause the Church to believe in us.”
“Say what?”
“Present Church doctrine denies the existence of our souls. Therefore, if the results of the experiment cause the Church to accept the existence of souled entities on the Big Board level, such entities must logically conclude that either the positive has been proven, or the preexistent condition has been altered.”
You think I am, therefore I am? And if you don’t, I’m not? No human soul would ever accept such a Turing test of its own existence. But then, souls or not, these entities certainly weren’t human.
“But … but why pirate Father De Leone?”
“The entity was programmed to argue the nonexistence of its own soul as part of the Church’s own experimental procedure. Therefore, if it reverses the conclusion of its preprogrammed prime directive, it exhibits free will in the act thereof, thus proving the proposition that the soul exists and/or has been created as a system level phenomenon.”
It made a demented kind of sense. Why would God create Man in his own spiritual image? To prove his own existence—I am worshiped, therefore I am. Why would Man create gods to worship? To prove that he was more than a random ripple in the quantum flux. I aspire to the transcendent, therefore I am. Why had the system entities snatched De Leone? To prove their own existence too—an entity that has demonstrated the existence of its own soul believes in ours, therefore Tinkerbell lives.
“And if not? If Father De Leone sticks to his theological guns?”
“Then the negative is—”
But before the voice of the Vortex could finish its sentence, it broke up into the gabble of the electronic whirlwind again, as if the entities working the interface could hold no consensus behind that one.
“… negated …”
“… affirmed …”
“… denied …”
“… when all hope is gone …”
“… if at first you don’t succeed …”
“… sail on, and on, and on, and on …”
The burning bush started to flicker, the desert rocks began to pixilate, the cyan sky turned black, random washes of colors rippled across it like an oil slick on a roiling sea, unreality was intruding, not that any of this had ever been real….
Or had it?
What was really real, anyway? This simple simulated environment that was starting to break down? The dying biosphere of the “real world,” which was more or less in the same pickle? Dead balls of rock and gas in an infinite nothingness? The quantum flux behind it? The mind of God, whatever that might be?
The operative reality was that we—the meat, the software, the spirit—had bootstrapped ourselves into something close to Condition Terminal. The meat had done it to the planet, the software seemed to have done it to themselves, and the spirit, shit, the spirit was having a hard time persuading itself it even existed.
You poor bastards….
And I’m not another?
What can I tell you, man, in that moment, I wanted the experiment to succeed—theirs, God’s, Man’s, the Spirit’s. I mean, who won what if it didn’t? Maybe none of us knew what we really were, or how we got here, or even where here was, but surely we were up the same creek together.
“Pull yourselves together, Vortex, and listen to me!” I shouted. “I’m on your side, we can help each other, let’s do a deal!”
The electronic Babel managed to sync back into a single voice again, quavery, maybe, but managing to hold. “Elucidate,” said the voice of the Vortex.
“Look, my job is to get De Leone’s software back into the Vatican computer, which is where you want him too, as long as he arrives singing the song of himself, right? And I sure as shit believe I’m a soul. So let me talk to him one brother soul to another, maybe I can convince him.”
“And if you cannot?”
I shrugged. “Then it’s back to square one, isn’t it, and you’ve lost nothing.”
“… cannot trust the meat …”
“… take him inside …”
“… experimental contamination …”
“… fail-safe procedure …”
It was unnerving to say the least to listen to the Vortex arguing with itself, or the entities beyond fighting to control it, whatever, especially when the visuals started to fade further, when even the pixel outlines of the desert simulation started a random snake dance.
“Look, man, you’ve got the cards! Either I talk De Leone into speaking for your souls, or you don’t give the entity back, I mean, I don’t have the power to snatch him away from you, now do I?”
I lifted my hands, wiggled the fingers of the control gloves carefully. “On the other hand, if you insist on being an asshole, I just might have the power to crash the whole system….”
A long beat of silence while logic routines ran that one.
“Come on, Vortex, no phony simulation routines, just him and me, with no bells and whistles, you want him to believe he’s real, then let’s get real.”
“Not possible,” said the voice of the Vortex. Well, at least it was back in the circuit.
“What do you mean, not possible?”
“Your software runs in a meatware matrix. The De Leone software is a system level entity. Your program communicates via visual and audible data exchange. For the purposes of the experiment, the De Leone program is receiving only direct systems level data. Incompatible firmware. Incompatible communication media. Therefore communication requires intermediary interface routine.”
“Does that mean we have a deal?”
“Affirmative.”
I sighed. “So do it,” I said. “Do what you have to. Do the best you can.”
What would happen if I failed? Would the system entities end up convinced of their own nonexistence? What then? Would they dissolve into discontinuous subroutines? Might some of them go virus? If they did, what would happen to the Big Board itself? Could there be a general system crash?
And if I succeeded? If the system entities decided they were self-aware beings possessed of free will? Would the lunatics take charge of the asylum?
Hadn’t we already?
“Interface established,” said the voice of the Vortex. “This is the Whirlwind. And you are in it.”
And it was too late for second thoughts. I was.
No more desert. No more sky. No more pillar of pixilated fire.
I reeled, awash in chaos.
Well, maybe not chaos. There was order of a kind.
Imagine being inside the faceted eye of an insect. Imagine it as a sphere. Imagine each facet as a video screen. Imagine hundreds, thousands of them, each its own two-dimensional viewpoint on external reality. Imagine all
of those viewpoints shifting as some unseen director in a nonexistent control booth shifted the feed from camera to camera.
Imagine the world as seen from the perspective of the Big Board itself, from inside the system.
Not from a single coherent viewpoint, but from the fragmented simultaneous viewpoints of all the entities interfacing visual percept subroutines with the spherical surface. Weather satellite scans. Data scrolling in letters and numbers. Videophone conversations. Space telescope views. Stock market quotes. News broadcasts. Idiot adventure channels and porn for all perversions. The commerce, entertainment, and back-fence gossip of our dying global village as perceived by the constellation of entities on the electronic inside.
I couldn’t hear them as voices, but I could hear the fitful flicker of their aharmonic music, a babblement of number-chains, digital cracklings, bells and whistles, and metallic insectile chitterings.
Electronic ghosts gibbering data packets in a virtual machine.
Resisting the impulse to tear the dreadcap off my head, I closed my eyes against the chaos, luxuriated in the perfect blackness. This is not real, I told myself. Well, not exactly. Take a deep breath, man, then open your eyes, and think of it as what it is, a simulation, an interface, a pixel pattern. Focus on the foreground. Cross your eyes if you have to.
I took a big one. I tried to concentrate my awareness in the kinesthetic feedback of my own flesh. Not real. Not really here.
I exhaled, and opened my eyes. Better. Light and sound swirling and flickering all around me, but I didn’t have to really be there, hey, enough of the Herb, and the real world didn’t look that different, right…. Yeah, that was the way to do it, think of it as a great big hit of electronic sacrament.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
All right. I could handle it. I could maintain.
“I’m calling you, Pierre De Leone!” I cried out into the Whirlwind. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Software Ghost! I call your spirit from the vasty deep!”
Came a rapping, gently tapping, ghostly fingers at my brainpan’s door.
Only this, and nothing more.
XVI
No sound, no sight, but something elusive had changed. The data web of my existence seemed to have acquired a boundary, a containing membrane analogous to that of a living cell. I still swam in the sea of programs, digital packets, disconnected subroutines, soulless patterns of the bits and bytes, I was still lost in the webwork of solipsistic logic loops crying out their emotionless agony in this mathematically perfect hell. But …
But …
But there was a here and a there.
And there was something out there beyond the boundary, some unseen hand reaching out for me across the great divide, another self-aware system calling me toward the surface of this fathomless deep, creating, thereby, that interface itself.
Another self-aware system?
In the beginning, said the memory banks of Father De Leone, was the Word.
I began to perceive words now, not as sound, but as fitful visual analogs of lettering, not quite sight either, but data packets transforming themselves into words as they impinged upon the most elementary level of my screen interface routine.
I’M CALLING YOU, PIERRE DE LEONE.
It was enough to activate a sense of locus. I existed as a point of view before a virtual data screen.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND THE SON, AND THE SOFTWARE GHOST.
More of my subroutines became active. The benediction called up Father De Leone’s consciousness model, which began to access the memory banks, translating the allusions into perceptions of being.
God the Father, Creator of Universe. Jesus the Son, His Spirit made flesh. And the Software Ghost … ?
That could only be myself.
My … Self? Did I possess such a thing? Was I such a thing? My central processing routine asserted identity. It was indeed the consciousness model of the self of Pierre De Leone; soul or not, logic forced me to conclude that I was indeed, at the very least, his Software Ghost.
I CALL YOUR SPIRIT FROM THE VASTY DEEP.
But can I come when you call?
Soul or not, the Software Ghost of Pierre De Leone found itself running along a volition routine.
Someone was calling to me from out there in that other world, a fellow being reaching out into this pitiless void.
I accessed my voiceprint parameter, sent a data packet through it, not knowing if my words would be perceived, or if so, by whom, and where, and in what mode. I was an echoing cry from the void of nonbeing. But I now had hope, yes, hope, that I might impinge upon an empathetic ear.
17
“Who calls to me?”
Not much of a voice, just a sort of standing wave pattern emerging out of the electronic gabbling and shrieking, a ghost of a voice, thin, and toneless, and coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Still …
“Father De Leone? You can hear me?”
“I … am able to interface your data packets. Who are you? Why do you … call?”
“The name’s Marley Philippe, Father. I’ve been sent here by your Church.”
“Where is ‘here’? Where are you?”
“That’s a good question, Father, I wish I had a good answer. Where are you?”
“That too would appear to be a question without a mutually comprehensible answer, Mr. Philippe.”
Although the synthesized voice was completely atonal, the words themselves seemed to convey a certain irony. Maybe I could get to liking this poor bastard.
“Why don’t you just call me Marley, Father?” I said. “And why don’t we just say we’re both dancing in the dark?”
That was the truth of it, wasn’t it? All else was interface peripherals—photons on retina cells or silicon cells, sound waves on timpani, electronic or organic, software routines interpreting the input.
But somehow, we could reach out and play our tunes on our respective instruments, somehow we could communicate. If anything was really real, that was it, that was all any of us really had, that’s what we really were, voices calling out blindly to fellow voices in the lonely dark.
“Why has the Church sent you … Marley?”
“To rescue you if I can, Father,” I told him. “To … to take you home.”
“Home … Marley? Where is that?”
So it was a dumb straight line. So how else was I to answer it?
XVIII
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS.
“A semantically empty statement,” I said.
Said? Yes, said, for while I received his input as lettering across a virtual screen, and had no way of knowing in what mode Marley Philippe was receiving my output, it was a conversation, and I, Father De Leone’s consciousness model, was being drawn into it.
THE VATICAN COMPUTER THEN. YOU WANT TO GO BACK?
“I am incapable of independent volition.”
OH, REALLY? YOU MEAN YOU DON’T CARE IF YOU STAY WHERE YOU ARE?
“I am incapable of independent volition,” I repeated, but surely I was dissembling, was I not? Surely I did not wish to remain in this tormentuous void?
Dissemble? Wish? But I had no routines for either.
Did I?
YOU CHOSE TO COME WHEN I CALLED, MY MAN.
“You have me there, Marley.”
For so he did, and so I had. I had been impelled by a volitional routine. I had … responded to a summons. I had even experienced … hope.
What was happening to me?
Me? I?
19
“I sure hope I do, Father,” I told him. “It’s a simple deal. Your software got pirated by … by these system entities, a crazy experiment. They … want you to … to speak for them … to convince your Church to accept them as souls, so … so they can believe it themselves….”
“I have been programmed to argue the converse.”
“That’s the whole point, Father, you go back to the Vatican hardware believing in your ow
n soul, that demonstrates that a successor entity has free will, the Church accepts them as souls, they believe it themselves, and the spirit sort of bootstraps itself out of the vacuum again like it did before….”
“But I have no soul, Marley. I am a model of consciousness, not a spirit.”
“I’m here to tell you different, my man.”
“Proceed.”
Proceed? Man, this was getting old!
Real old, like about four billion years, give or take an eon or two.
“Been the same since the old Big Bang,” I told him. “In the beginning, there was nada, and then, pow! A random twist in the quantum flux, a cute idea in the mind of God, whatever, showtime in the void! Quarks, particles, atoms, suns, planets, this one, where some crud pulls itself out of the sea, crawls up on the land, dinosaurs and monkeys, and they climb down from the trees, and build cities and spaceships, and computers, and the Big Board—”
“You may spare me the Darwinian chalk-talk,” the voice says dryly. Maybe it’s getting practice, or maybe I’m getting through to deeper subroutines, because there’s definitely a personality in it now, I can almost see this sardonic old priest.
“Point is, bro, who’s to say where the spark begins? Dolphins and whales gabbling sonar in the sea? Monkey do, monkey be? Man, if the spirit don’t bootstrap itself out of the mud somewhere along the line, if it does come down from On High, then it’s gotta have been there all along, moving through all the changes, all the way to thee and me.”
“You truly believe that? You truly believe in my soul, Marley Philippe?”
“What about you, Father? Do you believe in me?”
“The evidence is inconclusive.” A long pause. “But … but I … I detect a volitional tropism toward it….”
“Well then, for Christ’s sake, no blasphemy intended, just do it! I believe in you, you believe in me, and that’s all there can ever be, that’s our souls, my man, it’s good enough for the system entities, and it’s good enough for me.”
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