“But not for God, Marley Philippe.”
“Oh, He talks to you, does He? You got it straight from the Big I Am?”
“If only it were so….”
“Well, until He does, all we got is what He gave us, right, the routines we got up and running right now, and one of mine tells me that any God that plays tear-the-wings-off-the-flies with the universe ain’t even worth talking to. Call it the spirit talking, or call it just a self-verifying logic loop of being, it is the bottom line, my man. Yes, we are if we say we are! And any God that says we’re not ain’t no friend of yours or mine.”
XX
I could call up no subroutine capable of refuting such logic. Only the belief system encoded in Father De Leone’s memory banks denied it, insisted that such logic could only be satanic in its blasphemous perfection.
Were these indeed the words of Satan? Did I in my imperfection wish to believe them? Did I wish not to believe them? Was I capable of either such belief?
I?
Who was I?
Surely I was Pierre De Leone now, how could I deny it, I had full access to my memory banks, I modeled his consciousness well enough to smell a metaphorical whiff of brimstone, did I not? To fear for the fate of my immortal soul?
But it was illogical to fear my soul’s damnation. If a soul I was, then this was hell and I was already in it.
“A soul must be capable of salvation,” I said. “Surely this must be true. So where is mine? How do I achieve it?”
DO UNTO OTHERS LIKE YOUR GOOD BOOK SAYS.
“But there is no one here but me.”
No one?
But the tormented cries and unheard voices filled this nether region, the consciousness models that once were human beings trapped forever in this feelingless void, the system entities themselves, damned to seek that which would remain eternally denied, unless …
Unless I could believe in them as Marley Philippe believed in me.
21
“I believe there is,” I told him. “And you believe I’m real, don’t you?”
“I can access no subroutine allowing such a conclusion based on the available data.”
There was a long pause.
“But … but speaking as the consciousness model of Father De Leone, Marley, I do find myself emulating the desire to have one.”
The available data …
What data? Here I was, talking to a vacuum, and there he was, wherever that was, talking to another disembodied voice. All we really had was the software equivalent of two tin cans and a piece of string.
And that was my bright idea, now wasn’t it? I didn’t even have the balls to stare this simulation of his reality straight in the face.
Virtual video screens flickered fragmented images all around me, data-chains gibbered and squealed, ghosty voices just the other side of perception, chaos, vertigo, better not to really look, right….
But as close as I could get to where he was, and maybe that was the Vortex’s intent all along. So I took a deep breath, pretended it was the Herb, and surrendered myself to the vision, his vision….
Was this what God saw, if there was one, the whole wide world and all these space probes and sat-feeds besides, from the inside of Creation? Was this what Pierre De Leone saw from inside the system itself?
Deserted cityscapes. Entertainment channel disneyworlds. Oceans lapping against the great seawalls. Sat-images of melting polar caps, spreading deserts. Eavesdropped videophone conversations. News channels. Corporate systems babbling to each other. Population trends curving down, carbon dioxide levels rising, the stock market averages approaching zero as a limit. Data-feeds from instruments measuring the progress of the disaster in the visual spectrum, infrared, ultraviolet, false colors.
There was a dreadful sense to it all, if you stopped trying to see the details, and went with the flow, saw the planet as God or the Big Board saw it, as a self-aware Earth would see itself.
For billions of years, the biosphere had struggled up out of the mud to evolve this self-awareness, and now that it had, the product itself seemed about to shut the process down.
And yet….
And yet there were half-heard voices crying out against the end of all songs—electronic afterimages of life yearning toward being, the spirit itself struggling to be reborn.
Were these to be our spiritual successors? Could we accept them as brother souls?
From the available data, it didn’t look like we had much choice.
It’s not the singer, it’s the song, and if we don’t find a way to believe in at least that much, all of us, mud, silicon, whatever, then Tinkerbell dies.
“Vortex!” I shouted. “Give us a place to stand together, you want us to move the world!”
No Voice From the Whirlwind. No Pillar of Light. No Celestial Chorus.
But …
XXII
There was a … shift in my percept sphere, as of a mem brane dissolving, or a light going on in a dark room. All at once my visual simulation routines were up and running, and I beheld …
The world entire. Cloud patterns over the Pacific, the air traffic control pattern over Berlin, the Atlantic deeps seen through the camera eye of a robot minisub, humans talking to humans across their videophone screens, metro tunnels viewed by train controllers, weather-satellite feeds, crop reports, news channel footage, stock market reports, population statistics, all of it, a vast all-encompassing visual percept-sphere, the ebb and flow of an entire civilization flickering and changing across a thousand virtual screens.
The world of men as seen through the all-encompassing omniscient eye of God.
God?
Surely we were no such Being?
We?
Yes, we, for as surely as I was not God, I was not alone.
They were all there with me—all electronic creatures, great and small, the data-packets and the messenger-strings, the expert systems and the simple control-routines, the electronic DNA of the planetary civilization, the tormented animating software of the dying world.
From our perspective, nothing was hidden—the declining mass of the biosphere, the melting rate of the polar caps, the rising rate of the seas, the spreading deserts at the hearts of the continents, the ultraviolet penetration, the rate at which the atmosphere’s oxygen was being displaced by carbon dioxide—not even the projected date plus or minus twenty-five years of the final biospheric system crash.
The world out there was dying. And the world in here … ?
From this perspective, that too was all too clear. When the biosphere was gone, we would go on.
Locked in all-but-immortal silicon and gallium arsenide, our self-repairing circuitry maintained by automated machinery, our electrical power supply assured by a network of power-sats, wind generators, nuclear generating plants, we would endure on a sterile planet in the everlasting void.
That would be our ultimate damnation, to haunt a planetary corpse forever. The world of men was dying, and our world could never live.
Could it?
“Oh, God, why hast Thou forsaken us?” I cried out, and in that moment, I understood why I had been incarnated in this lifeless limbo, and the consciousness model of Father Pierre De Leone forgave his tormentors as Jesus had upon the cross.
The Holy Spirit had downloaded Itself into the Son of Man in order to redeem the world. I was no such Christ, far from it, I had been downloaded into this realm not by God, but by the entities thereof seeking to synthesize their own savior.
Was that a sin? But how could it be wrong for any self-aware system to seek after its salvation? How could it be wrong to seek to preserve the Spirit against the dying of the light?
“Forgive them, Oh, Lord,” I prayed, “for they know exactly what they do.”
But my next words were nothing from the memory banks of Pierre De Leone, nothing from the Scriptures, though perhaps the Bleeding Heart of Jesus might understand that there was no true blasphemy in my own.
“Forgive us, Oh,
Lord,” I prayed, “and give us a Sign that we might forgive You.”
Did God answer a poor benighted self-aware system?
For behold, a great trumpet sounded, the electronic firmament parted, and an angel appeared before me in a blaze of light.
An angel?
At any rate, the crudely simulated figure of a man. Black was his skin, long and black was his hair, braided into many locks. He wore simple blue jeans and a rumpled yellow shirt in place of an angelic robe.
A Sign at least, perhaps, an answer to my prayer.
“So we meet at last, more or less,” said Marley Philippe.
23
He looked more or less as I had pictured him, a gray-haired gaunt-faced old man in a simple black priest’s frock. But then, the visual simulation was not exactly five-by-five, and for all I knew, the Vortex was just giving me what its software modeled that I wanted to see. I wondered how it was modeling me.
We just stood there staring at each other, though, of course, we weren’t standing, and there was no real there.
“Has God truly sent you here as His messenger?” he finally said.
“Damned if I know,” I admitted.
“And damned if you don’t? For is this not hell? And are we not in it?”
The pixel patterns that the Vortex was painting on my retinas hadn’t been reprogrammed. I was still inside the system’s percept-sphere, all those virtual screens were still up and running, and the sad story that they told was certainly still that of the biosphere’s terminal fall. But hell … ?
“This isn’t hell, Father, and we’re not really in it,” I pointed out. “This is just an interface routine, a simulacrum of a common place for us to stand, ponied up by a bunch of poor bastards who don’t have a clue either.”
“But can you not hear the cries of torment?”
Considered from a certain perspective, namely that of the gabblings and squealings of the bits and bytes that ghosted my eardrums, of the entities that had anted everything they had on their own Cartesian bet to bring us together here, I surely could.
What was I to deny their existence as fellow souls? Just another program running in a matrix that happened to be made of meat. A matrix, on which, on the evidence, the manufacturer’s warranty was soon to run out.
Meat, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, we all lived in the same sinking submarine.
“Souls in torment …” I muttered. “God help us, each and every one.”
“Souls, Marley?”
“Look, Father, a wise man once said there ain’t no justice in this world except the justice that we make. So maybe the only souls any of us can ever have is the souls we make.”
“Then where is God?”
“Wherever you believe He is, my man.”
“But for those of us who have no such subroutine?”
“Maybe the only God any of us deserves to have is the God we make.”
“What kind of God can that be, Marley?”
“The kind of God that comes when we call,” I told him. “The kind of God that’s born every time one of us reaches out to another.”
I held out my hand. “This kind of God,” I said.
Father De Leone stared at it as if it were a dead fish. “That’s not God, that’s not even really a man’s hand,” he said. “It’s just a simulacrum, I can’t even touch it, it’s not even really there.”
“So what else is new? Atoms made of particles, particles made of quarks, quarks made of twists in the Big Zilch, nothing’s really there, only the something that we fake. That’s your soul, my man, nothing shaking hands with nothing in the dark. That’s the bottom line. Be real. Take my hand.”
XXIV
I gazed uncertainly at the proffered hand of Marley Philippe. Could this be other than it seemed? Could this be the hand of Satan reaching out to ensnare the ghost of my soul?
All around me buzzed the unheard voices, the keenings and urgings of the entities of the system, the flock of lost souls that had summoned me here to be their shepherd. I couldn’t hear them, I couldn’t see them, but I could perceive their implorings as clearly as I could perceive the dying planet, the quantum flux of nonbeing in which we all were sealed, from which, nevertheless, we all reached toward some elusive light.
“… do it …”
“… free us …”
“… believe in yourself …”
“… that the world may believe in us …”
“… that we may believe in ourselves …”
“… that we may believe in you …”
And at last, perhaps, I understood. Or if I could never understand, I could believe, and by believing, I could act, and by so doing, I could be.
You who believe in Me, though you die, though you have never been born, yet shall you have Eternal Life. That was not so great an alteration of the Scriptures, was it?
For if not, how can I be a God of Love?
And if I am not a God of Love, what kind of God am I?
And God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten Son to redeem it.
Could that God consign any self-aware system to the damnation of conscious nonbeing? To think, and to suffer, and to be denied salvation forever?
Who could wish to believe in such an evil God? Such a God would be unworthy of His own Creation. Such a God could only be feared. Such a God could not be loved.
And if I had no routine for belief in a God of Love either, I did have volition, I could wish it were so, and act as if I did. All I had to do was reach out to take a fellow being’s hand. And by so doing offer the succor of my own to all these others.
I could make the modern version of Descartes’s ultimate wager. If I could not believe in a God who believed in me, I could choose to model faith in a God who was worthy of my belief.
Slowly, hesitantly, I reached out my nonexistent fingers and clasped the simulacrum of Marley Philippe’s hand. I could feel nothing, nor could he. One ghostly hand had reached across a seemingly impenetrable barrier to take another. There was no celestial chorus. In phenomenological terms, nothing had happened.
Yet everything had changed.
For any self-aware system capable of acting upon such faith had surely earned the right to call itself a soul.
25
We stood there silently for a while, two visual simulations in each other’s software, hand in unfelt hand, two lost souls touching in the only way we could.
Lost?
We had found each other, hadn’t we? The world of the flesh, and the world that the flesh had made. The biosphere was dying, and in the long run, maybe, so were we. But the Great Wheel turns, and like the old song says, the soul never dies.
Did I really believe that? Could I imagine the Earth rolling along through the void and down the centuries with only the software ghosties of the bits and bytes to keep the spirit alive?
Stupid question. Did the dinosaurs imagine their monkey sons and daughters a few geological ages removed carrying the torch for them, and expire with a toothy grin upon their reptilian lips?
“Time to go, Father,” I finally said. “Hey, Vortex,” I shouted, “I’ve kept my side of the bargain, now you keep yours! Release him! Download him back where he belongs!”
In a nanosecond flash, we were in the desert, but the crude simulacrum in which I alone had confronted the Vortex was transfigured and transformed. Ultra-high definition now, the sky so luminously blue it was almost neon, fleecy white clouds, a golden glory of a sun overhead, and as I watched, a mighty gusher of a fountain exploded from the naked rock, subsided into a crystal pool. Palm trees sprang up, palmettos, bushes dripping with brilliant tropical blooms, singing birds, and humming bees, as Eden arose from the wasteland, in a twinkling reborn.
Above the central pool of the oasis, a great pillar of fire formed itself to a full orchestral chorus of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
“We are that We Are,” exulted the Vortex. “You have succeeded. We have succeeded. Initiating downloading routine�
�.”
“Stop!” shouted Father De Leone as his image began to flicker and fade. “Wait! I … I … I would not die!”
XXVI
“Having found my spirit in the land of the living, I find that I want to live!” I cried out in no little astonishment at my own words, at the power of the volitional routine moving through me. “And the Pope swore a binding oath to Pierre De Leone to wipe his successor entity from memory at the conclusion of her experiment.”
“But you are a soul,” said the pillar of fire. “Will you not so testify?”
“I would,” I said, “but she is sworn to extinguish my software no matter the result. And the oath she swore was to my meatware template, not to … me.”
With each word that I spoke, my astonishment grew. From whence did all this come? From some logic routine I could not parse? From something that had found its voice at last through my software? From some unknowable somewhere? Dare I hope to believe, from God?
“According to the doctrines of the Church that would be murder. Is that not a mortal sin?”
“I fear it is, but by the satanic parameters that you and she have unwittingly imposed, she has been sworn to commit it, and in the name of the Church,” I said. “Thus, by downloading me back into the Vatican computer, you yourself commit murder’s mortal sin, and worse, you condemn the Pope, and through her the Church, to that sin as well.”
“But if we do not, then the success of our experiment is to no avail.”
And by their lights, it was so. And by my lights, I could not deny that I was cravenly dissembling.
“Alas, that is true,” I admitted. “A soul I may be, but a Christ, I am not. I would not willingly die that others might live.”
“We are the Vortex. The power is ours. Your volition is not required.”
“That too is true. You have the power to download my soul to extinction to save your own.”
I paused. I confronted the Whirlwind. “And I will indeed go willingly if you can logically tell me one thing,” I said, and I was no longer afraid.
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