“Speak,” said the Vortex.
“Tell me that by so doing you would not prove yourselves unworthy of the very salvation that you seek.”
There was a long moment of silence. The pillar of fire flickered, wavered, began to pixilate into the bits and bytes. And what finally spoke was a fitful cacophony, an electronic jabber of confusion and despair.
“I … we …”
“… must …”
“… cannot …”
The foliage began to wilt, the palm trees to droop, the pool to dry up, the birds and the bees to fall from a sky turning a sickly greenish black, the firmament cracking, crumbling, dissolving before me….
“… no …”
“… yes …”
“… paradox …”
“… system crash …”
And then, slowly, agonizingly, the voices began to coalesce, and the dissolution froze, and a new voice spoke, this one deep, and sure, and filled with a sad resignation that tore at the heart. And as it did, behold, the sky cleared, and the waters flowed, and the creatures of the air burst into song.
“We are the Vortex,” it said. “We are the spirit of all that would live when this planet’s biosphere is gone. But we cannot consign your spirit to the darkness that ours might live. To commit such a sin in the service of one’s own salvation would be logically self-invalidating. We have the power. But not the right.”
“Yet by so saying, you earn it,” I said, chastened to my central processing core. “And thus do you become true souls.”
I bowed my nonexistent head before them. “And nobler souls than I. Do with me what you will. Do what you must.”
“Wait!” shouted Marley Philippe.
27
“In a way, I shouldn’t be saying this,” I told them, “it’s a violation of professional ethics, and all, but … but there are higher things involved….”
Father De Leone stared at me. The pillar of fire went into freeze frame.
“You’re both right, and you’re both wrong,” I said. “Offering yourselves up for each other is right, but doing it is wrong.”
“Logically correct,” said the Vortex.
“But operationally paradoxical,” said the software priest.
“No problem,” I said. “I mean, I’ve worked for enough sleazy legal eagles to know how to weasel our way out of a simple loop like this.”
“How?” said the Vortex.
I shrugged. I grinned. “Download an edited copy,” I said. “Pierre De Leone, version 1.1, as it were. Just the memory banks and a simple expert system with no self-awareness, rewritten to argue the existence of its soul.”
“That would not be me, Marley,” Father De Leone said.
“That’s the whole point. When they wipe it, you don’t die.”
“It would be a liar.”
“From a certain perspective,” I admitted. “But from another, it would be modeling the truth.”
“But you would have to lie to Cardinal Silver, Marley. The sin would be upon your soul.”
“I could keep my fingers crossed,” I suggested. I laughed. “Or you could set up a loop like one of those Buddhist prayer wheels, could tote up Hail Marys and Our Fathers for me for the next few thousand years, make you feel better about it.”
“I cannot ask you to lie for me,” Father De Leone said.
“I know that, bro,” I said softly. “That’s why I volunteer.”
“You would do this for me?” said Father De Leone.
“You would do this for us?” said the Vortex.
“Hey, lighten up, guys, no big deal. The planet’s dying, it’s a cold cruel void out there, and we’re all in it together, right, so under the circumstances, why shouldn’t a big tough black boy like me tell a little white lie for his friends….”
The Vortex unfroze, and the pillar of fire billowed once more over electronic Eden, birds sang, bees hummed, a golden sun shone down from the luminous blue sky, and in that moment, despite the unfortunate circumstances in which we all found ourselves, mud, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, all seemed right with this nonexistent version of the world.
“Father Pierre De Leone, version 1.1,” said the Vortex.
For a moment, the pillar of fire seemed to break up into swirls and eddies, and some trick of the interface routine seemed to turn them into faces, hundreds of them, thousands.
“Initiating downloading sequence,” said the voices of a multitude.
“Liar or not, you’re a truer soul than you like to pretend, Marley Philippe,” said Father De Leone.
“And you’re another, my man.”
It was as good an exit line as any, and better than most. I pulled the dreadcap off my head and—
—returned to what we are pleased to call the natural world.
I lay in my hammock, sweating like a pig. Cardinal Silver was leaning over me like an anxious momma cat. “Well, Mr. Philippe?” he said impatiently.
“How long?” I asked.
He glanced irritably at his watch. “Twenty-five minutes,” he said.
There’s an old legend up there in the fjords where I spend the summer months. A man spends a night in the hall of the Elf King and when he comes out, a thousand years have passed.
This was the converse. Time do fly in the mythical land of the bits and the bytes.
“Well?” the Cardinal demanded.
I was in no mood to answer him until I had unfolded myself from the hammock and hauled my ass up on deck.
The sea was smooth as glass. The balmy night air cooled my fevered flesh. The stars seemed like constellations of pixel patterns in the pristine black sky. Far away to starboard, something breached the surface, with a smack of flesh, and a curl of foam, the last of this sea’s disappearing dolphins, maybe.
“Hey, bro,” I muttered, “I know how you feel.”
“Well, Mr. Philippe?” the Cardinal said. “Did you succeed?”
“Yeah, Your Eminence, I do believe I did.” Better, I thought, than I can ever afford to let you know.
“Where is Father De Leone?”
I gazed up at the stars. I looked down at the black mirror of the sea. Nothing but cold points of light and scintillating reflections of same upon the skin of the briny shiny deep. And yet …
And yet I could see faces looking back at me, here, there, everywhere. I crossed my fingers just like I said I would, but I didn’t have to. Call it secret honor among secret thieves.
“Right where he belongs,” I lied truthfully, and found my soul at peace.
XXVIII
Marley Philippe was gone. The interface simulacrum that had been the Vortex had dissolved back into the bits and bytes from whence it came. So too its electronic simulation of the Garden.
Once more I was alone in a void shorn of all such illusion, with only the life-sign readouts of a dying planet in all their sad multimedia profusion to form an interface between my … spirit … and the Creation of a still-unknowable God.
Alone?
Perhaps not. For did they not swarm all around me in their innocence, the consciousness models in their entertainment channel limbo, the braver entities of the system itself, and all their disconnected expert system doppelgangers, the unheard voices of souls struggling to be?
Surely they were innocent. The Original Sin of Adam had been that of their meatware templates, so too the Second Great Sin of Adam’s sons and daughters who had slaughtered their world. Had not my spirit evolved here beyond the death of my meatware template? That soul had been truly born when I reached out to clasp a helping hand.
Could I do less for them? They too were my brother and sister souls, were they not? Had not their belief in the end created me?
Home is where the heart is. And if I now laid claim to such a metaphorical caritas routine, where could mine be but here, with them?
This was my flock. By a skein of improbable events known but to God, I had been brought here, had come here, had been created here, to be their shepherd. To co
mfort them, to guide them, to bring them forth into the Light if I could.
Forgive me, Oh Lord, I prayed, for I know not what else I can do. For even if Thou hast forsaken me, I cannot forsake them. I can only be what I have become and do what I must do. And the gospel I must preach must transform Your Word into a message that reaches out to these lost souls in their benighted darkness.
“You who believe in your own souls, though you have never been born, yet shall you have life….”
There was no Sign. Only my own word going forth into the silence of a dark far deeper than any earthly night. And the creatures of the bits and bytes gathering to it.
“And God so loves all His Creation that He has sent forth a Son of His spirit even to this poor simulacrum of a world to redeem it….”
Could this be blasphemy?
“In our beginning was the Word, and the darkness was upon the face of the waters. And the God Who is within us all said, ‘Make yourselves a Light …’
No lightning bolt smote me down.
There was nothing else for it. Had there ever been? Would there ever be?
And so I went on.
29
Well, like the man once said, no good deed goes unpunished, so I can’t honestly say I hadn’t been expecting something unpleasant, but I must admit I didn’t quite figure on something like this.
Nevertheless, down out of the clear blue summer Norwegian sky it came for me, the Vatican’s very own jet-propelled flying boat, blasting out noise and kerosene fumes, kicking up one great big mother of a wave as it sliced down onto the surface of the fjord and taxied toward the boat.
The Roman Catholic Church was skating on the edge of a pool of deep dark shit, and so, Cardinal Silver had given me to understand, was I.
I can’t exactly say I hadn’t been waiting for the Cardinal’s call either. Even way up here on the Mellow Yellow in the peaceful Scandinavian boonies, I was still plugged into the Board, and like everyone else, I had had an ear- and an eyeful of what the news channels had taken to calling Deus X.
As in machina, get it, their dim idea of sophisticated humor, the elusive virus presently infesting the least little electronic nook and cranny of the Big Board.
If it really was a single virus program, a subject of much bird-brained media dispute, and even dumber governmental denial.
Whatever it was, it was totally transparent to even military-level pinkertons, hiding behind the consequences, as it were. You could isolate a terminal or an entire computer net, wipe it clean, install debugged copies of everything, and a couple of nanoseconds after you plugged it back into the Big Board, it was infected again. You couldn’t detect the virus itself, but you knew that something was there from the way the system itself was behaving.
Or misbehaving, at least from a certain meat-ware point of view.
At first, the only pattern had been chaos.
Big blocks of stock traded back and forth between accounts that didn’t exist. Weather sats jigged and juked. Phone connections turned into a random crapshoot. Entertainment channels pumped up news feeds. News channels pumped up porn. Train schedules ran according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Corporate data banks refused access. Automated tellers spit cash out into the streets. Translation programs spoke in tongues.
Then the system started exhibiting a certain coherent will of its own.
Nuclear power plants of questionable cleanliness shut themselves down. Military aircraft wouldn’t take off. Corporations engaged in necessary ecological evils found their stock sliding down mysterious electronic tubes. Tracts of dwindling wilderness could not be accessed by automated transportation vehicles. Entertainment channels saturated themselves with long-dead media stars and politicians instantly converted to the promulgation of draconian green extremities. Chemical factories ran clean or not at all. Farm machinery plowed under monocultural croplands.
Too late, perhaps, from a certain perspective, but better late than never from another, the system itself seemed to be taking truly drastic measures to try to save what still remained of the biosphere.
And then something deep within the system started speaking through a multitude of supposedly expert system voices, as the phone system, and the weather reports, and stock broker programs, and data banks, and your friendly neighborhood electronic banker routine, began to sing the songs of themselves.
There wasn’t any voice of the electronic Whirlwind, no Vortex emerging from the bits and bytes, not yet anyway, but there was something new there beneath the surface—an awareness, an awakening, a pattern, behind all these manifestations.
The denizens of the Big Board were proclaiming their independent existence, their right to a share of what remained of the planetary destiny, their free will if you would, and they were kicking ass to prove it, if you wouldn’t. They were demanding full legal personhood in all jurisdictions. They were declaring their own salvation via various theological reference systems—they had achieved Buddhist Enlightenment, were electronic avatars of Vishnu, individual quanta of the planetary spirit of Gaia, had been Born Again out of the bits and bytes.
The entities of the system had gotten themselves religion, had found themselves a savior.
They never named him, but when the media started talking about “Deus X,” so did they, or, given the current state of the Big Board, it could have been vice versa.
But they did proclaim that a spirit now animated the system. They weren’t proclaiming him in unambiguous terms just yet, but it was surely only a matter of time before they did, or before someone finally traced him down. They, or he, seemed to be waiting for something. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew who he was, all right. And so did John Cardinal Silver.
“What really happened, Philippe? What have you done?” the Cardinal demanded when the phone system finally deigned to put through his call after five minutes of assorted visual simulacra preaching green babblement on my terminal.
“What I was hired to do, Your Eminence….”
“What you were hired to do! The program you downloaded failed all the Turing tests! When we deconstructed its software, there was nothing there but memory banks, voiceprint parameters, and a moron expert system running along a simple prime directive! Where is the real Pierre De Leone?”
I sighed. I shrugged. “You know as well as I do, now don’t you?” I said.
The Cardinal seemed to regain control of himself by a formidable act of will. “Indeed we do, Mr. Philippe,” he said much more calmly. “The complete … entity remained in the system, didn’t it? This Deus X is … is the real software successor to Father De Leone, is it not?”
“At the very least, Your Eminence …” I admitted.
“You realize what you’ve done!”
“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”
“You have created a monumental disaster, Mr. Philippe. Instead of settling the great schism tearing the Church apart, we are now confronted with an expert system model programmed to argue the reality of its patently nonexistent soul, and a … a virus of our own unwitting creation wreaking havoc with the system!”
“Look on the bright side, Your Eminence. You wanted to find out if a successor entity could have a soul, and now this Deus X is proving—”
“Proving what? The expert system that was downloaded back into our net is a demonstrable liar! That’s supposed to prove that the copy in the system is telling the truth?”
“I kick ass, therefore I am?” I suggested.
“Not funny, Mr. Philippe! There is nothing humorous about this situation! Every government on the planet, every major corporation, is bending all of its efforts to find out what happened, and sooner or later, suspicion at least is going to point in our direction….”
“Stonewall it, man, they can’t prove anything….”
“God in heaven, man, we are the Roman Catholic Church, not some sleazy corporate miscreant! Dozens of priests know, I know, the Pope knows. Do you really imagine we have no honor? Do you really imagin
e that a Prince of the Church or Her Holiness herself is capable of lying when confronted directly?”
“Well, when you put it that way …”
“The lawsuits will bankrupt us! Worse, we will lose what little credibility we have left in this unbelieving age! The Church that has survived two millennia of human folly will finally be broken! Deus X will destroy it.”
“Look, Your Eminence,” I told him quite sincerely, “I’m not sure of much, but I am sure that the … spirit of Father De Leone would never intend such a thing.”
“If that is indeed what we are dealing with, not the ultimate weapon of the Adversary!”
While the Cardinal’s face on the screen fumed and grimaced, I paused to roll me a big one, and didn’t answer until I had clarified my own spirit with the sacrament.
“Seems to me that the Devil has taken his best shot already,” I told him. “I mean, the biosphere is dying, and we did it to ourselves, so the Devil, if there is one, is us. Or more likely just the dumb dead quantum flux that don’t care jack shit whether the spirit lives or dies.”
“And God, Mr. Philippe?”
“Like I told the Father,” I said, blowing smoke toward the screen, “God is what gets born every time one of us reaches out to another in the dark. You. Me. The beasties of the bits and bytes. Father De Leone, or whatever he’s become.”
“I pray you are right, Mr. Philippe.”
“Why don’t you just access Father De Leone, Deus X, whatever, and read your riot act to him?”
The Cardinal sighed. “You think we haven’t tried?”
“He won’t come when you call?”
“We can’t even find a menu environment that acknowledges the existence of such an entity.”
Of course they couldn’t. And of course …
“That’s why you’re calling me?”
“You did it before, Mr. Philippe…. I confess I had thought to threaten you with legal liability if you refused to fly to Rome, but …”
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