I don’t usually have to remind myself that the Lord said it is a blessing to serve, but right now I’m mentally running it through my head like a mantra. This guy could make a career out of rubbing me the wrong way.
“Senator, as far as I’m concerned, what happens in your house is your business. I don’t talk out of school about this stuff. Most of the folks I talk with wouldn’t give a shit what you do, anyway. A promise of discretion from my organization, though? No. The Church certainly doesn’t answer to the likes of you. If you’re not okay with that, I’ll see myself out. Otherwise, let’s get started.”
“Blue jeans and cowboy boots? You don’t really fit my image of a priest, much less an exorcist.”
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Senator. A priest is as much a human being as anyone else. Everyone sins. And if you’d rather deal with a priest wearing a cassock and biretta, good fucking luck. The pretty boys don’t do the kind of ditchwork I do. Like I said, if you’re not okay with this, just let me know. I can up-sticks and leave.”
He sits there for several moments like it’s some agonizing decision, then nods. “Okay. As I’m sure you’ve been told, I own a Sempai Q. I use him—it—as a butler, and it has performed admirably in that capacity. Up until a week ago.”
“And what happened then?”
“On Monday, the warranty ran out, and almost immediately, the unit began to malfunction.”
“How was it malfunctioning?”
“First it was just small things, like the voice synth unit skipping and grumbling whenever instructed to perform any small task. From the start it’s been a butler bot. I opted to keep its responses cordial and businesslike, so the vulgarity was an indicator. When he—it, I mean, told me to fuck off when I sent it to fetch me orange juice, I thought there had to be something seriously wrong. Now it’s gotten to the point that it’s vandalizing the house, gouging these five-pointed stars into the hardwood flooring and broadcasting loud, monotonous chants that sound like Latin. I knew I needed to call someone, so I guess you’re it.”
His tone sounds like he might be leaving out something important. “Uh-huh. Well, not to sound callous, Senator, but you’re not exactly clipping coupons to get by these days. Why don’t you just toss the damned Sempai out and get a new one?”
“Well, the thing is…it’s a Sempai Q, the new one. Fully programmable, right down to the personality.”
“Yeah?”
He pauses, looking down at his hands. “Before my father died, he purchased a full neural download.” The embarrassment in his voice makes the air in the small room almost sticky. “I uploaded him into the Sempai Q.”
“Wait, let me get this straight. You’re saying you uploaded your deceased father’s personality into your robot butler? Your dead father is your servant?”
Holy shit. This guy has some unresolved issues, doesn’t he?
“Yes,” he sighs. “It’s the only copy, and I’d like to recover it, if possible.”
What for? So you can upload it into a homosexual pleasure doll next? I can’t say that, though.
“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.”
I could nearly promise it, especially with the Witchsword Crucifix, but I was hedging. Unlike human possession, where the goal is the destruction of a person’s faith, most instances of demon possession in bots are only annoying. The bot gets hung up in a loop, usually right after maxing the warranty, and that’s the crack the demon uses to slide in. Once the demon gains a foothold, it’s just like any other viral infection. It spreads its influence through all the processors. Idle motherboards are the devil’s workshop, right?
Networked appliances that become possessed are the most difficult ones to cleanse. The cleansing is viral, just like the possession, so the exorcism subroutines are chasing down the same paths as the possession. If your toaster starts acting flaky and burning the face of Aleister Crowley or Anton LeVay into your toast, it won’t be long before your television shows the tortures of Hell and your voicemail fills up with hymns to Beelzebub and Hastur. The cleansing coming after that is sometimes a lost cause.
Luckily, the silicon-to-soul barrier is still completely intact. If that were to change, viral demonic possession could jump from bots to people, and all hell would literally break loose. Possession as a virus that goes from tech to people? End Times, indeed. Bots and humans are wired differently, though, so if demons are going to possess people, they’ve still got to do it the old-fashioned way.
“Let me show you. It’s upstairs, in one of the bedrooms.” He steps to the desk and clicks a button. The screen saver vanishes and the picture onscreen resolves into a well-lit bedroom. A huge four-poster stands in one corner, beside a wardrobe and a night table. On the opposite side of the room, a daybed is nestled into the cove of a bay window. In the middle of the room, a brushed steel robot spins on its wheels, drawing a geometrically perfect pentagram in the floor.
“I’ve got the camera in that room trained on it.” The bot stops spinning and turns its video lenses toward the camera. The audio is so crisp I hear the servos turning in the bot’s neck.
The Sempai series is one of the few high-end bots that don’t cling to anthropomorphism. Given the fact that it can have a full human personality uploaded into it, that’s probably for the best. The one concession to humanity is a simface. The unit’s video inputs are a pair of cameras (eyes) above a slitted vent (nose), which is centered over a rectangle opening in the epoxy head, from which protrude a weird animatronic pair of polyvinyl lips whose movements are synchronized with the voice synth module. Apparently, once upon a time the developers decided it was okay for the bot to resemble a mobile fireplug as long as it had a semblance of a face to facilitate interactions with the customer. Fucking creepy if you ask me.
That “face” looks up into the camera and the rubber lips grin. It senses we’re watching it.
A gravelly old man’s voice struggles from the speakers as the lips move.
“Come on up, bitch.”
The Senator is standing over me with a See? I told you! expression on his face. I ignore it.
“Have you got remote access to it from here?”
As he pulls down the proper menus, I get my laptop out of my briefcase and power it up, then I hook the laptop’s output cables to the Senator’s computer.
First I scan the local network, everything in the house that’s on the network. Looks decent, the only interlopers being auto-updaters and cookies.
“The house is clean,” I tell the Senator. “I’ll install a blessing anyway, as a sort of preventative measure.”
The bot, however, is another matter. The first salvo I send into the bot’s brain is the Our Father trojan, followed closely by the self-replicating Glory Be macro I force feed into the Sempai Q’s BIOS. I look up at the screen to see if there is any immediate effect.
The current pentagram the bot was burning into the floor is all jacked up now. It looks almost like a kid’s drawing of a shining sun, a circle with wavy rays coming out of it.
That’s a good sign.
The neck turns again toward the camera, but it stutters as it moves, and the animatronic motion of the simulated smile is all skips and freezes. A thread of light gray smoke creeps out of the vent nose of the bot.
I turn back to the laptop and fire off one more logic rocket. This one is a worm that the unit should send back to the origin point of the possession, an electronic version of a dash of holy water and “The power of Christ compels you!” Then I cut its connection with the house network.
Onscreen, the bot spins. It goes faster and faster, until it upends itself with a resounding crash I hear through the timbers of the house as well as through the speakers. The remote camera fizzles, and the screen goes blank.
I unhook the laptop and stow it, ignoring the Senator’s anxious questions.
“Just tell me which room,” I say. “You’re staying here in case it’s dangerous in there.”
“Top of the st
airs, last door on the left.”
I take the briefcase back into the hallway and walk up the stairs. I stop at the last door on the left, as directed. I mumble a quick Apostles’ Creed, then open the door.
The bot is lying on its side, its waxy-looking mouth twitching like a Parkinson’s patient. Smoke drizzles out the nostril-like vents.
I walk around it without touching it, looking for the input panel. I find it, and see that it’s next to the twin cameras that count as eyes in its alien face. When I actually touch it, the bot reacts. It speaks in that dry, old man’s voice. Maybe that’s the voice of the Senator’s father.
“Bless me Father, for I have sinnnnnnnnnned.”
“Uh huh,” I grunt, trying to pry up the edge of the panel with a fingernail. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s been…” it begins, then cackles, “holy shit, it’s been a long fucking time since my last confession, Padre! And I’ve got to tell you, you worthless sack of shit, that I’ve done them all. Every sin you can think of, and more besides. So don’t FUCK with me, preacher-man.”
“You can’t have been doing too well, whatever your name is. You did get demoted to bot possession.”
“Not a demotion!” it screams shrilly. Finally I pull a flat-bladed screwdriver from my briefcase and work it under the edge of the input panel cover. “I could destroy you with a thought!” it shrieks at me.
“You keep thinking that, worm. My Boss sees things a little differently.”
“Your Boss has abandoned you! Just like He always does! Just like He did to His own Son! You’re just too blind to see it.”
I ignore the words, knowing that the demon is only saying them to slow me down. My views and beliefs are irrelevant. It’s a mechanical problem with a mechanical fix, and in this case, faith is a tool. I twist the screwdriver and the panel pops open. Wire microfilaments that had been holding the panel down retract into the hull of the unit like fleeing worms. Cute.
“Save it, hellbaby, before I send you into a herd of suicidal pigs.”
It pauses for a second, then whispers, “You would put yourself on the same level as Him? Tsk, tsk. Pride, preacher-man. At this rate, I’ll see you soon anyway. You’re prideful, belligerent, and uncharitable. You’ve got too much hubris, and no faith. You’re only going through the motions, padre.”
“You keep thinking that, Screwtape. What is your name anyway?”
“Oh, no,” it hisses, “you’re not getting me that easily, preach.”
I’m pulling out the laptop again, so I can plug directly into the bot. After blowing the network connection, the rest of the cleansing can’t be remoted.
“Oh, right, I should’ve known. A bot demon probably isn’t even important enough to have a name.”
“You dare mock me?” it howls, the plastic mouth stretching. “I am a Prince of Hell!”
“Yeah. Sure. A Prince of Hell. Tell me another.”
“I AM! I’m—” the mouth closes with a rubbery slap, purses momentarily, then stretches into a smile. “Oooh, preacher-man. Good one. You almost got me. I almost said my name.”
I don’t believe him for a second, but whatever. This is not exactly my first day on the job. By this time I’ve heard all their standard lines of bullshit. The laptop is up, and I plug the micro-USB cable into the back of it. The other end of the cable is for the bot.
I plug it in, and electricity jolts into my body.
It’s like an alligator is inside my chest, doing a death roll with my heart in its jaws, banging against the insides of my ribcage. I can’t pull away. Voltage zips through every synapse between my fingertips and my spine, melting them together into fiery chains. I see the microfilament wires from the panel, their ends sticking into my flesh like cactus thorns, tiny dots of blood all over my hands.
The possessed bot cranks up the amps, and I can’t even open my mouth to pray. All I can do is close my eyes and try not to bite through my tongue between screams.
As suddenly as it began, it stops. The bot shuts off the juice and sends my electrocuted body flying across the room, fingers numb and burnt, pulse racing like a televangelist in a whorehouse.
I’m lying in a crumpled heap, my face to the floor. The only thing I can hear is the monotonous, almost tubercular laugh of the possessed bot. Dumbass. I should have seen that coming.
“You little shit,” I groan as I get to my feet. My knees don’t cooperate at first.
The bot is still lying on its side, its animatronic smile sideways.
“Oh, no. You’re the little shit, padre. You still want to know my name?”
I look down at the laptop. It’s fried. Totally fucked. I don’t give a shit what this demon’s name is. I’m fed up, I’m hurt, and my tech’s nothing but scrap now. It’s time to just end this, and to hell with the uploaded personality.
One thing about a large iron crucifix. As blunt objects go, it does assloads of damage.
“I told you I’m a Prince of Hell. I’m Marbas, you pustulent bag of offal.”
Wait. Marbas? That can’t be true. According to the grimoires, Marbas is the evil genius of tech, communicable disease, and can transform humans into other things. But that’s impossible. A Prince of Hell would never sink to possessing a bot, and a Prince of Hell would never give someone like me his name. Unless.
Unless he has nothing to fear.
Realization flashes in my mind.
The Sempai Q…the uploaded personality…
Marbas…the demon of tech, disease, and transformation…viral disease…
Tech and disease…the uploaded personality would be the perfect bridge…
The silicon-to-soul barrier.
Fallen.
Ohshitohshitohshit, I open the flap of the briefcase, looking for the Witchsword Crucifix. When I finally uncover it, it’s surrounded by a corona of horrible blazing blue-white light, and the pain, coursing down into my bones, is profound. I shriek, kicking the briefcase into the corner.
“That’s right, padre,” the bot says. “You’re fucked.”
“Nooo!” I look at my burned hand, and beneath the skin and fingernails, I see the chrome microfilaments. It’s inside me. I turn my hand over, and the shiny ends of the microfilaments peek from beneath the edges of my fingernails.
It’s not that I’m possessed. I’m infected. The bot possession spawned.
I’m infected with the demon.
“But think about it this way,” the bot says cheerfully. “You are the first of them all, the seed of the Apocalypse.”
Before I can scream again, the virus takes hold.
When I leave the Senator’s home, he’s crumpled on the floor in his doorway. He’ll get up. And when he gets up? He’s infected, too.
I’m driving back to Baltimore now. The Inner Harbor is a busy place in spring, lots of tourists. I wonder how they’ll feel about being touched by a stranger? And, I expect when the former Senator gets up, he’ll feel compelled to to go and press the flesh with some of his old cronies on the hill. The math is easy.
The infection will spread.
Dev Jarrett is a writer, a father, a husband, and a soldier in the US Army. He and his family have been stationed all over the world, but no matter where he goes, he’s always working on the next story. His first novel, Loveless, will be published by Blood Bound Books in summer 2013, followed by Dolly in fall 2013, by Bad Moon Books.
Arrival
Christopher Nadeau
Don’t ask me how I got out because I don’t remember.
I remember when Slim blew himself up to take as many of those mutated freaks out as possible. Now there was a guy who believed in the cause. I can’t stop picturing him standing there smiling one moment and exploding into a hail of blood, bone and tissue the next.
It was the goddam porcupine-man. That deformed fuck with the spikes coming out of his skin spinning like a top, ripping my fellow hunters to shreds like they were wheat and he was a reaper. I was the only one far enough away to hit the deck and roll
away. We were in a church; there wasn’t a lot of room to move. Why we chose that location for an offensive never made sense to me, but I wasn’t the Big Man in Charge, just another grunt.
I wandered the streets for weeks after the explosion, head full of fuzzy flashbacks that made little sense, unsure of my own name. I ate from garbage cans and slept in a junkyard. People barely noticed me and I started liking it that way. What right did I have to be noticed when I’d failed to purge the world of evil? Better I should fade away into despair and irrelevance.
God had other plans for me.
He came to me in a dream as a small Asian child, a boy, surrounded in a white glow. When he spoke, his mouth hardly moved and the words seemed to come from the air.
“You have to return, Norman,” he said. “The fight isn’t over.”
I laughed, surprised at the sound; I hadn’t heard myself laugh for a long time. “We lost. We were always gonna lose.”
“Good men died in that church because they didn’t believe that. Who are you to ignore their sacrifices?”
I gazed about the shifting dreamscape and sighed. “I’m the coward that ran. Nice to meet you.”
He smiled at me, a seemingly simple gesture that filled me with warmth and the beginnings of a renewed sense of purpose. My heart beat fast and hard, as if trying to erupt from my chest and begin anew with or without me. That smile, that slightly upturned mouth, was my wake-up call.
“I’m so sorry.” I wiped the tears from my cheeks.
“I forgive you,” God said. “By my Grace will you continue your crusade.”
“Yes,” I heard myself say. “Yes, I will.”
I needed weapons and intelligence. The former was relatively simple to come by, but the latter posed a unique problem.
Our leader had always kept his contacts to himself but I remembered someone once mentioning a guy named Lev Applebaum. Lev had owned the Choose Your Own Adventure shop for as long as I’d been alive, weathering the big distribution nightmares of the Nineties and the reduced readership nightmare of the following decades.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 17
