Deus X (11 page)

“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 …

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.”

“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.