Deus X (12 page)

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.

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.

“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?

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
?

“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 own 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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.