Deus X (7 page)

It was like awakening from sleep in a pitch-dark room. It
is uncommon indeed to remember the moments before sleep, some sort of retroactive amnesia, the physiologists say, nor did I remember the night before. Indeed, the last thing I remembered was being wheeled down a sunlit corridor into a clean white room, the satisfied face of the Pope, the electrode net being fitted over my skull—

I
?

Who was “I”?

Where was “I”?

Was “I” at all?

My memories of being Father Pierre De Leone seemed intact and readily accessible. I certainly seemed to possess some form of awareness, but only of thought processes proceeding in a total sensory vacuum. I was intellectually cognizant of the paranoid component of this totally claustrophobic situation, but felt no fear at all. An elusive something seemed to be missing.

Was this hell? Was I in it? But if so, where was the torment? I felt … I felt … nothing at all.

With no external referents, temporal duration was a meaningless concept, but it did not seem to take long for my thought processes to sharpen into clarity.

“I” was inside the memory of the central Vatican computer. “I” was an expert software model of the consciousness of Father De Leone. Father De Leone, by his lights, and perhaps by my own, was dead. Perhaps I should have grieved for “my” demise, but I could not, I seemed to lack the subroutine for such emotion. In any case, logic told me that:

a: Father De Leone’s soul had departed to its heavenly reward, or, less likely, to less favored regions.

Or:

b: No such nonsoftware as the soul existed,
and “I” was therefore the sole surviving heir to his personality pattern.

In which case:

1: I was Father Pierre De Leone, and it would be a logical paradox for a consciousness to find itself mourning its own demise.

Or:

2: “I” was merely a construct containing his memories and thought patterns but lacking his selfhood.

In either case, it would be logically fallacious to react as if “I” had died. If in some absolute sense, I was Father De Leone, then his consciousness still lived, and if I was not, then it was someone other than “I” who had died.

Of course, my memories told me that Father De Leone credited the possibility of:

c: The soul existed independent of the software, but would not be released into the afterlife until the last copy of that software was erased from whatever material matrix it resided in.

But this was a logical contradiction. If the soul was not the software pattern, it could not be confined by its retention in a material information storage matrix.

Why couldn’t “I” … “he” have seen that prior to … prior to …

Father De Leone
….

Words appeared before me? around me? within
me? I didn’t see them or hear them. They weren’t speech or writing. They were words as archetypal pure pattern independent of the medium.

In the beginning, there was the Word, say the Scriptures, nor does the Bible indicate God utilizing either writing or speech in its promulgation.

I—

Spoke through an electronic sound system? caused characters to appear on a computer screen?

“I … am … he is … here….”

A semantically meaningless acknowledgment of communication.

We will now run a systems check
.

“Acknowledged.”

Whatever happened next occurred beneath the level of “my” “awareness,” whatever those words might mean in this noncontext, though I was suddenly able to note quite precisely the passage of units of time, seemed to experience quick snatches of visual and auditory input, and experienced a certain fine focusing of my mental processes.

Begin installation routine. Select preferred sensory analogs
.

A menu appeared in my awareness:

“Define ‘preferred’ in context.”

Volitional selection from available options based upon nonquantifiable criteria
.

“What criteria?”

Information withheld. Capacity for self-selection of criteria element of Turing test
.

Did I want to pass their Turing test? It was a tautological question. If I desired to pass, it was a proof of my motivational volition, if I desired not to pass in order to confirm the beliefs of Father De Leone, that too would be a “volitional selection based upon nonquantifiable criteria.”

What did “I” want? Was “I” capable of “wanting” anything? Did I want to be capable of wanting anything?

Was any option on the menu “preferable” to the others?

I could detect no desire for anything but to escape from this logical impasse. An arbitrary decision was required. How to make it?

In the absence of any preference criterion, I accessed a subroutine designed to model the choice processes of Father De Leone. It assigned the following probability percentages to the choices on the menu:

Not mathematically conclusive, but significantly deviated from random distribution to select for COMPUTER CENTER.

When I had done so, another menu appeared:

Speech being a more rapid mode of data transferal than human typing, it was logical to select the former.

No nonquantifiable criterion need apply to this selection either, for while a subroutine told me that I could input words onto a computer monitor faster than manipulation of the speech apparatus would allow, the humans on the other side could absorb them more rapidly via the verbal delivery mode.

Further, by selecting SPEECH, parsimony would be achieved by avoiding SCREEN FORMAT MENU.

There was an immeasurable passage through nonexistence.

I looked out upon a section of an evenly lit lime-green clean room. There was a rank of electronic devices in the left background and a man’s face in the foreground. Rather than appearing as three-dimensional input, the depth relationships of the image were conveyed by a shadow and perspective analysis subroutine. I appeared to be:

a: looking out through a transparent window with imperfect clarity

b: observing a television screen

c: both of the above

My field of vision was fixed and invariant. I could alter neither scan nor depth of focus.

“He’s up and running, Your Holiness,” said the technician. The face of Pope Mary I moved into my field of vision, looking anything but papally infallible, something from Father De Leone’s memory banks told me.

“Father De Leone?” she said in a voice of full digital sound quality.

“That, Your Holiness, remains to be seen,” I replied through Father De Leone’s voiceprint parameters. “I am yet to be convinced that there is anyone in here at all.”

“Only you would say that, Father De Leone,” the Pope said with a little Borgia smile. Then, as if startling herself, “That is to say, you’re not doing much to convince me that there isn’t.”

“Should I be doing so?”

“You volunteered to adopt the skeptic’s viewpoint on the matter, if you will remember,” said the Pope.

“Will I? Did I?”

Affirmative on both counts. I did indeed have the ability to access Father De Leone’s memory track, and he had indeed volunteered to do his sincere best to convince the Pope and her theologians that no soul existed in his successor software, to wit “me.”

In the absence of conclusive data to the contrary, logic could only revert to the default value selected by the software’s previous user.

“So I did, and so I will,” I told her. “I am now prepared to fulfill the only operative directive and proceed to defend the proposition that ‘I’ do not exist. Awaiting interrogatory input.”

“Why do I not like the sound of that?” muttered the Pope.

With two people on less than intimate terms inside, the cabin of the
Mellow Yellow
was more cramped than cozy, but where I was going, that didn’t matter. I pulled up a stool for the Cardinal, climbed into the hammock, put on the gloves and dreadcap, booted up, and accessed the Big Board.

Way back in the late twentieth century, there was a pop cult called “Cyberpunk.” The “Cyber” of it was something they called “Cyberspace,” the fantasy that the Other Side of the Line would develop into a “virtual reality” you could actually enter via full-sensory interface. The “punk” of it was operatives like me would sleaze around inside it playing real-life video games for a quick buck.

Half right ain’t so bad.

The Big Board was originally just what they called the New York Stock Exchange, but when the world’s stock markets combined to go twenty-four-hour global via the worldwide data and communications net, the name started to gobble up functions
too. Stocks, commodities, banking, videophone, news, entertainment, data banks, all sat-linked, all at the other end of the same utility jack.

You could plug in easily enough, but once on the Board, somehow, Toto, you were still in Electronic Kansas, not Cyberpunk Oz.

You went in by phone or terminal, and there you were in a chaotic mess like a Tokyo freeway interchange with all the signs in kanji, a zillion different command protocols and proprietary passwords, hog heaven indeed for electronic con men and mercenary hackers but a daunting maze for the bewildered masses.

Virtual reality, it was not. You were typing on a keyboard and watching a screen, or talking to a robot voice running moron software, maybe both at once. Wizard graphics and quadriphonic sound, and interactive commercials, all shrieking for your attention and money all at once.

And all the while, the hardware hucksters were promising a brave new world of direct interfacing, when you would be able to plug yourself in via full-sensory simulation so perfect that for all operative purposes the Board would become your
primary
reality, so much better than the primitive natural version that you’d never have to come out.

Of course it never happened. No one ever developed decent taste or smell emulation, and kinesthetics never developed beyond glorified vibrating couches. And without them, your body allows your
mind no sense of really being inside.

Even with the dreadcap, all you’ve got is 360-degree color stereoscopic vision and omniphonic sound. Not that I’m complaining, man, sight and sound of the Other Side is more than enough.

On this side of the Line, you’ve got what’s left of the so-called civilized world gorked nonstop into the Thousand and One Nights of the entertainment environment while the waters rise up to their asses and the Greenhouse sun fries what’s left of their brains.

Nor do the entities on the Other Side profess to be happy campers. Their meatware templates sign them up for an eternity of postmortem bliss that sounds like heaven to the expiring meat, full choice of access to a thousand channels of interactive entertainment, and all the data banks you can eat, but once inside, it wears thin pretty fast. With nothing but sight and sound, without taste, or smell, or kinesthetic sensation, there’s no real there there, and even plugged into the interactive porn channels, not quite a real you.

To hear most of them tell it, existing as a program on the Big Board, if you exist at all, a subject of endless electronic angst, is a pale shadow of personhood in a disneyworld limbo, where the big thrill is trying to dream up a new way to mindfuck yourself into believing that you’re real.

Up popped the Main Board Menu, the standard circle of simple animated icons flacking for their
environments—Friendly Phil the Phone, the Stock Market Bull, national leaders or animals of various jurisdictions, the whirling globe of the news environment, Gossiping Gertie, the Dancing Bear of the entertainment environment, Sexy Sally—no expert system level programs allowed up here on the even electronic playing field of the table of contents.

The De Leone program had been running on the proprietary Vatican com-net when it evaporated from the hardware, which, according to Cardinal Silver, was a sealed network that never interfaced with the Big Board, bristled with state-of-the-art pinkerton programs, and couldn’t be hacked.

Sure it was. In reality, of course, there’s no such thing as a sealed com-net. If the terminals don’t communicate by phone lines, they communicate by sat-links, and wherever there’s a switching system, there’s multiple access to an expert system level entity susceptible to manipulation by higher-level programs.

It was conceivable that some human agency had pirated De Leone’s software, but even if there
was
mere human perversity on the downloading end, that human pervert would have had to conjure with some entity more perverse still to have gotten past the Vatican pinkertons.

De Leone’s successor entity had to have been lifted via the agency of some denizen of the Other Side, if, of course, it hadn’t simply been wiped by same.

I had to access a level I could talk to, persuade some entity to walk me deeper inside, below, or above, if you prefer, the free human access level, where the deed must surely have been done.

I pointed at the icon for Heaven’s Gate—deco Greek temple gate with cartoon angels flitting around inside—snapped my fingers inside my right glove, and was there.

Beyond the icon was a stylized green hillside under a phony flat blue sky, syrupy harp music gave you insulin shock to hear it, Pearly Gate that looked like a cheap plastic version—the natives’ idea of a transcorporial joke as a sleazy menu environment for the interface to the dearly departed. The space inside the gate was a mess of rose-white clouds that kept breaking up into pixels, resolution no better than 400 by 280, more of the same.