Diabolus by Travis Hill Page B

volume, the anger evident in his face as well as his words.
    “I’m intrigued by them more than ever,” Benito said.
    “How do you mean?”
    “They truly are a life form, I am a firm believer in that, and not just because I’ve got a diploma that says I understand them. That’s how I know their lives, even though their physical forms are artificial, are real. Because I don’t understand them at all,” Benito said, shaking his head. “They truly are sentient, and I will admit it is frightening in some ways that we’ve created life forms that have a genius IQ from the day they are created, and within three years they have all of human history, art, music, everything we’ve ever created and then wrote about, documented with pictures, video, or holo, every song we’ve recorded on paper or to an audio format, all of us in their memory to reference and cross-reference endlessly, finding patterns, finding flaws, maybe even finding out why we truly are the way we are.”
    He was edging into heretical territory, but the bishop had commanded him to hold nothing back. Salvatore needed the priest for his technical skills as well as his fresh-from-seminary scriptural help. Benito was also the new breed of Catholic. Within another generation, the priest’s peers would be the slight majority in the Church, and before another decade was out, they’d be in the super-majority. The fact that Pope Augustus I was the first official to receive a neural interface implant only made this all the more clear. That act alone had almost refilled the ranks of the faithful who had fled the church after the scandal, not an easy thing to do after Salvatore’s disgrace.
    The young were flocking to the Church again now that the restrictions on technology had been lifted. Humans yearned to find answers to questions that technology either still couldn’t, or never would be able to answer. Why am I here? w as just one of the many puzzles of existence the Church was striving to find answers to. The Church was moving on from the stodgy, fear-based, pulpit-centric doctrines of the last two thousand years. With the ease of connecting to the members of their flock, priests could use technology to connect on both a one-to-one as well as a community level.
    With the help of Aggelos, all of those connections could be used to collect research data, which the Church could then use to grow and evolve along with not only the generational followers, but with technology as well. Salvatore realized with distaste that he was being that old man again, disliking, even fearing change.
    “It doesn’t bother you that they have all of that access to the information of their creators? Imagine what we would be like if instead of the Bible, we had a multi-volume instruction manual that covered every aspect of God,” the bishop said.
    “If we had a multi-volume instruction manual on every aspect of God, and then found out He was slower, less intelligent than us, full of flaws like hatred, violence, and the ability to lie… I don’t think I would be very respectful of God,” the priest replied.
    “Would we kill God, Benito?” Salvatore asked. “Would we, knowing how to kill Him with the insight and instruction from our volumes of manuals, launch everything we could at Him, to strike Him down?”
    “That is a very dark thought, Your Excellency,” the priest replied, enjoying the scowl that the bishop gave him at the formal title. “My rebuttal question would be: ‘Do we destroy Him, or work with Him to help Him learn about and correct His own flaws, thereby making us learn about ourselves and our flaws, and correct them as well?’”
    “Humans? Correcting God Almighty?” Salvatore asked, incredulous at the priest’s definite plunge into heresy.
    “Again, Salvatore, we are assuming we have a detailed manual that tells us everything about Him, and we’ve found Him to be more flawed that we are. This is how I view what the AI are debating about us, about