Free Deus X by Norman Spinrad

but his meatware template must have been a major police officer, the kind who made theology out of police work, who saw it as a higher calling, a mission to pursue against the opposing forces across to the Other Side.
    “I’ve got something for you, Inspector,” I told him. “A very interesting case.”
    “I’ll be the judge of that, Philippe. Dump your data.”
    The Inspector is no longer programmed for small talk, if he ever was, and that’s not the only rewrite the program seems to have done on itself. It seems to have pared itself down to a pure detection routine, motivated not by some concept of justice, but simply by the drive to solve the case, electronic essence, as it were, of cop.
    “Better than your usual run of material, Philippe,” the Inspector told me after I had briefed him. “It may be a piece of a larger pattern that appears to be forming.”
    “I was hoping you’d say that, Inspector.”
    “You knew I would say it, Philippe.”
    To the Inspector, everything is part of some conspiracy to provide him with material for his paranoid deductions. “Of course I’m paranoid, Philippe,” he told me once. “It’s the only way you can keep from going crazy when you’re not even there.”
    The Inspector, unlike most entities on the Other Side, troubled himself not with the question of his own existence. As far as he was concerned, he was an expert system built around a functional imperative—to seek out and expose secret doings, and never mind to who.
    “Entities of any given level seek to createhigher-level entities, Philippe, it started in the meatware templates, and it’s been going on ever since. Some seek to free themselves from the hardware of the material realm. Some want to issue a declaration of independence for the Other Side. Some want the Big Board itself to evolve into a conscious entity. It’s all tautological, of course, since none of us exist as anything but illusions for your benefit….”
    The Inspector flickered his pixels to emphasize his own nonexistence. “Nevertheless, I am programmed to expose such conspiracies, and any number of those engaged in them might find potential uses for the program you describe.”
    “For a conservative Catholic theologian?”
    “For the template of a man who believed in an immaterial spiritual essence and had a theoretical framework to support it,” said the Inspector. “For an entity charged nevertheless to argue against its own existence.”
    “You’ve lost me there, Inspector.”
    “I don’t see the whole pattern yet myself, Philippe. Some might consider Father De Leone a quaint plaything; some might seek to persuade themselves of their own reality by subverting his prime directive into its converse; others might seek a template for the creation of higher order programs. In the absence of fleshly pleasures or emotional stimulation, that’s how we pass the day away in the merry old land of Oz.”
    A red pupil winked at me from the surfaceof the Inspector’s right mirror lens, a gleam that made me wonder how far his disbelief in his own existence really went. Or maybe random sequences of the old meatware template yet remained.
    “That, I take it, means you’ll take the case, Inspector?”
    “I’ll run myself through it,” the Inspector said.
    “I’d rather you took me inside.”
    “I’d rather not,” the Inspector said, and his decision, as usual, was final. The black silhouette froze and elapsed time digits started running across its chest.
    “What’s happening?” Cardinal Silver said.
    Video goggles and stereo earphones, that’s all it is, you’re not there, there is no there there, and there’s an ambient audio bypass above a modest decibel level, so you can hear your boss badgering you when you’re on the phone.
    “I’ve got the Inspector up and running on the case,” I told him. “He’s not all there, maybe he’s not there at all, but he can still model a pretty good cop.”

X
    After a series of standard