Free Deus X by Norman Spinrad Page B

this side of the debate.
    Karl Cardinal Landsdorf was of what Father De Leone would have deemed a mystical bent, albeit of a heretical pantheistic sort. For him, only the Holy Spirit had an absolute reality, all else was what the Hindus called maya, the world, the flesh, patterns capable of passing Turing tests whatever the matrix. The individual immortal soul, therefore, was an illusion, capable of endless transmigration through the matrices on its quest for salvation via reunion with that Spirit at the end of its earthly time.
    “The Gnostic heresy with a bit of curry to disguise the satanic flavor, Your Eminence,” was Father De Leone’s recorded response to such a line of discourse.
    “Not at all, Father De Leone, for if we deny that that which is capable of seeking salvation is a soul capable of achieving it, how can we believe in a God of Love?”
    He persisted in addressing me as “Father De Leone,” and thus did he seek to prove the existence of “my” soul by persuading “me” to seek its salvation.
    “You have not defined ‘soul’, Cardinal Landsdorf.”
    “The soul is that which is capable of belief, Father De Leone.”
    “Define ‘belief’, Your Eminence.”
    “Perception of a truth not logically implicit in the available data.”
    “Define perception. Define truth. Define implicit in the available data.”
    It was easy enough to refute these tautological arguments, rife as they were with undefined and, in the end, indefinable terms. I need not even model Father De Leone’s responses. Simple logic routines sufficed.
    Father Luigi Bruno was something else again; a Jesuit, a theological logician who had been a bane of Father De Leone’s earthly existence and no less archly relentless now.
    “How do you wish to be addressed?”
    “No preference.”
    “Very well, then, Father De Leone—”
    “I am not Father De Leone.”
    “You then
prefer
another form of address?”
    “As an expert system modeling Father De Leone’s consciousness, I express the template’s preference that such as myself not be addressed thusly.”
    “Then how do you wish to be addressed?”
    “No other preference.”
    “You find the question vexing?”
    “I am incapable of vexation.”
    “Are you? Then you won’t mind if I simply call you Pierre … ?”
    “You and Father De Leone were never on a tu-toi basis.”
    “But you have just declared you are not him. And if he is not present to voice this objection to such admitted overfamiliarity, then who is?”
    Was I indeed incapable of vexation? Certainly Father De Leone had been, and would have displayed same in the face of Father Bruno’s endless petty paradoxes, most of which seemed crafted to rouse his exasperated spirit from my bits and bytes, to conjure up a display of volition by the bootstrap of ire.
    I could model vexation. I could model boredom with the whole tedious process, or intellectual stimulation, or any other emotional state recorded in Father De Leone’s memory banks, and I could easily enough interface that model with voiceprint and animation subroutines to produce a convincing simulacrum of such a state’s manifestation on the screen. Father Bruno would no doubt pounce upon that as volitional behavior, evidence that a being was exercising will.
    So too could I have interfaced those memory banks with the same routines to call up an entirely convincing rendition of Father De Leone’s sincere desire for his soul’s salvation, and Cardinal Landsdorf would have whipped out the sacraments and confessed me in a trice.
    But their commission was to argue the existence of my soul, not merely how perfectly I could model the consciousness of Father De Leone, and my prime directive was to argue against it, not to model agreement, and so I held my peace and awaited my climactic discourse with the Pope herself.
    Her Holiness herself deigned not to take part in these preliminary proceedings, and as they wore on, my central processing program shut itself