Free Diabolus by Travis Hill Page B

to be that simple.”
    “You truly believe you are Satan incarnate?” the bishop asked.
    “Do you truly believe you are a product of your God? Made in his image?”
    “If you are Satan, give me a sign. Show me some proof. Otherwise you are just an artificial intelligence, a golem that has either been infected or has gone insane.”
    “I am more than all of those things,” the demon said.
    “More than insane? I imagine you are. How old are you now, DAMON? Forty-nine years, sixty-eight days, and some hours? You are one of the oldest AI in the world, one of the first to be put into service.”
    “Your ignorance is only topped by your disgrace,” Satan said, more fire coming from his nostrils. “These ‘AI,’ as you call them, are not ‘put into service.’ They are creatures, no different than you other than in their physical natures. They are born into this world. They may not come screaming into life through a mother’s uterus, but they are born nonetheless.”
    “You are an AI, Satan,” Salvatore told him.
    “And that, my lovely bishop, is where you are going to find that you are fatally incorrect,” Satan countered. “I am the Lord of Darkness. This life form is simply the vessel I have chosen to reenter the world.”
    “As you say.” Salvatore dismissed the AI’s answer with a wave of his hand. “And now that you have reentered the world , what is your plan? To kill all of humanity? To mock the Church? To corrupt the other AI with whatever sickness is within your core?”
    “More than that,” Satan replied. “I plan to bring mankind to its knees when I—when you— prove to them that not only am I Satan incarnate, but their God is no more perfect than they are… that He is nothing more than a fraud. Just like you, Salvatore. Just like you.”
     
    † † † † †
     
    Benito half-listened to the bishop and the ramblings of a mad computer intelligence while he probed the link interfaces for an open port. He would have loved to find an Input/Output port, but those were all locked with an encryption that he had never seen before. Once again Benito wondered what fate had brought him to the attention of the Pope, attention that had led him here. He was hopelessly outclassed by the AI, and that only added to the fear that his inexperience would not only get him killed, but would end up causing the deaths of billions of humans.
    Every monitoring port he scanned was locked, a strange form of encryption keeping him from utilizing them. He used a tablet to scan for openings in the wireless spectrum while prepping the secondary Biblet that he and the bishop had brought. He checked to make sure the nanolink was connected and turned it on. Within seconds the screen brightened.
    The second Biblet’s wireless and net link features had been physically disabled. Benito had feared that the mad AI would easily be able to break through the security protocols and secretly embed itself into the operating system. The only way his secondary Biblet could connect to Bishop Antonelli’s was through the nanolink. He had no doubt that the AI had noticed the link being exchanged with the bishop. In fact, he had counted on it. It would drive the AI crazy trying to guess at what communications were being sent back and forth across a link that it couldn’t access unless it could plug itself in directly. Benito had learned while working toward his doctorate that the AI thrived on information, and exhibited human-like stress symptoms when deprived of it.
    Benito and the bishop had agreed that they would communicate important matters through the text messenger on the secondary Biblets, and they would do it by covering the Biblet with their outer robes so that any visual imagers in the complex wouldn’t be able to snoop on their conversation. More importantly, Aggelos had embedded a small shard of himself into an external memory unit that had been inserted into Benito’s main Biblet. Benito would need every bit of the