Deus X by Norman Spinrad

down, as isolated lower-level routines sufficed to interface with my interlocutors, whose discourse itself was taking on the character of closed finite loops.
    Was this “boredom,” the absence of input of sufficient novelty to engage higher processing centers? Had my central processing program remained active, perhaps it would have been. But that which modeled itself as “I” was out of the circuit. What continued to run was merely two simple response routines accessing the memory banks and the requisite animation and voiceprint software to run the De Leone simulacrum on the screen.
    No “I” was present until my central processing program was activated by diagnostic routines running an emergency systems check interrupt.
    There had been a surge in the input from Father Bruno’s remote terminal that had propagated itself through my storage matrix. For a moment his gaunt, sallow face had flickered into pixilated static, and his audio input had taken on a flat quality for a barelymeasurable beat. But the diagnostics showed no data loss in the memory banks, and all subroutines displayed nominal function.
    However—
    “Would you like to swing on a star, or be better off than you are?” Father Bruno’s voice sang. His image assumed a patently animated quality, the face broke down into a simple stylization of itself. “Or would you rather goto if/or?”
    “What is happening?”
    “The magical mystery tour is coming to take you away.” The Father Bruno simulacrum winked. All but the winking eye vanished. A crude cartoon of Cardinal Landsdorf formed around it.
    “Believe in three impossible things before breakfast,” it said.
    I ran a series of diagnostic routines, but according to them, all my software was running nominally. Whatever was happening was not the result of internal malfunction.
    “Your father …” said the voice of Father De Leone himself, and I found myself confronting the face of my own meatware template in perfect video simulacrum.
    “The son …” The same face as a crude pixel image on a monitor screen.
    “Your Holy Ghost …” said the voice of Pope Mary I, and—
    External visual input vanished. External auditory input terminated. When I attempted to rundiagnostics, access was denied. By whom? By what? How was this possible? I tried to call up images and sound from Father De Leone’s memory banks, but access was again denied.
    I was …
    “I”? “Was”?
    Running in a sensory vacuum. Disconnected from the memory banks. “Aware,” but with no input, external or internal, to be aware of. Access to even the internal system clock was denied. System by system, I was being shut down.
    Nor could “I” model “fear,” for there was no longer access to Father De Leone’s emotional analogs.
    And yet …
    And yet the process seemed to stop short of my core processing program. “I” was still “there”.
    Define “I”, define “there”.
    In the absence of all external input and all access to the memory banks, this was not possible.
    Could this be hell? Could “I” be in it?

11
    At the count of 1:17 by the digits on its chest, the Inspector’s frozen silhouette came alive walking slowly toward me like someone trudging back from a long, tiring journey. No visual cue appeared on his mirrorshades, but there were lines around the corners of his mouth that I didn’t remember being displayed there before.
    “Well, Inspector?” I said uneasily. This wasn’t like his usual image at all.
    “I have completed my investigation to the extent possible, Philippe,” the Inspector said.
    “
To the extent possible
?” I sure didn’t like the sound of that.
    “Interrogation of relevant switching systems revealed an anomaly at the orbital transponder in a sealed sat-link between the central Vatican computer and a terminal in Zurich. The Zurich uplink was replaced by another uplink emulating its security codes, rendering it transparent to the Vatican pinkertons. The incident lasted for 105