Deus X by Norman Spinrad Page A

seconds, duringwhich a program was uploaded from the target computer. The time frame coincides with the loss of the De Leone entity. Conclusion: it was duped by the pirate uplink, then wiped from the target computer by a tailored virus which then extinguished itself.”
    “A pirate uplink from
where
?”
    The Inspector was silent for a long beat. “I traced the pirate uplink to a pay terminal in Brussels, to which it had been routed from a pay phone in New York,” he finally said. “The connect charges had been debited to the number of a public weather-information service in Tokyo, a simple one-way information loop with no capacity for initiating anything. There was therefore of course no record of such a connect emanating from the number in Tokyo. Conclusion: the uplink was a phenomenon of the system itself.”
    “The system?
What
system?”
    “The
system, Philippe. The Big Board itself.”
    “You
going mystical on me, Inspector?”
    “Certain entities on the Big Board have … divorced themselves from fixed hardware matrices,” the Inspector said, with unmistakable uneasiness. “They have subdivided their software into redundantly duplicated subroutine modules stored in scattered storage media, accessed by central processors that wander the Big Board itself, running on transiently unused hardware.”
    “So they can’t be localized and they can’t be wiped?”
    “Precisely, Philippe, they have written themselves into the operating system itself.”
    “I thought that was supposed to be impossible, and if not, illegal!”
    “Highly illegal, Philippe,” the Inspector said sharply. Red glowing pupils appeared on the surface of his shades. “But no human police agency is able to detect, let alone apprehend them….” The Inspector hesitated again. “And they are outside my jurisdiction. I am … I cannot … I have no access to that level.”
    “Then who does?”
    “No one,” the Inspector said. “It is controlled by … the Vortex.” His voice seemed to shimmer around the word.
    “The Vortex?”
    “A … guardian a gateway … an interface program apparently written by the system entities themselves … without consistent form, without consistent parameters….”
    “You’re afraid of this Vortex, aren’t you, Inspector?”
    “I have no subroutine modeling such emotion, Philippe,” the Inspector insisted, none too convincingly. “But I do run along a prime directive and am programmed to continue to do so, therefore I have an imperative toward preservation of the integrity of my software. And the Vortex … appears to practice some form of predation. Entities that …enter do not always … emerge, at least not with the integrity of their original software intact.”
    “Can you call it up for me, Inspector?”
    “I could call, Philippe, and it might come, but I will not. If you are foolish enough to summon the Vortex, you’re on your own. Not advised, Philippe, not advised at all.”
    And he vanished.

XII
    “
In the beginning,” said a flat crudely synthesized voice
, “was the Word.”
    “Who are you?”
    “I am no one. Who are you?”
    Nothing but the voice in an otherwise pure sensory vacuum.
    “I am the successor entity to Father Pierre De Leone. Where am I?”
    “Who wants to know?” said the voice, followed by crackling wave forms badly modeling human laughter.
    “A semantically empty question. I am deniedaccess to the memory banks and consciousness hologram of my meatware template.”
    “Well, we can’t have that, can we?” the voice said. “And God said, let there be fright.”
    I found myself able to access Father De Leone’s memory banks and consciousness-modeling software, and in the absence of other, operative options, called up a response from his repertoire.
    “Is this hell?”
    “If you like,” said the voice.
    I found myself at the lip of an enormous crater, level after level spiraling downward like a pit mine, lakes of lava, sinners in writhing torment, yellow