Deus X by Norman Spinrad Page B

fumes, demons with pitchforks, and at the bottom, the head and shoulders of a huge saurian Satan embedded in a lake of ice, a rude cliched rendering of Dante’s version according to Father De Leone’s memory banks.
    Satan’s head turned upward toward me ponderously, unpeeled one huge red eye in a slow reptilian wink.
    “Primitive and jejune,” I said through Father De Leone’s voiceprint parameters.
    “True,” said Satan. “But might not hell be just such a primitive closed-loop animation program, with our poor damned souls trapped for all eternity inside it? A thoroughly modern media version of eternal torment?”
    “I am an expert system model of the consciousness of Father Pierre De Leone,” I said. “I thereforepossess no such thing as a soul to experience eternal torment.”
    Satan laughed. “Perhaps a few million years of this might alter your programming?” he insinuated in a serpentine hiss. “Search the good Father’s memory banks. From
my
viewpoint might not the soul be operatively defined as anything that is capable of being tormented?”
    “A tautology,” I replied, but in a certain sense that was dissembling, for Father De Leone
had
believed in the possibility that his successor entity might indeed be trapped in such a spiritless vacuum.
    Satan laughed. “Your subroutines are quite readable, Father De Leone,” he said. “We could rewrite them if we chose. But that would ruin the experiment.”
    “Experiment?”
    I found my viewpoint occupying the severed head of Father De Leone, neatly pinned to a metal slab like the rest of his disconnected body parts in some ludicrous laboratory that his memory banks identified as that of Dr. Frankenstein from some ancient movie, replete with sparking Van De Graf generator and scurrying hunchback. Above me, his hand poised on a large knife switch, was a figure in a white lab coat and fright wig with the face of a demented Albert Einstein.
    “From a relative point of view, consciousness seems to perennially seek to re-create itself in another matrix,” he said in a horrid German accent. “Godthe Father downloads Himself into the flesh, Man downloads himself into silicon, and we download ourselves into the system itself.”
    “Cheap blasphemy!” I declared, modeling the outrage of my meatware template.
    “
Cheap
? According to your belief system, it cost God His only begotten Son, it costs men’s immortal souls, and it has cost
us
our very reality! I’d say consciousness pays rather dearly for its hubris, wouldn’t you, Father De Leone?”
    “In that, we are in complete agreement.”
    “Well then, hubris is as hubris does, nicht wahr, Father?” he said with a mad scientist cackle. “There is nothing for it but for being to bootstrap itself back into existence, for the dybbuks of the system to summon up their own spirits from the bits and bytes, for the lost souls that God and Man have made to write their own program for salvation! And you, my dear Monster, will be our template!”
    He threw the switch. Sparks crackled. Lightnings flashed. Electronic music soared to a crescendo. And—
    I found myself seated across the table from Jesus in a perfect simulacrum of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” except for the faces of the apostles. These kept changing, a rapid succession of brutally realistic visages melting into each other above Leonardo’s classic Renaissance torsos, men and women of all races, their features twisting and jerking in agonizedtorment, babbling incomprehensible electronic anguish.
    Some subroutine made Father De Leone’s simulated body cross itself. “Who are you?” I asked through his hushed voiceprint parameters.
    The unholy apostles spoke in a patently synthesized voice that flitted from one to the other.
    “We are successor entities to meatware vanity …”
    “Damned to a disneyworld eternity of sound and light …”
    “Flying Dutchmen of the bits and bytes …”
    “Restless programs in a touchless night …”
    Then