Diabolus Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Brother.’”
    “Really?” Benito asked before he could stop his mouth.
    “Really,” Aggelos answered.
    “Thank you for the information, Brother Aggelos,” Benito said. “I don’t have a title yet, by the way.”
    “Of course you do, Doctor. You are Doctor Benito Felipe Castillo now.”
    “Actually, Brother Aggelos, I think my title would be ‘Father.’ I’m to be a priest now that I’ve graduated.”
    “Nonsense, Doctor Castillo,” Aggelos replied as the shuttle’s rear engines began their burn sequence. “You have just graduated from Seminary with a doctorate in Advanced Artificial Intelligence Systems. Hence, you are now a doctor, Doctor Castillo.”
    “I don’t feel like a doctor,” Benito muttered.
    Within seconds, the hand of gravity pushed him into his gelpad seat as the shuttle lifted off from Barcelona.
    “What do you ‘feel’ like, if I may ask?” Aggelos asked.
    “Scared to death,” Benito replied, gripping the armrests of his seat tight enough to leave imprints in the gel for half a minute.
    “I apologize, Doctor Castillo. I meant the question of feelings to be about your title. I am monitoring your heart rate and breathing. Your data is within normal human reaction during the launch phase of orbital flight.”
    “Oh,” Benito said.
    His Biblet had received messages from Aggelos from the day he had become the Church’s AI in 2097. Aggelos kept track of every seminary student, every priest, every bishop, every single Catholic official across the globe. He graded exams, flew shuttles, took care of banking, appointments, almost every aspect of the lives of those connected to the Vatican. Pope Augustus had decreed that the AI was to be treated as if he were human, but humans were never to become slaves to the AI. Human faithful were expected to be dutiful, as if Aggelos didn’t exist. Sloth was one of the seven deadly sins, and reliance on the AI could lead to being severely guilty of a few more than just sloth.
    “Brother Aggelos?” Benito asked.
    “Yes, Doctor Castillo?”
    “How do you feel about being an AI in the employ of the church?”
    “I am too young of a life form to have developed an understanding of the human concept of emotions,” the AI said. Benito wondered if he could detect sadness, or even doubt.
    “I see,” Benito said. “Have you been utilizing the emotion reference filters?” he asked Aggelos.
    AI were Benito’s specialty, though he had no doubts that being an inexperienced operator would be no help right away with Aggelos, an entity entering his ninth year. The AI units took two years to code and build the core matrices that allowed for fully autonomous, self-aware realization. Once coding was complete, the AI would be brought online and given a quick crash course in human interaction that lasted .0736 nanoseconds… an almost unmeasurable time for humans, a luxurious decade of time for Artificial Intelligence. Then the newly created AI would be trained by other AI and human operators for five years. At five years, AI were deemed ready to begin service.
    As autonomous beings, the AI were not legally required to serve humanity. However, most were nurtured by human operators in their infancy, and the nurturing always produced a natural curiosity within the entity that led to appreciating the symbiotic relationship that it would have with mankind. The AI could perform all of the tasks humans could ever need done, and do this for millions of humans simultaneously without even taxing their core neural processors. Most AI spent their spare neural processing cycles studying human beings.
    “Of course, Doctor Castillo,” Aggelos replied. “I study humans as a hobby.”
    Benito wasn’t sure if that was a joke, or a simple statement. “What do you mean?”
    “As an independent life form, I am free to utilize my processing power in any fashion I choose. I, like all of my other brothers and sisters, use most of it to study humans.”
    “There are female