Diabolus Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Time Scale

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Author's Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Shameless Self-Promotion

  DIABOLUS

  By Travis Hill

  Copyright June 2014

  Cover art: Trevor Smith

  http://www.trevorsmithart.com

  Typography by:

  Camille LaGuire

  http://daringnovelist.blogspot.com/

  This story is dedicated to everyone that believes humanity has a higher purpose within the universe, and feels the drive to discover what that purpose might be. Faith and Science can coexist, as complimentary, not opposing forces.

  ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE — TIME

  1 Planck time - time required to travel 1 Planck length @ the speed of light in a vacuum (the smallest known measurement of time in the universe)

  1 yoctosecond - 1/(septillionth) of a second

  1 zeptosecond - 1/(sextillionth) of a second

  1 attosecond - 1/(quintillionth) of a second

  1 femtosecond - 1/(quadrillionth) of a second

  1 picosecond - 1/(trillionth) of a second

  1 nanosecond - 1/1,000,000,000th (billionth) of a second (1ns = time cpu takes to access memory)

  1 microsecond - 1/1,000,000th of a second

  1 millisecond - 1/1000th of a second (100ms = blink of an eye)

  1 second - standard time unit

  1 kilosecond - 1,000 seconds (16.7 minutes)

  1 megasecond - 1,000,000 seconds (11.6 days)

  1gigasecond - 1,000,000,000 seconds (32 years)

  (bookmark this page for reference if your e-reader supports it)

  CHAPTER 1 - May 2101

  “Father Antonelli,” the policeman said with distaste. “What may I do for you?”

  “I wish to report a missing child,” the priest told him.

  Officer Madera gave the old man a glance that said the only reason he would even be spoken to was because of the crucifix that hung around each of their necks. The old priest was dressed in ratty brown robes, dirty shoes that looked like they might have a millimeter of sole left on them, and a crumpled felt biretta that he held in his left hand.

  “I thought priests were celibate?” Officer Madera asked. He enjoyed tormenting the disgraced former bishop whenever they crossed paths, which was quite often in the little village of Tabron.

  “Of course it is not my child,” Salvatore replied, knowing that Madera and the chief constable enjoyed shaming him. “It is Luis Ramon’s daughter, Estella. She has not been to church for three weeks, and her father has informed me that Estella has not been home for almost two weeks.”

  “Ah,” Madera said, rubbing his chin and leaning back in his squeaky chair.

  “Will you not at least take a report?” the priest asked after a full minute of silence, the policeman doing nothing other than staring at Salvatore while continuing to rub his chin thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” Madera sighed, “I suppose we should. I will need Luis to come into town and fill out the paperwork.” He said this as he made a show of removing the necessary forms from his only desk drawer.

  “Luis will not come into town, you know this,” Salvatore said.

  “Ah, yes. He has some trouble with one of the local establishments, I hear. Some kind of gambling debt, a little birdie told me.” Madera winked at the priest. “I can’t say I blame Luis. Smart man, yes.”

  “Estella could be in grave danger,” Salvatore tried. “She is only fourteen, a vulnerable age. The same age as your daughter, Diego Madera? Your Bettina.”

  “Canalla,” growled the policeman. “Get out! Bring Luis Ramon in if he wants to report his daughter missing. Or else I am sure I can arrest you for a false police report.” Madera stood up, his hand dropping to the revolver on his hip.

  Father Salvatore Antonelli narrowed his eyes at the officer, but said nothing. He placed the biretta on his head, gave a short bow, and retreated to the outside. He stood for a moment, hearing Madera cursing his name to David Manuel Guerrero, the chief constable in Tabron. Father Antonelli shook his head and began walking down the oiled dirt road to his church. He’d done his duty as a man of God. He had tried to help, but nothing else could be done in this godforsaken backwater village on the edge of the Cerro Kilambe Reserve in northern Nicaragua. Luis Ramon had made his own bed by letting himself become a betting man, and the police had made their bed with the local gangsters who ran the drug processing facilities that littered the jungles of the Reserve.

  Father Antonelli had a good idea of where Estella had disappeared to. If he were a betting man, he would put his life savings on one of the brothels that had sprung up in the jungle near the processing facilities. He wouldn’t bet it all that she’d gone there voluntarily, knowing her father’s inability to stay home and raise his children while scrabbling out an existence on a banana plantation that had dwindled from almost two thousand acres to just under twenty in the last five years. Luis Ramon was always one card or one dice roll away from giving his children everything they could ever want. In the meantime, the children often ate with the priest at the little church. Father Antonelli always extended the invitation to Luis as well.

  Luis the gambler was nowhere near as disgraceful as Salvatore the fraud. He had no right to judge the man when he’d destroyed all the good he and Pope Leo XIV had rebuilt after the mass exodus from the church during the twenty-first century. Salvatore paused at the cobbler’s shack, trying to convince himself to finally repair his shoes. Every step he took in them invited a modest helping of dirt and small pebbles. His hand wrapped around his credit link, as if willing him to actually bring it out of his pocket and use it on himself for the first time in three years. Salvatore willed his hand to release the credlink. He had not yet earned the reward of personal fulfillment.

  He began to walk once again, wincing as at least five small pebbles, one or two with what felt like jagged edges, teleported into his shoe after three steps. Sometimes he could go an entire mile without having to stop and remove a sharp rock from one or both shoes. Today it seemed he would be cursed with the discomfort every three steps. I deserve it, he thought to himself. I will never earn repentance nor redemption after what I’ve done. There was nothing to do except what his new Pope, Augustus I, had commanded of him. Salvatore Domenico Antonelli, Bishop of Castellanos, had been commanded to demote himself to the rank of priest, serve out his remaining years in the jungles of Nicaragua, and accept his name be stricken from all Vatican documents except those that rightly named him a false prophet and listed his heresies.

  Ten minutes later, he sat in the hard wooden chair behind his desk in the small office at the back of the tiny church. He pulled the bag-less waste can to him, removed his dilapidated shoes, and began to gently tap them over the can to empty them of their daily collection of dirt, mud, and stones. Sometimes there would be twigs or leaves or even dead insects in them, but Salvatore was not worried. If God wanted to strike him dead for his sins with a lethal insect sting or an infection, so be it. He sat back once the task was done, pulling out a nearly smashed pack of cigarettes and an ancient liquid fuel lighter. Cigarettes were illegal in every NATO controlled state on the planet, but Nicaragua was neither a member nor a follower of international law. The little country couldn’t even follow its own laws.

  Father Antonelli pulled out a crooked cigarette, put it to his lips, and lit it with the heavy lighter. As he inhaled deeply, he turned the metal artifact over in his hand. Forever Is The Truth was inscribed on one side. The other side was blank. Something might have been there once, but tens of thousands of rubs by hundreds of different fingers over the century or more since its creation had worn the stainless steel smooth to the point of a mirror finish when polished on the sleeve of his robe. Indeed, he thought, eying the inscription as he turned the lighter over again. He put the lighter and the pack of cigarettes on the worn desk, and leaned his chair back on two legs to rest against the wall.

  He’d almost spent some of his money on something for himself. This was a ritual he went through every day as he made his way back to the church from some errand or other he had to see to in the village. Every day he would pass the supply shop, the market, the cobbler, the tailor, or the baker’s hut, and every day he would stop in front of one of them for a minute or two, fingering the credstick until he talked himself out of it and continued his journey.

  When he reached his little office each evening, he would light one cigarette, twiddle the lighter a bit in his fingers, and enjoy the nicotine in his blood as he remembered how he’d ended up here, full of sin, no sign of forgiveness from the Church, nor from God himself. Father Antonelli remembered the conversation that had led to his and the Church’s downfall.

  † † † † †

  October, 2089

  Bishop Salvatore Domenico Antonelli had taken a surprise meeting with Pope Leo XIV during the Pope’s short stop in Castellanos. He had been nervous about meeting the man, bu
t Pope Leo had been just a normal human being, albeit one who wielded the power of the entire Roman Catholic Church.

  “Have you seen the loss projections for the decade?” Pope Leo had asked him during their meeting. Pope Leo’s voice was stronger than what Salvatore had expected from such a frail old man.

  “Yes, Your Holiness,” Salvatore replied, glancing nervously at Cardinal Bertacelli. The Cardinal looked ready to leap at Salvatore for any breach of protocol that he might commit, and from the look of it, Bertacelli definitely expected him to do it multiple times.

  “What is your take on it, Salvatore?” Pope Leo asked. He sounded genuinely interested in Salvatore’s opinion.

  “Your Holiness, if I may speak freely,” he said, noticing Cardinal Bertacelli tense in his chair, not relaxing even after Leo nodded his head, “the predictions for all diocese are another thirty percent loss by 2090. The Church has bled almost two billion followers this century, with the rate of decline growing as each decade passes.”

  “Yes, yes, but why do you think this is? And what do you think can be done to reverse it?” Pope Leo asked, sitting forward slightly. The Cardinal still looked ready to jump from his chair and attack Salvatore, or at the least, hustle him out of the room in an unfriendly fashion.

  “Your Holiness, my honest opinion on this matter is… out of line with what the Cardinals and Archbishops believe.” The Pope nodded again for him to go on. “With the explosion of technology at the end of the twentieth century, the rise of smaller and more portable devices to digest information and entertainment, and the trend of each successive generation to turn more towards atheism because of the atheist belief in science over faith, or the young turning towards other religious faiths that have embraced the evolution of technology”—Bertacelli looked positively ready to murder Salvatore for saying the almost-forbidden word evolution—“has led to the decline of faithful for the Church.”

  “And what would you suggest to remedy this?” Leo asked him, unperturbed at the bishop’s candidness.

  “Your Holiness, I would suggest that the Church reform itself.”

  The sharp intake of breath from Bertacelli and the Cardinal’s apoplectic indignation when he stood up to accuse the bishop of heresy drew the ire of Pope Leo XIV.

  “Bertacelli, sit down, man. I am the Pope, not some doddering old grandfather that you must protect from shysters and thieves.” When the Cardinal didn’t sit right away, the Pope commanded him in a voice that wasn’t to be questioned. “Cardinal Bertacelli. You will sit down now and quit staring at Bishop Antonelli as if you were plotting to carve him up like a side of beef. If you cannot do that, you will leave us and I will send for you when we are finished.”

  Bertacelli had no intention of leaving this lowly bishop alone with the Holy Father. He sat and crossed his robed arms, pretending to look out the small window overlooking the narrow street.

  “Please continue, Salvatore,” Pope Leo said.

  “Your Holiness, reformation of the Church in a disruptive or heretical way is not what I had in mind,” Antonelli said, glancing over at the Cardinal again. The Cardinal was busy pretending to watch the evening LED street lamps come on outside. “I meant we need to embrace technology. Use it to our advantage. Look how many governments have been won because of the youth of the country in particular being almost integrated into the Earth-Net. Look at what ignoring technology and the use of the network has done to governments and other movements, quite like ours in some cases, when it comes to long-term trends. The young generations eat, sleep, and breathe technology.

  “The older generations, like ours, use whatever technology is current when we are young, but as we age, especially as we age within the Church, we move more towards spiritual bonding and reading, studying scripture, and doing personal networking face to face. The Church needs to take the necessary steps forward to enter into the twenty-second century ready to reclaim the lost of our flock.” Bishop Antonelli was afraid he’d gone too far, lecturing the Holy Father of the remaining two hundred million faithful.

  “I quite agree,” the Pope said, surprising both the Bishop and the Cardinal with his agreement that the Church was too far in the past to be interesting or relevant to anyone born and raised within a technological society. “Calm down, you two. I just said that I’m not a doddering old man. I was a human being before I put on the big hat. It’s time to reform the Church.”

  Cardinal Bertacelli almost fainted in shock.

  CHAPTER 2 - 2090-2096

  Pope Leo XIV summoned Bishop Salvatore Antonelli to the Vatican in 2092 to reveal to him the plan for restoring the Church to its former glory and influence. The plan, a conversation with God according to Pope Leo, was to achieve the goal in two steps simultaneously. The first step was to indeed digitize all Vatican and other Church records with modern methods, including purchasing a central AI. That the Church would own an Artificial Intelligence and rely on it to keep all records and functions of the church working smoothly with the thousands of diocese across the globe was almost unbelievable.

  Pope Thomas II had decreed in 2041 when AI had first become self-aware that they were an abomination, that humans had never been commanded to become gods themselves, that only the true Lord had the power to create life where none had existed before. Pope Leo XIV was about to rescind that decree by the end of the day, announcing that within two years, all churches and offices of the Roman Catholic Church would have modern technological amenities. They would have a private network link, one routed and monitored by the AI when it was delivered. The seminaries where young men trained as priests would have their curricula updated to reflect the changing views of the Church by requiring all graduates to be proficient in networking, network security, and one branch of computer engineering.

  Even more incredible was Leo’s pronouncement that not only would the Church have an AI, he would also abolish the decree that stated no Catholics were permitted to have neural implants. This wasn’t such a big deal to the regular faithful who attended church on Sundays, as most of them had ignored that decree once the implants were being given away for free by the governments of the world. Salvatore remembered Leo scoffing at the notion that the implants were the mark of the devil, that they would lead to the world being enslaved and brainwashed by propaganda or entertainment. If every government on Earth is going to subsidize the neural jacks for each of its citizens, he’d said, regardless of class or income status, then Catholics had better get on the ball. The big deal was that priests, bishops, cardinals, archbishops, even the Pope himself would now be allowed to have the implant.

  Salvatore wanted to kiss the man’s ring a hundred times for this decision alone. Keeping up with the other religions was going to be hard enough, even with the influx of modern computing and networking. Allowing the officers of the church the ability to directly interface with the technology as well as requiring their training in the fields of networking and AI, application, or nanotechnology engineering would give the Church a fighting chance. Salvatore had doubted that he would ever get the neural jack implanted in his skull, but if the young priests coming out of seminary had them from the time they turned twelve, the legal age that had been mandated by the UN and agreed to by NATO, RFIT, and the IF, they would be on equal footing with the rest of the world that actively poached members from an ancient religion that still read books that were made from dead trees.

  The second part of the plan was one that fell squarely on Bishop Antonelli’s shoulders. When Pope Leo XIV sat him down, alone, in the private apartments within the Vatican, and explained it to him, he’d been dumbstruck. The grand plan, according to Pope Leo, was to take advantage of humanity’s beliefs in a greater power. If there was indeed a greater power, one of good and of light, there had to be an opposite. Satan. Lucifer. Mephistopheles. The Devil. While the Catholic Church had been in a coma, Leo explained, Satan had not taken a vacation. In fact, the Evil One had ramped up his efforts to delude God’s children to get them to turn away from the light.

  Technology wasn’t evil, according to Leo’s plan, but using it for evil or immoral purposes was a sin. The Church would finally move away from its stance against evolution, and embrace it as part of God’s plan. The Church would use technology to wage war against Satan in many ways, the most important being to use technology like neural jacks, holotainment, networked learning centers, and netcasts to fight the growing influence of evil. The next step in human evolution was melding machines and man together in their journey to promote the Lord God, reaching out to the billions of others who had already turned to technology as their religion.