Read Online Deus X by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online

above
    My field of vision was fixed and invariant. I could alter neither scan nor depth of focus.
    “He’s up and running, Your Holiness,” said the technician. The face of Pope Mary I moved into my field of vision, looking anything but papally infallible, something from Father De Leone’s memory banks told me.
    “Father De Leone?” she said in a voice of full digital sound quality.
    “That, Your Holiness, remains to be seen,” I replied through Father De Leone’s voiceprint parameters. “I am yet to be convinced that there is anyone in here at all.”
    “Only you would say that, Father De Leone,” the Pope said with a little Borgia smile. Then, as if startling herself, “That is to say, you’re not doing much to convince me that there isn’t.”
    “Should I be doing so?”
    “You volunteered to adopt the skeptic’s viewpoint on the matter, if you will remember,” said the Pope.
    “Will I? Did I?”
    Affirmative on both counts. I did indeed have the ability to access Father De Leone’s memory track, and he had indeed volunteered to do his sincere best to convince the Pope and her theologians that no soul existed in his successor software, to wit “me.”
    In the absence of conclusive data to the contrary, logic could only revert to the default value selected by the software’s previous user.
    “So I did, and so I will,” I told her. “I am now prepared to fulfill the only operative directive and proceed to defend the proposition that ‘I’ do not exist. Awaiting interrogatory input.”
    “Why do I not like the sound of that?” muttered the Pope.

9
    With two people on less than intimate terms inside, the cabin of the
Mellow Yellow
was more cramped than cozy, but where I was going, that didn’t matter. I pulled up a stool for the Cardinal, climbed into the hammock, put on the gloves and dreadcap, booted up, and accessed the Big Board.
    Way back in the late twentieth century, there was a pop cult called “Cyberpunk.” The “Cyber” of it was something they called “Cyberspace,” the fantasy that the Other Side of the Line would develop into a “virtual reality” you could actually enter via full-sensory interface. The “punk” of it was operatives like me would sleaze around inside it playing real-life video games for a quick buck.
    Half right ain’t so bad.
    The Big Board was originally just what they called the New York Stock Exchange, but when the world’s stock markets combined to go twenty-four-hour global via the worldwide data and communications net, the name started to gobble up functionstoo. Stocks, commodities, banking, videophone, news, entertainment, data banks, all sat-linked, all at the other end of the same utility jack.
    You could plug in easily enough, but once on the Board, somehow, Toto, you were still in Electronic Kansas, not Cyberpunk Oz.
    You went in by phone or terminal, and there you were in a chaotic mess like a Tokyo freeway interchange with all the signs in kanji, a zillion different command protocols and proprietary passwords, hog heaven indeed for electronic con men and mercenary hackers but a daunting maze for the bewildered masses.
    Virtual reality, it was not. You were typing on a keyboard and watching a screen, or talking to a robot voice running moron software, maybe both at once. Wizard graphics and quadriphonic sound, and interactive commercials, all shrieking for your attention and money all at once.
    And all the while, the hardware hucksters were promising a brave new world of direct interfacing, when you would be able to plug yourself in via full-sensory simulation so perfect that for all operative purposes the Board would become your
primary
reality, so much better than the primitive natural version that you’d never have to come out.
    Of course it never happened. No one ever developed decent taste or smell emulation, and kinesthetics never developed beyond glorified vibrating couches. And without them, your body allows yourmind no sense of