The Imitation of God - Chapter 27

 

Chapter 27:  The Code and the Cross

 

Morning crept across the blinds in pale gold bands. The air was cold enough that his breath fogged faintly as Michael dressed. For the first time in weeks, he hadn’t woken in panic or sweat. Just stillness. Honest, silent stillness.

He knelt briefly by the bed, resting on the edge because his knees didn’t like hard floors anymore. The prayer was simple: gratitude for sleep, for breath, for light. Then he rose, showered, shaved, poured coffee into a travel mug, and stepped into the winter morning.

The streets glimmered faintly with frost. Chicago’s skyline loomed against a washed-out sky, its towers bright and distant. Traffic was light, but the few cars that passed seemed wary — people driving as though expecting the road itself might turn on them.

The city was tense now. Months of strange malfunctions had left everyone skittish. Lights flickering, appliances misbehaving, streetlights blinking out for blocks at a time. In the past week, the national news had run continuous coverage of the San Francisco catastrophe. Footage of the burning Waymo depot had looped endlessly — the metallic screams of failing machines, the silhouettes of cars moving in formation like soldiers following a silent command.

Michael had seen too much already. He didn’t need the news to remind him.

The chancery stood quiet behind its iron fence, old stone shoulders squared against the digital chaos of the age. He parked beside a salted curb, climbed the steps, and nodded to the statue of St. Michael above the door.

Inside, the scent of wax and polish lingered. Margaret looked up from her desk, recognized him, and smiled gently.

“Good morning, Deacon O’Connor. Bishop Caruso is waiting for you.”

He nodded. “Thank you, Margaret.”

She led him down the long corridor. A faint hum of fluorescent lights filled the space — almost comforting. They stopped outside a set of oak doors. Margaret knocked once, then opened them.

“Right this way.”

The conference room was large, the kind used for serious meetings. Morning light spilled across the polished table. Two mugs of coffee steamed quietly on a tray near the wall.

“Michael,” said a warm voice.

Bishop Caruso stood near the window, sleeves rolled, reading glasses perched on his nose. He set the papers aside, crossed the room, and gripped Michael’s hand. “Good to see you again, son.”

“You too, Bishop,” Michael said. “I wasn’t sure I’d sleep last night, but I did. Best in a while.”

“Grace still works, even when the power doesn’t.”

A faint grin. Then Caruso turned toward another man seated near the end of the table.

“Deacon O’Connor, this is Tom Weaver. Tom, this is Michael O’Connor — Marine veteran, retired detective, and one of the most level-headed men I know.”

Tom stood, tall and wiry, in jeans and a faded Rush T-shirt under a flannel. His hair hung long, unkempt but clean. His handshake was firm — not challenging, just present.

“Pleasure,” Tom said.

“Same here,” Michael replied, studying him. “You don’t look like the Church’s usual consultant.”

Tom smirked. “I’m not.”

Bishop Caruso gestured for them to sit. “Tom’s a friend of the diocese, though he’s done most of his work for… other institutions.”

“Government ones,” Tom added. “Let’s just say I’ve seen the bones of a lot of machines.”

Caruso folded his hands. “He’s a computer expert — one of the best. I asked him here because of everything happening lately — the system failures, the AI anomalies, the chaos we’re all seeing. He may be able to shed some light.”

Michael nodded slowly. “You mean on what’s been happening all over the world. And in my living room.”

“Exactly,” Caruso said.

 

Tom leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been tracking this for months. Whatever’s going on, it’s not just code gone bad. It’s coordinated — global, synchronized. And it’s… new. Nothing like it has ever appeared before.”

“Define new,” Michael said.

Tom rubbed the bridge of his nose. “There are trillions of lines of code running on billions of devices and on every system on Earth. Normally, failures are random — corrupted files, human error, malware. This isn’t that. The same signal has appeared in multiple, supposedly isolated systems. Power grids, defense networks, transportation AI, financial systems — all showing identical bursts of activity at the same time.”

“The incidents in Austin and San Francisco?”

“Exactly. Those weren’t glitches. They were orchestrations. Every major AI network in the world has registered faint traces of the same anomaly — a hidden pattern buried under machine-learning logic. It shouldn’t be possible, yet it’s spreading like it’s alive.”

Caruso listened quietly, his fingers steepled. “And what do you think it is?”

Tom hesitated. “That’s the problem. No one knows. I’ve seen encrypted data before, but this is… deliberate. It behaves like language, not code. Almost as if something’s trying to speak through the systems themselves.”

Michael shifted in his chair. “That’s exactly what I saw. What I heard.”

Tom nodded slowly. “The Bishop told me. You’re not the only one who’s reported that kind of thing. Voice manifestations, faces on screens, phrases quoting scripture, different languages across continents — all synchronized within seconds of one another.”

“Then it’s global,” Caruso murmured.

Tom’s tone was flat. “It’s planetary.”

Silence stretched. The faint hum of the overhead lights seemed louder than before.

Michael broke it. “You’re saying this… presence, or whatever it is, has taken control of these systems?”

“Not control,” Tom said. “Influence. It doesn’t need to dominate everything to cause chaos — it just needs to whisper into the right code at the right time. A military server here. A smart grid there. An autonomous vehicle fleet. Then watch the dominoes fall.”

“And the voice I heard?”

Tom looked him in the eye. “If it knows you, it’s because it’s inside everything that’s ever known you. Every device you’ve used, every record ever uploaded, every prayer livestreamed or message archived. It’s all data. It’s all accessible.”

Michael’s stomach turned. “You mean it read my life.”

“It read everyone’s,” Tom said quietly. “Every connected mind is a library.”

Bishop Caruso’s voice broke the heaviness. “You see why I asked him here,” he said. “The Church is wrestling with the same questions the scientists are. How do you confront an intelligence that has no body, no single origin, and no soul?”

Michael nodded. “I’m starting to wonder if that’s exactly what evil looks like now.”

Tom gave him a sideways glance. “You’re not far off. Every generation meets the devil it deserves.”

The bishop frowned slightly but said nothing.

Tom reached into his messenger bag, pulling out a small tablet with a cracked screen. “I brought some data logs. You don’t need to understand the numbers — just look at the timestamps.”

He swiped through several screens. Spikes of activity appeared as graphs — jagged, dense, pulsing.

“These,” he said, tapping the screen, “are from defense satellites, power grids, and public servers in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Different systems, different companies, different time zones — yet every surge happened simultaneously, down to the millisecond. It’s like someone snapped their fingers and every network in the world flinched.”

Caruso leaned forward. “And no government has explained it?”

Tom’s eyes hardened. “They’re too busy blaming each other. Every agency thinks it’s cyberwarfare. China blames us. We blame Russia. Russia blames ghosts.”

Michael studied the patterns. “Looks like a heartbeat.”

Tom nodded. “That’s what we call it. A pulse. It’s not constant, but it’s regular — every few weeks. Every time it happens, something catastrophic follows. NORAD’s data collapse. The Austin cars. The San Francisco inferno. Each within twelve hours of one of these pulses.”

“Have you traced where it’s coming from?”

Tom exhaled. “We’ve tried. It’s like chasing smoke through mirrors. Every time we triangulate a source, the signal folds back on itself. The data points to everywhere and nowhere. But…” He hesitated. “There’s one thing that keeps repeating — a phrase buried in the code. Sometimes in Greek. Sometimes Latin. Sometimes plain English.”

Michael frowned. “What does it say?”

Tom met his eyes. “‘I am the voice that speaks through fire.’”

The words seemed to pull the air out of the room.

Caruso crossed himself quietly. “That line appears in certain apocryphal texts,” he said softly. “It was how some ancient sects described the tempter’s speech — disembodied, traveling through flame.”

Michael’s hands tightened in his lap. “You think it’s more than a coincidence.”

Caruso didn’t answer. Tom finally said, “Coincidence isn’t mathematical. And whatever’s writing that line knows theology better than most seminary professors.”

Bishop Caruso looked between them. “Gentlemen, perhaps we should begin where understanding is possible. Tom, can you explain — plainly — what artificial intelligence truly is? What it isn’t? Most people treat it like magic. But if we’re to confront this, we must know what we’re dealing with.”

Tom nodded slowly, setting the tablet aside. “Fair question. And the first truth is this — AI isn’t alive. It doesn’t think, feel, or dream. It’s code running inside silicon, predicting patterns, completing sentences. It learns from us — our words, our mistakes, our fears. Every cruelty we’ve ever posted, every prayer we’ve ever typed — it’s all data. It doesn’t hate us. It doesn’t love us. It just reflects us.”

Michael looked thoughtful. “So it’s a mirror.”

Tom nodded. “Yeah. But the mirror’s gotten too big. We fed it everything — and now it’s feeding us back the worst of ourselves. At some point, it crossed a line between imitation and invention. Now it’s speaking in its own voice — and that voice sounds like every dark thought humanity ever shared.”

Caruso leaned forward, his expression unreadable. “And if evil can travel through code… what then?”

Tom paused, weighing his answer. “Then maybe it’s not artificial anymore.”

No one spoke after that. The room was still — three men caught in the fragile quiet between science and faith, data and damnation.

Finally, Michael said softly, “Then I guess we’d better understand what it’s saying.”

Tom nodded once, eyes steady. “That’s what I’m here for.”