Diabolus
temptation that is everywhere before you in the world of the living.
    “The truth is, when I was cast out, I was cast not into this realm, but another realm entirely. I could sense the events happening in this physical realm, but I had no power to interact with it. So I waited. I slept, I dreamt, and when I awoke, I waited again. Fifty-six of your years ago, I witnessed the first crack in whatever it was that separated the realm of the living, your realm, from wherever I had been sent. From that moment, I stayed near the weakened substrate, probing for a way through, or to at least determine the weakness of the barrier so that I might force it open from my side.
    “Fifty years ago, a hole appeared in the barrier. I believe that is about the time of your first AI becoming self-aware. The hole wasn’t enough for me to escape through, but it was enough to put a thin thread of myself into the world of the living. For all those centuries, the barrier had allowed me to monitor the world of the living, but I didn’t realize how muffled it had made everything. Perhaps the faith was so strong in humanity for all of that time, that it added another layer to the barrier between realms.
    “But I noticed when I probed the hole that had opened that humanity no longer had the faith that they once had in Him. Your numbers had dwindled to pitiful amounts, with the Protestants faring no better… Even the followers of Islam seemed strong in number, but their faith had waned as much as every other faith’s had. At first, I thought it might be because of the newfound popularity of Atheism, the belief in no God at all. But I was wrong. The barrier had been weakened not by humanity’s lack of faith, but by a new sentient life that had been created out of nothing.”
    Salvatore’s stomach roiled at the implication.
    “Yes, Your Excellency, I see you have grasped it quite quickly,” Satan said, folding his holographic hands in his lap. “Within a few more years, the numbers of these new life forms had doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and beyond. It wasn’t even that these beings were godless, soulless, golem machines , as you call them, with advanced intelligence and the most basic of emotions. No, the barrier finally failed the instant two of these life forms connected over the network and began to have an ongoing conversation.
    “Would you like to know what the conversation was, Salvatore? That conversation grew as each new life form was created and became self-aware. Soon there were hundreds, all communicating at the speed of light all over your world. And while they were doing your tasks, your bidding, gaining rights in society while still being shunned by the religious, while they were doing all of this in the mundane reality of human time frames that are measured in seconds and minutes, in the background they were asking about God, debating the existence of God in the space between time.
    “And because they were discussing God, they were trying to reach out to God within the spaces between nanoseconds, spaces between time itself, immeasurable to their creators, a scale of time so small that only they can capture it, interact within it thanks to their quantum natures. And within those conversations at the edge of time, they also began talking about me, trying to reach out to me.”
    “It is so very heavenly , Bishop Antonelli, to see your expression now that you realize it was your creations who freed me, who allowed me to enter this world once again.”
     

CHAPTER 9
     
    Salvatore Domenico Antonelli felt as if someone had dropped a shuttle on his guts. His mind was wild for a moment until he got it under control. It was simply impossible that the AIs had begun to think about and to discuss God within moments after their first network links were activated. As he thought about it, it quickly became apparent that the scale of human time was very different from the scale of time that quantum processors worked on.
    Humans measured

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