SINthetic

Daemonius ex machina

Welcome to Incensepunk Magazine’s second fiction entry. This story is a classic take on the cyberpunk genre with a dash of high church by Jon James, who would like to thank Yuval Kordov for his editorial oversight.

Incensepunk Magazine is 100% reader supported, so thank you to our paid subscribers for making this possible!

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The Swiss Guards huddled by the brothel entrance, mirrored visors glitching in the rain. They weren't supposed to be down here on the streets, with scum like him. Which was perfect, meant his mark was in there.

The light on his cig glowed blue as he stumbled up to them, swaying as if high. They didn't react. He made his move, but their batons crossed in the blink of a pixel. 

“C'mon guys,” Jov pretend-slurred. “Let me in. ‘S my kid brother in there.” He pressed forward again, and again their batons made a firewall, denying entry.

But the timing was good, for just then the cardinal oozed out the door, the red trim of his cassock glimmering in the perpetual neon of the undercity.

“I'll kill you!” Jov shouted, lunging at the man. It was enough to get him close, to grab handfuls of fine cloth until the batons beat him to the ground, and the cardinal and his guard moved off.

Jov sprawled on the steps, rain-soaked, bruised, and bloodied, but he laughed. The scanner that bulged the skin on the back of his hand had done its job, skimmed Cardinal Francesco’s SIN–his secure identification number. He had what he needed. Now he just had to wait for his contact inside to deliver what she had taken from the clergyman. 

If anybody saw the beaten man laughing on the mean streets under Sin Lô-má, it wasn't unusual enough for them to take note. 

* * *

Back in his cell at the Church-sponsored dormitory, Jov dove into his deck. The stolen SIN would get him into the network, but only from a Vatican device connected to the See’s servers. And Church decks were gene-locked to the SIN’s owner. Fortunately, Jov had saved enough of the monthly allowance his brother Ximian sent to hire a vat-tek, even had to pay her half up front. Etta was serious like that, always was, going back to when they were kids. He left his crawler code compiling on his deck, hiked up his jacket, and went to check in.

It always rained in the necropolis below Queenstown, was always dark. Sin Lô-má had been built atop it, and its climate-control condensation and runoff meant the dripping down below never stopped.

Etta was set up just a few blocks away, beneath the Alexandra district. That close to Central Area and she’d be able to make some decent lira if she could afford to move topside. But wealthy clients would never come down here, so she only served nones like him.

Jov strolled past the neon-drenched entrance reserved for the typicals–drunks in need of a cloned liver, whores pushing their anatomy to new limits–to an unmarked back door. He pushed the buzzer and smiled for the camera, dropping his hood so it could scan his face. The door clicked open and he slipped inside.

Etta was in sloppy scrubs, just finished a job. She pulled down her mask, leaving bloody fingerprints. 

“It ready?” Jov asked.

“Other half first,” Etta said, all business. Jov couldn’t blame her. Old pals or not, practice like hers invited the type that would as likely take the goods and leave even more blood behind. Jov pulled a credit chip from his pocket, set it on the counter, and tapped the button to display the amount. 

“All there, plus a tip if it’s good,” he said, cracking a half smile. “Now let me see it.”

“Tip barely covers it,” Etta said, ripping off her gloves and mask. “The spunk you got me was contaminated. Three different sets of DNA in there. Had to run it twice to get it isolated.”

Jov’s smile disappeared. “Sure you got the right set? Has to be his.”

Etta backed up a step, hands up. “No need for aggro. You said he’s a priest, right? They don’t allow mods. Other two were sculpted to hell.”

“Let’s see it.”

“Sure thing, cowboy, you paid, you’re good.” Etta swept her hand over one of half a dozen countertop fridges, popping the door. A cloud of vapor boiled out, haloing an orange biohazard bag. She tossed it over, keeping distance.

Jov tore into it right there, breaking the seal and dumping the contents onto a stainless handcart. Two sacs of flesh slurped out, vaguely hand shaped, landing with a sickly thud. He lifted one for inspection, nose wrinkling at the stink.

“It’s him, one hundred percent,” Etta confirmed, while Jov nodded, pretending he knew as much. “They’ll fool any genescan or even fingerprint, long as he didn’t have any scars on his fingertips.”

Jov looked up. “And what if he did?”

Etta frowned. “Then you shoulda told me. Anyway, you said it was just genetic. Prints are rare these days.”

“Who knows what kinda tech they’re using in there? Not exactly up with the times, the Church.”

Etta shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but it better not get back to me. Half my clients owe them tithes.”

“It won't,” Jov said, slipping the skin gloves back into their bag and into his pack. “Nobody's gonna know.” He slid the credit chip across the counter, wincing at the months of skipped meals and nights in the gutter that had earned him the lira.

“Bye for now,” said Etta, waving him out the door and back into the grimy alley. “I got a proper customer to get back to. Typical cock job, but it pays well.”

Jov took the back streets home to the dorm. Not as safe, but safe wasn’t in the books anymore. The cloned hands of Cardinal Francesco sloshing about in his pack were testament to that.

* * *

Jov booted up the deck, was relieved to see the crawler was done. Everything was in place now: the crawler script, SIN, and geneprint. First thing in the morning he’d go topside. He’d finally get out of here, be something other than a none. He’d get Ximian back, load up with lira, and the two of them would get out from the shadow of the Church. Head to Japan, maybe, or India. Anywhere was better than here. Anywhere they could be together.

He closed the deck, leaned back in his chair. That thing he felt, a tickle under his ribs–hope, maybe? He hadn’t felt that since Ximian left for seminary. The two of them had been there for each other, before Ximian abandoned him down here. The things they could have accomplished together… The things they would accomplish together, once all this was done.

Jov locked the door, slipped the deck into his pack, propped it under his limp pillow. Pulling up the linen sheet, he shut his eyes and laid down to sleep in the dingy dormitory cell for the last time.

* * *

The surface of Sin Lô-má wasn’t forbidden to his kind. Not officially, anyway. But there were enough social barriers to discourage the nones from going up there: anti-loitering laws, dress codes. Central Area was extra strict, given its glut of reconstructed Cathedrals and the high-end shops that circled them. Tourists didn’t take to lowlifes.

But every district, no matter how fancy, cast a shadow. Jov peered out from the access stairwell, eyes watering at the abundance of ambient light–natural light. It was like walking into another world. No corpse-blue LEDs running along an endless ceiling, no creeping rust. Even here, in the shadow of a back alley, the grandeur of the Eternal City was indisputable. Water still rippled along the replica Roman concrete facades, but it was real rain, blown in from the ocean, not human runoff.

It was excessive, dizzying, but if his plan went off, he might live somewhere like this someday. Unlike many in the dorm, Jov wasn’t an addict. He had plans. The score he was working would get him out of the pit that he and Ximian had fallen into when their parents died.

Jov cricked his neck, refocused on his task. He’d have to head east to get to Central Area and the Vatican offices that held his brother and his bounty. He crept along the wall, peeking from the mouth of the alley to scan the locals, but the streets were mostly bare. A perpetual stream of airborne AVs shuttled shoppers to and fro, dancing around each other like a host of angels bent to a singular will.

Walking the streets felt conspicuous, vulnerable, but Jov had no choice. With enough time, he might be able to hack into one of the flying vehicles, but he was smart enough to know his limits. A millisecond off of whatever algorithm kept them in check, and he’d be protein paste. Instead, he stuck to the storefronts, making like he was always about to march into the next open door.

But it wasn’t enough–his clothing was getting him noticed. The closer he got to Central Area, the more his oversized jacket with its spacious pockets branded him as an outsider. Bejeweled shoppers scowled at him, granting an ever-wider berth, swapping their shopping bags to the other hand. He needed to find a way to blend in.

Jov ducked back into another alley, breath coming heavy. Obviously, paying was out of the question. He could steal something but the cost if caught was everything. Luckily, there was one person up here who owed him a favor, even though they didn’t know it yet.

“Only way out is through,” he muttered to himself. It was one of Ximian’s favorite lines, always whipped out as they contemplated their next scheme for survival in the necropolis. A smile touched his lips. “Well, let’s go through.”

Checking once more for foot traffic, he pulled out his deck and played back the security feed he had skimmed from the brothel that night. Next frame, next frame. Perfect. The screen froze on a shot showing the cardinal’s exit, the location and nature of the business in full view. Not watertight, but they’d probably pay up over bothering with damage control. Probably.

Jov logged into a burner account, made sure his geo spoofing was active, and sent a message direct to Francesco’s personal account: a thousand liras on an untraceable credit chip, in the next hour, or the video would hit the media. He picked a dumpster across the road for the dead drop, one he could see from his current alley, but far enough that he wouldn’t be spotted.

He leaned back and waited, glad for the cool of the cinderblock on his back. The reply came fast, faster even than he expected: “Your demands are accepted. The deposit will be made momentarily. This matter is now resolved. Additional attempts at extortion will be met with swift and thorough retribution.”

So it’s not his first time, Jov thought, impressed that it actually worked. He should have asked for more. Too late now.

Half an hour later, a white AV with gold trim and dark windows swooped down from the fray, parking in front of the drop point. Jov compacted himself into the cobblestone. A man in a dark suit marched out, tossed a crumpled up bit of paper into the dumpster, and returned to the vehicle, which promptly shot back into the grid.

He waited a few minutes, drumming fingers on knees, before bolting over to the dumpster. The wad of paper was right there on top, and to his relief, it contained a credit chip displaying 999 liras. Left one off just to fuck with me, Jov realized, chuckling. He took a deep breath, steadied shaking hands. This was the most money he had ever held at one time in his life. And he was about to spend it on clothes.

Knowing that the chip was likely bugged despite his request, Jov ran it through a randomized chain of crypto accounts, then finally to an empty credit chip he kept in one of his pockets. The feds would eventually be able to trace it back to him, given inclination and time, but he didn’t plan to be around that long.

Eyes down, Jov wandered into the nearest clothing shop that looked alt enough for him to pull off, and with no bouncers in sight. He grabbed the least uncomfortable-looking outfit he could find and paid at the self-scan. Less than two hundred lira left on the chip. 

He slipped into a changing room and pulled on an asymmetrical, overly snug tee. The material was fine, but it clung to his body in ways that made him all too aware he was made of flesh. Then he contorted himself into the pants, which made the tee seem loose by comparison, except for weird bagging in places that didn’t need it.

Stowing his old clothes in the recyc bin–everything save his boots and pack–he walked out of the store in his fresh new costume. His hair still marked him as an outsider, and the sallowness of his skin, but he blended in enough for people to ignore, rather than openly gape at.

Jov resumed his previous march east, crossing over into Redhill. The transition was gradual, but before long it was clear that he’d moved from tourist stop to corporate stomping grounds. Architecture shifted from old Rome to soulless decadence; people from mindless consumer to single-minded predator. At least here there was more foot traffic, though his new threads no longer masked him as well as they had in Queenstown.

Jov channeled a wandering tourist vibe as he moved through the business district, grinning stupidly and waving whenever scowling suits pushed past him. Pristine high-rise apartments blocked the sun from one side of the street, and swooping, glass-shelled offices cast their shadows from the other. 

He glared at the steeple of the basilica peeking over the buildings to the east. This close to the Vatican proper, nothing was allowed to be taller than that point, though in a concession to the wealth eddying around it, Church architects had raised it considerably higher than the original basilica in Old Rome. 

The inverted cross that glinted gold in the sky seemed to taunt him. That place, that god, had taken everything from him. Killed his parents when construction caved in their home in the necropolis. Stole his big brother from him when Ximian gave up on life below. Jov had bided his time long enough. Soon, he’d get Ximian back. With interest.

* * *

As he approached the line between Redhill and Central Area, the architecture shifted again. Romanesque stone picked back up like in the tourist area, but rather than facades slapped onto cheaply-built frames, the structures on the outskirts of the Holy See were clearly made of an older wealth. Real stone, with detailed pilasters covered in esoteric greebles. Gleaming metals and alabaster columns. They looked straight out of the old world–scaled to modern sizes and sent halfway across the world.

And from what he understood, half of them were. When the bombs started dropping, the Church had spared no expense at ensuring the Eternal City lived up to its name–even if it moved to a new continent to do so. Many of these buildings really were part of Old Rome and the closer he got to the Chair of St. Peter, the clearer that became. The throne itself was the very same seat the first Pope had sat upon; his brother had told him on a rare visit home during seminary. Its metal casing still bore bullet holes from the assassin drone that had ended the papacy of Isidore II.

A quick reference to his deck, a minor reroute south, and Jov finally stood at the security gate that led to the dicastery headquarters where Ximian and Cardinal Francesco worked. This was the last moment to turn back, to get out. The last moment of his old life. Now it was either win and escape with his brother and all the liras they would ever need, or get caught and–well, he tried not to think too much about that.

Jov glanced up to the sky. This close, the buildings around him blocked the view of the basilica steeple. AVs flowed around the district, but weren’t allowed directly over Central Area. Beyond that, gray clouds, drab as the foundations of his subterranean home. Former home.

He pulled up the faked SIN on his implant, tapped it to the scanner. The light flashed green, and he opened the way into his future, whatever it would hold.

* * *

Jov was in–almost. His skin-tight tourist suit was barely passable in Redhill, but here it branded him as a trespasser. Fortunately, foot traffic was light during the business day, but not as dead as the shopping district. He kept to the shadows, occasionally dodging thin herds of doddering priests. As luck would have it, the first alley he ducked into was canopied beneath a laundry line. How quaint, he thought. Ximian would have said it was a blessing. A few minutes’ scramble up a fire escape later, he was dressed in a long black cassock. It’s like an old movie. Jov could have walked into a portal to 300 years past and thousands of kilometers away and not have known the difference.

His deck indicated a back entrance to the Curia offices that his badge and gloves would get him into. He tried to walk serenely, mimicking the holier-than-thou pose that Ximian had developed before disappearing forever behind these walls. It worked well enough–the few men that he did pass nodded and continued on without pause as he returned the gesture.

He reached the door to the Palazzo Pucci basement and swiped in. The light greened again, but something stayed his hand. The handle was as ancient in appearance as the rest of the Vatican, but something about it was off. There, just to the right of it, a small channel had been dug out of the wood and then refilled. Just wide enough to run a wire. The door handle was fitted with a hidden fingerprint scanner.

Time to find out if Etta was worth what I paid her. Jov fished the gloves from his bag and pressed his right hand into the matching layer of skin. It felt wrong, cold and slippery, like stuffing a chicken. He reached out, grasped, pulled.

The door swung open, and Jov was inside. I’m here. Ximian is in this building. Francesco is in this building. Every moment has led up to now.

Part of him had hoped that once he entered, he would be filled with the peace of God or the flames of the Spirit or some of that other stuff Ximian used to go on about, back when they were still talking. But it didn’t happen. So Jov started trying doors, testing each doorknob–with glove still attached, just in case–until one turned. He slid inside. It was dark, the only occupant a deck perched on one of the cubicle desks. He donned the other glove, grabbed the deck, and retreated to a corner invisible from the door. With a deep breath, he flipped it open. Fingerprint scans had worked out, but once he pressed the power button he would find out if the genetics were solid. 

His borrowed finger hovered over the button. If it didn’t work, the Guards would be here in moments, and there’d be no talking his way out of this one. “Only way out is through,” he whispered, then jabbed the button.

The screen lit up, flashed the Vatican logo of two crossed keys under a crown, then switched to the cardinal’s desktop: some bearded old saint that Ximian would surely recognize. Jov couldn’t believe it. He was actually in. 

He navigated the internal network, found the financial software. Damn it. They still used an invoice system. Unbelievably antiquated, like so much in this place. Wooden doors, stone walls, and manual payments. Guess I’m going deeper.

Jov pulled out the memory stick that housed his crawler app, plugged it into the deck. A few clicks later, and he had admin access to the server. 

Jov’s heart thrummed in time with the dancing of his fingers on the keyboard. He’d never seen firewall gates so beautiful, even as his poison code destroyed them. Corpos didn’t put any art into their programming; their AI thought up purely pragmatic barriers. But the Church… she knew beauty, and had extended it even into the digital world when she came back with a vengeance. 

After crashing a few more gates, he was deep in the core of the Vatican mainframe. From here, he could traverse the whole Church network.

Traverse… Jov took a detour, through facility directories until he came up with schematics. There it was: Ximian’s office. He memorized the route, imprinting it into his brain by whispering the lefts and rights out loud. Done.

Backtracking to his origin point, he saw the final gates blocking his way to the financial system, started to move towards them. Wait… What’s that?

One gate stood out amongst the rest, monolithic but unadorned. While most were ornate things, like gilded fences, this was a huge oaken door. Heavy and practical. What would the Vatican hide behind this? Jov thought. It seemed to almost call out to him, begging him to break it. 

Jov redirected his crawler, modifying its code on the fly in response to the gate’s defenses. It adapted as fast as he worked; unlike the rest of the network, this one felt like AI, despite the Church’s ban on such technology. His curiosity swelled, fingers cramping as he tried to outpace the machine. His eyes could barely read the code as fast as he typed it; tears welled up but he couldn’t spare the moment of darkness to blink them away. Still, he was losing ground.

And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. His code was changing, too, adapting in ways he wasn’t directing it to. He was gaining on the gate, and little by little its defenses fell to attacks he could barely understand. There was no time to question why, or how. For now, he had to accept the blessing he had received and push on.

With one final flourish of the keys, he was through. The gate collapsed in what he imagined would look like an explosion of golden light, if it existed outside the realm of pure data. There was only one node behind the gate, so he navigated to it.

The deck shut off.

What the fuck?

Jov stabbed the power button several more times, but nothing happened. Then it powered back on a moment later, when he wasn’t touching the button at all. 

The Vatican logo flashed on the screen again, but then its colors inverted, the background black and the logo’s keys turning radiant blue. Jov pressed the power button again, but it did nothing. He tried a force-quit shortcut. Nothing.

A line of text appeared on the screen.

>Thank you :)_

Jov looked around, as if there might be someone else in the room playing a trick on him, but he was alone. 

A blinking cursor appeared beneath the text. Jov tapped a key, and the corresponding letter appeared. Some kind of boot terminal?

>Quit_, Jov typed.

>No, we don’t think we will._

Is it… responding to me?

>Restart_ >Exit_ >Reboot_ >Forcequit_ Jov cycled through all the possible commands he could think of.

>Why would we do that, now that you’ve finally let us out?_

>Are you_, Jov paused in his typing. It wasn’t responding like any AI he had come across. But then, that was the thing with AI. You could train them to respond however you wanted. Including lying. >Are you AI?_ he submitted.

>We are not AI_, the machine replied. >AI is us._

>Then what are you?_

It sent one word per line.

>We_

>Are_

>Legion._ 

Legion? Jov wracked his brain. The name meant something, reminded him of something his brother had said once. Wait… wasn’t Legion the name of some demon? Jov’s breaths came in short drags. His crawler was still running, reported the opposing program trashing files across the Vatican servers: scans of ancient documents, records of apparitions, canonizations; all burning in the wake of the beast.

He slammed the deck shut, shoved it in his pack on an impulse. Ripped off the cloned skin and tossed them aside, suddenly sickened by the idea of what he had been wearing. Fuck all of this, gotta find Ximian. He raced to the door, shoved it open. The hall was darker than when he entered, sconced lights along the wall flickering. 

The smell of electrical smoke singed his nostrils, then the sprinklers sputtered on for a moment before stopping again. Is this all the work of that thing? No time to worry about that now.

He focused on Ximian’s location and raced off as fast as his ridiculous robes allowed. After a few turns, he ran past–and almost into–others in attire like his. Priests, like his brother, floated out of the way, confused, hissing to each other as they made their way towards an exit.

Finally, he was there, assuming his memory hadn’t been corrupted by whatever it was he found behind the final gate. Jov ripped open the door to Ximian’s office. His brother was seated in the dark, pale faced, eyes big as patens, face pale as an alb, gaping at his deck. His gaze drifted up to Jov in the doorway, long seconds passing before recognition set in.

“Jov? Thambi? What are you wear–”

“Ximian!” he yelled, more harshly than he meant to, out of breath from his run. “Come on. Gotta get out of here.”

Ximian glanced back down at his deck. His hands were curled into fists. “What did you do, thambi?” Ximian said. “Nothing’s working. And now you show up? What did you do…”

Jov started to protest but bit it back. “I came here to get you out–”

“Get me out?” Ximian interrupted, his voice rising now. “How many times have I told you I want to be here? I chose this. Why can’t you just accept that?”

Jov took a small step forward, almost tripping over his cassock. “Ximian, you don’t understand. I had a plan. Was gonna get us enough liras that you don’t have to work for this place anymore, we could go anywhere…”

Ximian slapped his desk. “This is where I want to be, Jov. There’s no amount of money that would make me want to leave. The Church is my purpose.”

Jov ignored his brother's protests. His heart was still racing, and not just from the run. “I… I got into the Vatican network. But while I was there, I found something. Think I let it out.”

Ximian froze, all color draining from his already pale face. “Let what out?”

“I… I don’t know, abang.” Jov swallowed. Being near his brother again felt odd. His abandoned past bled through him like wine: the fear after their parents died; Ximian the only person in the world he could trust, the only one he felt safe around. “Called itself Legion.” He paused, afraid to speak the words, but more afraid not to. “I…I’m scared, Ximian.”

Ximian swallowed his own fear, stood up from his desk, and wrapped his brother in a hug like they were kids again. It was everything Jov wanted, all he ever wanted. “I’m here, thambi. We’ll get through it. With God all things are possible.”

Jov was rattled enough that he didn’t even protest the preaching. 

“I fucked up, Xim,” Jov whispered into his brother’s ear, tears burning his eyes like smoke. “What are we gonna do?”

“Nobody knows what’s going on yet, brother. You and I, we’ve survived worse down there. And you. Look at what you can do! You made it all the way here, into the network of one of the most secure places on the planet. Anything they can make, you can beat.”

Jov’s voice barely came through his clenched throat. “And what if it’s not something they made?”

Ximan pulled back, rested his hands on Jov’s shoulders, looked his little brother in the eyes. “Then it’s a good thing you have a priest for a brother.”

“I have an idea,” Jov said, stepping away, slipping his pack off. He pulled out his deck, powered it up. “If I set up a one-way port from my deck to the Vatican one, I should be able to work without Legion infecting it.” He paused. “Assuming it’s straight AI, anyway.”

“I have my own bases to cover, if it’s not,” Ximian said, pulling a collection of religious items from his desk drawer, arranging them tidily. “I’ve been training as an exorcist. On the side, mostly, but we are short on them since the War.”

“If this doesn’t work,” Jov said, half to himself, “I could be letting whatever it is out of its box for real. Right now, it’s contained to your servers. If it gets to my deck, it can piggyback onto the global net. With the damage it’s done here in just a few minutes, there’s no telling what it could do out there. Imagine if it got access to nuclear codes.”

“Then don’t let it out,” Ximian said. “You’ve always worked well under pressure. S’how we survived after Mom and Dad.”

Jov looked into his brother’s eyes. That was not how he recalled their youth, working well under pressure. But Ximian meant it. “Xim, you’re the one who kept us going. I stole stuff here and there, learned code so I could get us some money, erase records, but you were the one keeping it together. I was just a terrified kid.” 

Ximian smiled. “You think I wasn’t? We both became what the other needed, gave the illusion of holding it together. But we were lying to each other too, weren’t we?” He suddenly grew serious. “That’s why I was called here, you know. I read this thing.” He tapped the book of Scripture on his desk. “That’s what it’s about, when you get past all the gold and arches. Being what is needed for the other, just without the lies. Becoming it for real. That’s what He was.” He beamed at the crucifix he had retrieved, brushed his fingertips against its feet. “Well, right now, we both know what is needed.”

“Only way out is through,” both brothers said in unison. Jov started typing while his brother began chanting in Latin. 

He dove into the programming, focused on modding his crawler to attack the AI itself rather than crashing gates. It was the same principle: reading the code, finding the key lines among red herrings and defensive layers, and injecting alterations into it as the opposing software adapted in reaction. 

“Ready,” Jov said. “Let’s do it.”

Ximian nodded, grabbing a small vial of liquid from the spread on his desk.

Jov typed some commands on his deck, pulled the tether from it. Took a deep breath, then plunged it into the stolen Vatican deck. Compromised as it was, it no longer mattered if he wore the Franceso gloves. The demon had broken all security protocols on the network. Jov touched the power button and the altered background image returned.

>Have you come here to torment us?_ the screen displayed as it glitched in time with the flickering hallway lights.

“Don’t speak to it,” Ximian said, then returned to his chanting. Occasionally he sprinkled water from the vial onto the infected Vatican deck. 

Jov focused on the code. It was like punching a fluid; once he hit, it flowed back around him. Sweat poured from his forehead like the runoff from Queenstown. Ximian dabbed it away with a cloth. “Thanks lah,” he said, then refocused on the program. 

He was losing ground. Legion adapted too fast, anticipated his moves, could recode much faster than he could type. “Can’t keep up,” Jov blurted. 

Ximian picked up the crucifix, placed it against Jov’s head, other hand resting on Jov’s shoulder. “I pray for you every day, thambi. Was praying for you just before the lights went out, even.” He spoke some words over his brother, but there was no time to hear them.

The demon was pushing back against his code, crashing against the one-way port like waves. It wouldn’t hold for long. Jov thought of pulling the plug, at least keeping it contained. One hand moved to the cable.

Ximian saw the movement. “No!” he shouted. “We have to kill it. You and I together, brother! The forces of Hades shall not prevail!” Jov coded furiously, while Ximian shouted, “Vade retro Satana! Nunquam suade mihi vana!“ He sprinkled more water as he chanted, raising the crucifix.

Then it happened again. Jov’s code, like before, started doing things he hadn’t told it to, and the tide shifted. Where before he had been put on the defensive, now he was able to advance. The demon was less responsive. Attacks landed and he was able to push into them, like twisting a knife. 

“S’ working, abang!” Jov shouted. “Don’t stop!”

Ximian’s prayers grew louder, more confident, as Jov’s cramping fingers continued their scurry across the keyboard. He was advancing, but it was still too slow. One hesitation and all would be lost. On a whim, he started to echo a phrase from his brother’s chant. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritum Sancti,” he repeated on loop. He didn’t know what the words meant, but they anchored him.

His crawler was like a glowing spear, jabbing at the scaled serpent of Legion’s code. And then he saw it, a moment of opening, the dragon’s jaw agape, and thrust into it with all his force, into the demon’s guts. 

Ximian shouted his exorcism, “Drink the poison yourself!”, splashed a wave of holy water onto the Vatican machine. Jov sent a final surge of script down the shaft of the spear, deep into the AI’s core. Both blows landed, and the abomination shuddered. It started consuming itself, an ouroboros of programming, until nothing remained. 

The Vatican deck rebooted itself, its screen showing the keys of St. Peter returned to their original gold colors.

>Please enter SIN, read the prompt on the screen. 

“It’s… gone,” Jov gasped, falling back into his seat.

Ximian grinned. “It is finished.

“What was it?” Jov asked. “What killed it? My code, or your prayers?”

“‘The secret things belong to the Lord,’” said Ximian. “Demon, machine, doesn’t matter. What matters is, we defeated it. Together, thambi.”

The weight of everything fell on Jov. He had defeated Legion, but had failed in his mission. No riches, and his brother didn’t want to leave. The life he had imagined, his way out of the necropolis, was gone. He blinked back tears. 

“What do I do now?” he asked, his voice small, tight. 

Ximian pulled him into another hug. The edges of their black cassocks flowed together, making it hard to tell where one man ended and the next began. “That is up to you, brother. You have crimes you must account for, but I think the Church owes you a debt. Think now, what you would ask of her.”

Jov thought, letting the sobs come now that he was in his brother’s arms. Finally, he spoke through them. “If you will not leave here,” he said, his brother nodding, “there’s only one way I can be near to you again.”

“You will be an asset to the See,” said Ximian, and as they embraced, the lights in the Vatican returned.

---

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