“You know, I’ve always had a problem with the phrase intelligent design,” Archbishop Yoon said.
The android hosting Yoon Suk-kyu looked nothing like him: it was thin and pale and delicate where he was big, tanned, and broad-faced. But the host managed to relay Yoon’s tired posture with convincing accuracy. In Seoul, it was very late. Judging by the empty shape in the android’s right hand, he was drinking a very big cup of coffee. He gestured with it as he spoke.
“God isn’t just intelligent. God is a genius. He’s the genius of geniuses – the inventor of genius.”
The bishopric glanced at each other, then at Derek. The android took a sip of invisible liquid. Beside Derek, the gynoid tilted her head at it. It was the first time all afternoon that she’d looked anything like alive.
“And while humans may be God’s most beloved creation, made in His image, we’re still only a replica of that image. A copy.”
“And these machines are copies of copies,” Archbishop Undset said.
“Yes, exactly. Mimesis. Shadows on the wall of the cave. But without God’s eternal flame, we humans would not have sparks of genius at all. And that’s all they are, sparks. Just little flickers of cleverness. We can’t reflect God’s brilliance very consistently. Paul says it best: we see as through a glass, darkly.”
Derek looked down at the report he’d spent all night on. He’d taken a brief nap starting at five that morning after doing a final format. Now he realized that all the shiny infographics and all the expensive fonts on the Internet would never make his data meaningful to these people and their God.
“Imperfect and inconsistent as we are, we managed to create these amazing things, and they possess an artificial intelligence. And it, too, is imperfect and lacking in grace. Just as we lack God’s discernment, it lacks our discernment.”
The android looked exceedingly pleased with itself. Archbishop Undset glared at it. The other archbishops shuffled through their files and looked at it with only the corners of their eyes. Derek began to wonder if perhaps there wasn’t something other than coffee sloshing around in Archbishop Yoon’s cup.
“So what I hear you saying,” Derek was careful to reframe Yoon’s point before proceeding from what he’d thought it was, “is that we shouldn’t worry too much about how intelligent the humanoids are. Because it’s a miracle they even exist at all. We should just be grateful for what we’ve managed to create.”
“Exactly,” the android hosting Yoon said. “Besides, they’re only being developed for the Rapture, anyway. It’s not like they’re a piece of consumer technology.”
Derek had heard this argument, before. He called it the Post-Apocalyptic Cum-Dumpster Defence. It came up whenever he pointed out holes in the humanoids’ programming. Who cared if they were buggy? All the good people of the world would be gone, anyway. Only the perverts and baby-killers and heathens would be left behind. They’d just have to suck it up and hope their post-Rapture companions never went Roy Batty on them.
“Don’t you see the contradiction, there?” Derek asked. “We’re building these things to help people, but we don’t really care if they aren’t helpful. What if they malfunction? What if the failsafe fails?”
Now the bishopric just looked annoyed. Zeal and daring had gotten them this far: far enough to raise the funds to assemble groundbreaking technologies like graphene coral bones and memristor skins and aerogel muscle into something resembling a human being. But now that they had to make sure it actually worked, their energy had mysteriously run out. They had been working on this project for the last twenty years, since the moment Pastor Jonah LeMarque had asked them what they would do if they really took the Rapture seriously. They’d been idealistic young ministers then, just open-minded enough to admit some science fiction into their fantasies of fire and brimstone. Now they were tired. Most of them were fat. They had kids, and some of those kids had kids. They didn’t care about the Chinese Room, they cared about the nursery. They cared about the quake. They took the seventy-foot freefall of the Cascadia fault line as a sign of the End.
On her tablet, Susie was writing something. The same four words, over and over.