Diabolus Read Free

been dumbstruck. The grand plan, according to Pope Leo, was to take advantage of humanity’s beliefs in a greater power. If there was indeed a greater power, one of good and of light, there had to be an opposite. Satan. Lucifer. Mephistopheles. The Devil. While the Catholic Church had been in a coma, Leo explained, Satan had not taken a vacation. In fact, the Evil One had ramped up his efforts to delude God’s children to get them to turn away from the light.
    Technology wasn’t evil, according to Leo’s plan, but using it for evil or immoral purposes was a sin. The Church would finally move away from its stance against evolution, and embrace it as part of God’s plan. The Church would use technology to wage war against Satan in many ways, the most important being to use technology like neural jacks, holotainment, networked learning centers, and netcasts to fight the growing influence of evil. The next step in human evolution was melding machines and man together in their journey to promote the Lord God, reaching out to the billions of others who had already turned to technology as their religion.
    That would take time, according to Leo, and there wasn’t much sensationalism in it. That’s where Bishop Salvatore Domenico Antonelli came in. There were reports all across the planet, according to Leo, of humans who were still being tormented by the evil one and his demons. Some of the possessions were of the spiritual nature, while some were emotional, and some were technological. Bishop Antonelli’s new job would be to travel the world and visit each case, to see for himself. He was to use his knowledge and his learning as a man of the cloth to determine whether or not these cases were valid. Should they not be valid, Salvatore would be required to use the powers of the Church, including the Papal Credit Link he carried on a chain around his neck, to resolve the problem.
    For the person or persons that Salvatore would evaluate, any physical, mental, or emotional ailments that could be cured with modern medical science would be attended to. It would, promised Leo, give the Church some needed publicity, and positive publicity at that. Gone were the dark ages after the turn of the century that had put a dark cloud over the Vatican and the rest of the faithful and caused them to migrate towards atheism or other faiths. Bishop Antonelli would begin a new era for the Catholic Church. Money was no object, and could not be used by Salvatore as an excuse for failure. There were almost no diseases or maladies that couldn’t be cured with proper first-world medical technology and medicines, including the ones originating in the mind. Even emotional traumas could be resolved with the neural jack implants and expensive memory therapy.
    But the bombshell would be the cases that weren’t curable by mundane means. Bishop Antonelli hadn’t heard the word exorcism but one time in his fifty years of service to the church. It had been in a seminary class about Roman Catholic history. He asked Pope Leo to repeat himself twice when the plan for the incurables had been explained to him.
    “You will be the exorcist, and drive the demons from these unfortunate persons,” Leo had said, a small smile on his lips.
    “An exorcist?” Salvatore had asked.
    “Yes, Salvatore. You have access to the preliminary Vatican network. I’ve tasked the scholars to digitize all the works involving exorcisms as their first priority to make your task easier.”
    “But… Your Holiness, I know nothing about performing exorcisms!” Salvatore exclaimed.
    “Think of it as on-the-job training, my son,” Leo replied. “Not every case will be an exorcism. You have Papal authority to spend whatever credits are necessary to help the majority of cases reach a positive conclusion. We will, of course, make sure you receive public network coverage. We want the Church to look good, to attract the faithful, Salvatore, not be the laughing stock of the world for