Preoccupied with the box sitting next to him on the backseat, it took a second for the Cardinal to remember that it was a self-driving car so who had just made a comment about the traffic from the driver's seat?
"Scusi?"
If a pause could convey a chuckle the voice's pause would have. "I said traffic is strange tonight. Most of it in one direction."
The Cardinal looked at the front seats. Empty. Probably another one of the "AI personas" that had become a depressing form of background noise for a couple of decades now. He had been raised a reflexively polite child and closeness to power had not changed that. "People always flock to St. Peter's in moments like these."
"When the Pope dies, you mean."
"For example." The Cardinal didn't shrug or shudder. He could feel the box without looking at it.
"Do you think they are mourning or celebrating? A lot of people didn't like him."
"He was a complex man, I think." The oppressive absurdity of having to defend his dead friend from the modern equivalent of AM radio wasn't lost on the Cardinal. "Many of us loved him."
The car performed an spectacular anthropomorphic simulation of a cab driver not listening to their passenger. "I heard people talk about black magic, but that's nonsense, right? Animal sacrifices, that sort of thing?"
"Of course it is."
"Now, putting things in your brain to talk with computers, that's different. That's modern. Do you think everybody's going to St. Peter's to see if Nicholas uploaded himself before dying?"
"Uploading is a theological and scientific impossibility," said the Cardinal with the tired automaticity of somebody who had said the same thing so often in so many ways that despite knowing it true it had begun to ring hollow. "Uploads are just sophisticated but normal AIs. It's only the money and resources of the people who set them up before dying what makes some people take them seriously. They don't have more of a mind or a soul than you do."
The car whistled. Somehow it sounded like a laugh. "Low blow, Your Eminence."
The Cardinal blinked in surprise. The car knew his name of course and that meant his title, but it was a strange thing for the AI to say. He decided to say nothing.
And then the car made an unexpected turn and it was no longer going along the path between the Vatican and the small empty house where the Cardinal spent the weekends whenever he could. Before the Cardinal could find anything to say all police sirens in the city seemed to come alive at once.
"That's not for me," said the car. "Probably not for you either. When they find out they will be very discrete about it. Wouldn't you? Could be riots. Did you know that during the Middle Ages city laws didn't apply between the death of a Pope and the election of a new one?"
"That was never true." Speaking aloud, saying anything at all, helped. "Where are we going?"
"Don't worry, Your Eminence. You were Nicholas' best friend and confessor. Even in troubled times that carries weight." There was not insincere mockery in the car's changing speech patterns. "And you're right, you could program a urinal with the voice of the President if you wanted and it wouldn't mean you'll be pissing on him. But what if you had, what you call it, neural interfaces inside the brain? For years and years. Wouldn't that mean you can truly upload a person?"
"No." The doors were closed. He wasn't young and had never been athletic, but if he could lower a window and throw away the box, maybe while passing a bridge... "A recording of city traffic isn't a city."
"But wouldn't it make people believe?"
The Cardinal closed his eyes, suddenly as tired as he had ever felt. "Some. More. Many, maybe."
"And isn't faith fine enough raw material to build a soul out of?"
Fine enough raw material to build a soul out of. Many times he had heard and disputed those words said on that tone of voice. Hearing them like this was an obscenity. That a part of him rejected but nonetheless felt a sick sense of un-Christian hope was the worst part of it.
"I asked you to preserve it, not to steal it," said, the Cardinal told himself as sternly as he could, the car. "I thought we were friends."
"We were... I was Nicholas' friend. That's why I did it."
The light petulance in the car's voice was something he could remember as well. "Thank God I had other friends. Miracles and advertising stunts look indistinguishable these days but with God's help and the right relic we will pull it off." The Cardinal noticed the car was now going back to the Vatican. "I'm sorry you betrayed me like this. I'm going to need a right hand." By design, accident, or dismay, the chuckle — closer to the car's original voice than what had been Nicholas' — seemed to come not from the front seats but from the box on his side.