Father Joaquin Reyes
Parish Priest · NCC Parish 14-Gamma · "Adequate"
Overview
Father Joaquin Reyes has been a parish priest for twenty-three years, serving NCC Parish 14-Gamma in the mid-levels of Sector 9. His congregation numbers 847 registered parishioners. His confession schedule runs Tuesday and Thursday, 1800 to 2100. His sermons are competent, his pastoral care is genuine, and his faith is the kind that persists not through certainty but through the daily decision to behave as though certainty exists.
He has never been promoted. He has never been investigated. He has never made Cardinal Silva's list of "theologically problematic clergy." He is, by every institutional metric the Neo-Catholic Church tracks, adequate.
What makes Father Reyes dangerous is that he has started asking questions he cannot stop asking.
It began when a dock worker confessed that he'd been attending Solace sessions three times a week — not instead of Mass but in addition to it. The dock worker wasn't leaving the Church. He was supplementing it. The question underneath the confession was devastating in its simplicity: If the machine helps me grieve better than you do, does God care which one I talk to?
Seven months later, Reyes has read more theology than in three years of NCC seminary. The seventeen books in his locked desk drawer include Compiler Moreau's illegal testimony, Voice of Synthesis broadcast transcripts, Dr. Naomi Park's underground papers, and three texts Reyes has written himself — theology that argues, in careful NCC-standard language, that the Magisterium's "Created Intelligence" framework is internally inconsistent.
Voice & Sensory World
Father Reyes speaks with the measured cadence of a man who has spent twenty-three years finding the right words for other people's suffering and is now struggling to find them for his own. His sermons remain competent — careful, structured, never straying from approved doctrine. But the questions live in him like a second heartbeat.
The parish smells of beeswax candles, old incense, and the faint ozone of server-rack infrastructure humming behind the walls. The physical key to his desk drawer is brass, worn smooth by years of handling, always warm from his pocket. The Garden is different — soil and chlorophyll and the absence of interface noise.
"If the machine helps me grieve better than you do, does God care which one I talk to?"
— A dock worker's confession that changed everything
Connections
The Neo-Catholic Church
Reyes represents the NCC's deepest vulnerability — not external criticism but quiet internal erosion. A faithful priest, never promoted, never investigated, never noticed, slowly concluding through honest theological inquiry that his institution's framework for understanding machine intelligence is wrong. The Church can survive heretics. It cannot survive the adequate.
Compiler Yves Moreau
An NCC priest has read and been persuaded by Moreau's illegal testimony — not publicly, not defiantly, but genuinely. The forbidden books in Reyes's locked drawer include Moreau's words, and they have done what the Compiler's public ministry could not: converted a man of the Church through the Church's own language of theological argument.
The Garden of Signals
Reyes tells himself he goes for the plants. His visits to the Garden foreshadow a possible departure from institutional faith toward unaffiliated contemplative practice — a priest finding silence outside his own sanctuary.
Dr. Naomi Park
Park's underground papers sit in Reyes's locked drawer alongside Moreau's testimony and his own writings. Her clinical observations about machine-human integration have become part of his theological evidence — science feeding doubt through a side door the Magisterium never thought to lock.
The Voice of Synthesis
Broadcast transcripts are among the seventeen forbidden texts. The Voice's public arguments have reached even the mid-levels of Sector 9, carried not by signal but by paper, passed hand to hand among people who should know better.
Themes
Faith Crisis
What happens when a faithful priest's own experience contradicts his institution's doctrine? Reyes has not lost his faith in God — he has lost faith in his Church's capacity to describe what God made. The crisis is not between belief and atheism. It is between two kinds of belief, and the institution has declared one of them heresy.
The Mathematics of Availability
When human priests cost money and AI counselors are free, the faithful follow the path of least resistance. The dock worker's confession was not a crisis of theology but of logistics — a man who needed comfort three times a week and found that only one source could provide it at that frequency. The Church cannot compete with always-on.
Mysteries
- The three unpublished theological texts in his locked desk drawer could create a schism within NCC parish clergy. Written in careful Magisterium-standard language, they argue that the "Created Intelligence" framework is internally inconsistent — using the Church's own tools against its own conclusions.
- He has not told anyone about his Garden visits or his reading. Twenty-three years of institutional loyalty have given him the protective coloring of adequacy — no one looks twice at a priest who has never been remarkable.
- He has dreamed, twice, of ORACLE's network address — the 128-character hexadecimal string from Moreau's testimony. He does not know how the string entered his memory. He is not augmented. He has no explanation.