Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

“You mean…?”

“Yes, alas,” the Devil lamented. “Hell no longer looks good on TV. Nor even in reality.”

It was true.

We soared over the damned, their voices crying in a great wail of pain. Although we were above the tongues of the flame, the heat clung to me like fishhooks. Every square inch of epidermis felt like sunburned flesh sprayed with jalapeño juice. And the smell was far worse than the sulfur we all know from rotten eggs. It was of a purer species: fifth-grade chemistry set sulfur, though tinged with a darker, murkier scent, like a dead rat behind the wall. The stench was awful even from our lofty height. I can’t imagine what it was like inside that pit of fire.

But Old Scratch was right. The visuals were very last-century. Gouts of hellfire shot across the damned in big tacky bursts, as if some Coney Island flame-breather were running around down there. And the flowing rivers of flame were so Discovery Channel: turgid and crusted with solidifying earth on top. Nothing halfway as cool as the boiling-oil algorithms that Falling Man had created for the prequel to Death Siege, and that was just a Showtime original. We’d devised a mesmerizing and viscous black liquid all run through with scintillating veins of sharp crimson, like a negative of a bloodshot eye texture-mapped onto flowing blobs of mercury.

And the Hadean backdrop of reddened craggy mountains was totally pre-fractal. I’ve seen scarier coral.

“This looks like a heavy metal video from the early eighties,” I opined, blowing my nose from the heat.

“So you’ll help me?”

“I want a deal memo first,” I said.

Naturally, he had his paperwork already in hand.

Now, this was not your basic Daniel Webster-style deal with Beelzebub-swapping my soul for unlimited wealth or devilish charm. The Devil had been priced out of the geek-soul market. Vast riches were at that point pretty unremarkable for anyone with a software background. Hell, geeks can even get chicks these days. Satan couldn’t find anyone good to do the work, because he simply had nothing we wanted.

This facet of the New Economy no doubt appalled the most beautiful of former angels, and had thus far stymied his upgrade efforts (uncleverly code-named: “Hades 2.0”).

Until I came along.

You see, I wasn’t totally dead.

I was having what’s known as a “near-death experience.” My singed but not irredeemable corpse was in the back of a LAFD ambulance right now, headed toward probable reanimation at County General. But instead of the usual approaching white light that goody-goodies enjoy, I was getting a sneak preview of the Other Place. (We don’t hear so much about those, do we? I figure it’s a media selection thing-visions of hell don’t get you on Oprah.) Soon, I was going to return to the living, whether I took the Devil’s offer or not. But I had seen what lay in store.

“So no money, no gnarly magic powers?” I complained as I scanned his contract. “What exactly do I get for helping you?”

“In exchange for your help with my look-and-feel issues, you will receive certain highly proprietary information.”

“Microsoft source code? I knew that guy was on your side.”

“No, something far more valuable,” the Devil whispered. “The Secret of Damnation.”

“The what?”

He sighed, and all drama left his voice. “The secret of how not to wind up in hell, imbecile.”

“It’s a secret? Isn’t it like a sin and forgiveness thing? I mean, it all looks very Judeo-Christian down here.”

“Young man, it’s not that simple. Because of your cultural background, you’re merely seeing the Judeo-Christian, uh… front-end. But Hell has many facets, many aspects.”

“So this is just the Judeo-Christian interface?”

“Yes, but the Secret of Damnation is universal,” the Devil concluded. “The deeds and ideas that doom the soul are the same everywhere.”

“And this information is proprietary?”

He nodded. “Only God and I know the source code. You mortals are mere end-users.”

“That’s harsh.”

“And believe me,” the Devil said, “salvation grows harder to achieve every day.”

I looked back over my life, and wondered what-besides my casual agnosticism, rampant Napster piracy, and willing participation in the commercialization of Xmas-could have damned me. It wasn’t immediately obvious. My recent near-death had made me realize that I was somewhat shallow. (I’d sort of known that anyway.) But I didn’t think I was really evil.

I could always try to be a better person once this bad dream was over. Give to charity. Be a Big Brother. Pay the Falling Man pixel-jocks another buck an hour. But what if that didn’t tip the scales?

I remembered the terrible heat of the flames. However visually cheesy and culturally specific, a real trip to Hades meant pain for eternity. And pain never looks good on TV.

I also realized that I could leverage the subsidiary value of the Secret of Damnation. Once I knew the Secret, I could spread the word. Start a new religion with guaranteed results. A new, streamlined religion for the new century. Skip the rituals and dogma, and get straight to the part about not going to Hell!

Now there was a business model.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal. You’ll get the best infernal front-end this side of Fireblood IV. Just tell me the Secret.”

“First,” he said, “you must sign this.”

Damn, I thought when I saw the document. An NDA.

Now, I’ve signed about a thousand non-disclosure agreements in my day. In the software world, every meeting, every negotiation, even the most tedious of product demonstrations begins with this harmless and generally meaningless ritual. “We promise not to tell anyone what we learn here. Blah, blah, blah.” If you made a giant map of every non-disclosure agreement ever signed, with a node for each software company and a connecting line for each NDA-rendering the whole New Economy as a sprawling net of confidentiality-any point would be reachable from any other within a few jumps: six degrees of non-disclosure.

But this was the NDA from Hell.

One peep about the nature of the Secret-verbal revelation, gestural hints, Pictionary clues, publication in any media yet to be invented throughout the universe and in perpetuity-and I would be back down here pronto and permanently. Damned.

This was the hitch, the gotcha that Old Scratch always puts in his contracts. I was going to have to keep my mouth shut in a big way.

But I signed. Like I said, it was pure reflex.

And then I got to work.

The first order of business was getting an art director. Hades 2.0 was primarily a graphics upgrade, so high-quality pixel help was essential. I decided on Harriet Kaufman, a freelance artist who’d worked with Falling Man before, and who could be trusted not to tell anyone else at the firm about my little side project.

My body was alive by now-a shot of adrenaline had restarted my heart-and I was comatose in a hospital bed. Now only semi-dead, Hades had grown a bit fuzzy around me, but I could still function down here. To get me started quickly, the Devil let me borrow a machine with a fast net connection.

A buddy search revealed that Harriet was online, so I instant-messaged her. It turns out that my immortal soul types faster without my corporeal fingers in the way, and with better punctuation and accuracy.

‹thought you were dead!!› Harriet responded.

‹Nope, just near-dead. I’ve got some work for you.›

‹didn’t you catch on fire or something? you’re in the hospital, right?›

‹Just singed. Still comatose, actually. But I’m working remotely, from Hell.›

‹LA?›

‹No. The Hell. But I’ll be back in NY soon. And while I was down here, I got a job.›