Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

The look in Harriet’s eyes dampened my pyromania for a moment. What was I doing, working so hard to make Hell look better? How much pain would I have caused by the time Hades 3.0 came along, augmenting as I had the tortures of a multitude of lost souls?

But then I remembered: I was avoiding my own damnation. My motivation was enlightened self-interest, the fulcrum of a better world.

Harriet and I fucked in the production van while the inferno waned. The smell of cooking meat made us wildly hungry, and the late-August heat channeled the soot and ash that covered us into tiny black rivers of sweat. For a few minutes, we were demon lovers, savage and inhuman.

And Harriet wept, filthy and condemned, all the way back to Manhattan.

Despite ourselves, we’d gotten the footage we needed. Frame-by-frame analysis revealed how the pigflesh charred while the greedy napalm burned, the pigs’ innards curling out to embrace the flame, providing fuel from within. My programmers refined the process to a simple algorithmic dance, which writhed in perpetuity like a blazing Jacob’s ladder, an infinite meal encountered by a ceaseless appetite. Soon we had hellfire on tap.

It gave us all nightmares-even the programmers, who didn’t know our client’s business model. But it looked very good on TV.

A few weeks of tweaking later, we were done.

The day we delivered, Harriet and I went out for a celebratory drink.

“Did the client pay you?” she asked.

I nodded. True to our contract’s terms, I’d received a FedEx that afternoon, the Secret of Damnation printed out in a one-page summation no longer than a pitch for an action movie. The whole thing would have fit easily on one of those big-sized post-its. I had read it twice, then folded it up and carefully placed it in my breast pocket. I would burn it that night, after one more read. It seemed simple enough, but I didn’t want any loopholes or trick language screwing up my trip to heaven.

“Yeah,” I said. “The project’s all done.”

I’d already paid Harriet off with cash out of my own pocket, just like everyone else on the job. And a healthy bonus for not squealing to my partners that I was working on the side. But from the look in her eye, she wanted more now.

“Was it a lot of money?” she asked.

“Well, not money, really.”

“I didn’t think so.”

I coughed into my beer. “You know I’m strictly non-disclosure on this.”

“Of course.”

We drank for a while. We were still lovers, but barely so. Nothing had ever come close to those minutes in New Jersey, enveloped by the grime of a new abyss.

“I think,” she said, “that I’m finally going to take that vacation I keep talking about.”

“Africa?” I said weakly, careful not to inflect my voice with any enthusiasm.

“Yeah,” she said. “Africa. Just me, some paint and a few brushes. I’m going strictly analog for a year, maybe two. Like going native. No computers for a while.”

“I see.” I couldn’t believe she was saying this, so soon after I’d read the Secret.

“No Photoshop, no modeling software. Just real objects to look at and to paint. Pigment and white canvas. Sky and landscapes.”

“Sounds… nice,” I said flatly.

“So,” she asked, “is it simple?”

“Is what simple?”

“The Secret of Damnation.”

My hand went to my breast pocket, a sinking feeling hitting me like the NASDAQ in freefall. “How the hell did you know about that?”

“He told me. He came to me and told me what he paid you.”

“That fucker.”

“So I want a percentage. Tell me the Secret.”

“I can’t.”

“Just part of it. Give me a clue.”

“I signed an NDA, Harriet. I can’t even give you a hint. If I tell, I go to Hell.”

She shrugged, laughed as if she’d only been kidding.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to put you in breach of contract.” A pause, a wicked smile. “But it’s pretty straightforward, right?”

“Harriet! Stop.”

“But-”

“No hints, no adjectives, no information. Nada.” I put my hands over my mouth.

“Okay,” she said slowly, swirling one finger around the lip of her glass flirtatiously. “But if I was doing something, something bad? Bad enough to get me sent to Hell, for instance. Could you give me a sign?”

“Like scratch my nose with my right index finger?”

“Yeah, you could.”

“No, I could not. Harriet, this is the Devil we’re talking about,” I said. “Not some jealous boyfriend I can hide from down in Miami. He’s the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Hades, and if I fuck up he’ll come and carry me away screaming to Hell. You know, the one we just created?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Whatever.”

A silent moment elapsed.

“But is it a big thing?” she asked playfully. “Or just a detail?”

I shut my eyes, locked both hands over my face. I didn’t want any clues to pass over my visage-agreement or denial, warmer or colder. I tried to think of the latest virus hoax, the closing prices of Falling Man stock over the last week, anything to occlude the fatal knowledge in my mind.

Despite these efforts, I clearly remembered the Secret of Damnation. The simplicity of the idea, the easy charm of it. I could have explained it to Harriet in two minutes.

“Come on, relax,” she said. “I don’t believe any of it anyway.”

“Yes, you do,” I said from behind the curtain of my hands.

She snorted. “It’s obvious what’s going on here. This all just started out as self-indulgent therapy for you. You’re a software über-geek who thought you were king of the world, until you almost died. Mortality wasn’t pretty, and worse, it was way out of control. So you decided to deal with the post-traumatic stress the only way you know how. You decided to domesticate the afterlife into a software project. It’s so predictable and lame. You hire a few coders and artists to put your near-death hallucination-clearly inspired by the Tribulation Alley burn-onto a nice, safe computer screen. There, you can adjust its frame rate and resolution, play with its aspect ratio and palette. Then you burn it onto a disk, and you think you’ve got eternal life now. It’s pathetic. You’ve reduced heaven and hell to pixels, for God’s sake.”

“No,” I insisted. “What we made, it’s really Hell. I swear it is.”

“It’s nothing but a screen-saver!” she shouted. “By definition: some nice graphics that do nothing!”

“Harriet, I instant-messaged you from beyond the grave, remember? And you just said that you met the Devil, for Pete’s sake!”

“You messaged me from a County General Hospital in LA, you fuck. I checked the timing. You’d come out of your coma by the time I got your message.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I called them. You were already ambulatory.”

“They made a mistake. Or maybe it’s a time zone thing. I woke up after I messaged you, I swear.”

“LA’s three hours behind us. Any mistake would have worked the other way around.”

“What about the Devil? You said he appeared to you.”

“The Devil, sure. You hired some cute actor-some very cute actor, I might add-to mess with my head. What, did you think I’d fuck you again for the Secret of Damnation? Was this whole thing a way to get in my pants from the beginning?”

“No, it was a way to get out of Hell.”

She laughed again, but the sound was dry and ragged now. “Listen, I don’t know whether you’re pulling some elaborate hoax on me, or if you really believe all this. Either way, you’re totally out of your mind. But I’ll still take the bait, if that’ll make you happy. Tell me, what’s your idea of salvation?”

“Salvation?”