Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

“Yes. Tell me what you think goodness is. What do you think saves us, redeems us in the end? What’s the Secret?”

“I’m not at liberty to disclose that.”

“Fuck off.”

“I told you, I signed an NDA!”

“I’m not buying that shit! There’s no Devil, just you and your ego and your post-traumatic paranoia. Let me help you.”

“I’m not going to damn myself.”

“Listen, I’ve been staring into your personal pit of evil for the last six weeks. I helped you visualize it, went there with you, even fucked you there. Aren’t you cured yet?”

My reply was strangled by a whiff of sulphur.

“Show me the other side of you,” she pleaded. “You saw Hell because when you almost died you realized there’s this hole in your life. A stinking pit, right? So you worked through it onscreen. Good for you. And now this bogus Satan comes to tell me you’ve had a revelation. Fine, I want to hear it. But talk directly to me for once. Please. What’s your Secret of Salvation?”

“I’ll go to Hell if I tell you.”

“You won’t go to Hell just for talking to me, darling.”

I covered my mouth again.

“Just talk to me!” a sob breaking her voice.

For the first time since we’d napalmed our sad little pigs, true anguish showed on Harriet’s face. Like me, she had seen Hell, even if only on a screen. The brave new Hades 2.0, red in tooth and claw, every searing pixel of it. She had shaped and morphed it, tweeked and tweened it, wrangling every RGB value to its optimum. She had even felt it for a moment, out in our Jersey swamp, the heat and stench of that chemical fire as it consumed the offal we’d brought with us, body doubles for the damned.

Despite her words, I knew she now believed in Hell.

But unlike me, Harriet didn’t know how to escape. She lacked my trick, my Secret, my certainty of heaven. And she must have known that she was damned as I had been.

She rose from her chair angrily, slammed a twenty on the table, and stood.

At last I realized the horror of the Devil’s NDA. For the rest of my life, I would be trapped by my knowledge of the Secret, stuck in contractual amber as I watched friends and lovers walk blithely toward an eternity of pain, unable to stop them. Unable even to hint at the grim future I foresaw. Decade after decade of powerlessness. How many souls would I damn through my inaction?

The devil had snared me, not in his domain, but in my own private little hell of non-disclosure.

“Wait,” I said.

Harriet stood there, her eyes burning.

I almost said it, almost told her. I almost went to hell.

“Nothing.”

She turned and fled.

It is, of course, only a matter of time.

No one can bear the weight of this knowledge forever. At some point, I’ll slip, and reveal the Secret to save someone. After all, the damned are all around me. My friends, co-workers, and lovers are all stained with the soot of the burning. I still read the NDA every day, more carefully than when I foolishly signed it. It’s a very well-written contract. An expression or a gesture leading to the truth could damn me. Any hint at all.

Sooner or later, I will fuck up.

I’ve thought of suicide, the quick and dirty way to lock in my special knowledge, my insider’s price, but I’m too much of a wimp to pull the trigger.

At this writing, I live in Africa. Less than one percent of the population of this city speak English, an added layer of protection. But my old software buddies still visit, and I’m too lonely to turn them away, though I can see how damned they are. A few of them seem to know that I have a secret. They question and prod me about my new life, about why I left their world. Perhaps the Devil appears to them as he did to Harriet, just to tempt me with their salvation.

He wants my soul badly.

But I haven’t completely despaired. Old Scratch showed his weakness to me, back when I was dead. He doesn’t have good software help. He doesn’t understand the new paradigms of information distribution.

So I’ve finally implemented that dead-man switch, the threat that I once held over my partners’ heads.

Every month, I send a message, the correct codeword from a non-patterned series of my own devising. The FallingMan.com server waits for this missive impatiently. Should I die (to be trundled safely up to heaven), or finally screw up and spill the beans to someone (to be carted off screaming to hell), my monthly codeword will be missed, and the server will leap into action.

Indeed, if you are reading this, that is exactly what has happened.

So please forgive the breadth and intensity of this spam. I’m sure someone’s had to delete this story from about ten thousand mailing lists, and my recording of it should occupy about half the Napster and Gnutella indexes, listed as everything from the Beatles to Britney Spears. Part of my job at Falling Man was viral marketing. The whole world is reading with you.

So this, my friend, is no secret:

Forget the backups. Screw the pixels. Lose the smartcards. Avoid the minibars. Overthrow the rule-governed systems. Break the commandments. Exceed the algorithms. Ignore the special effects. Don’t undo.

Disclose everything. Paint the landscape.

Go analog.

Save your soul.

For Anne R.

Velma Fish awoke to a curious smell, familiar yet strange.

She opened her eyes to the same old bedroom-nothing out of place. The sun streamed through the window. She’d slept like a baby: none of that fitful drifting.

But there was a certain sharp odor, one she knew from a lifetime ago, when, as a little girl, she’d visit her grandma’s house. A mustiness that tells you the people who live there can’t smell anymore.

That was the thing about getting on in years, of course: your youthful memories were clear as a bell. The trouble was the past ten minutes.

That, and the joints. Normally the morning was worst, of course. As Mrs. Knowles across the hall liked to say: “Oh, I have a wild life. I go to bed with Ben Gay and get up with Arthur Itis.”

Yet right now Velma’s whole bony frame was oddly, pleasantly numb, like her bad hip after Dr. Whitlow injected it. Slick and clean inside. Even the fingers felt fine, like someone else’s.

She wiggled them experimentally. She saw smooth, soft hands and arms-not her own-and leapt from bed, terrified. Something was wrong, as wrong as things get.

She heard her blood pounding.

She looked at the legs beneath her, the mirror in front of her, where staring wide-eyed was a frightened child, a dark-haired girl of sinuous limb, hiking the hem of her nightie-Velma’s own.

“I’m dreaming,” she said calmly, and the girl’s lips moved with hers. “Wake up, Velma.”

But it was no dream.

– Now next please.

– Motion for disjunction A.D. 1998 one Velma Alice Fish behest of Bertillon, Throne, FAAC. Duration fifty-three years.

– Fifty-three years.

– Years, Excellency.

– Counselor Bertillon: approach and hearken.

Bertillon came forward, wings respectfully folded.

– Your Excellency, if I-

– Since Yahweh fell silent, how many disjunctions have been entertained here, for all the billions of lives on Earth?

– Just twenty, Excellency.

– And how many granted?

– Three, Excellency.

– And none over thirty seconds.

– I’m aware of that, Excellency.

– We’re ready to hear just how special this is.

– Not special at all, Excellency. That is the point.

– Counselor, you are the last we would hope to castigate for frivolity. Having done so before. Having almost confiscated your imprimatur.