Sympathy for the Devil (23 page)

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.

Harriet responded.

The
Hell. But I'll be back in NY soon. And while I was down here, I got a job.>

are
dead, and you set up some sort of dead-man switch, like you always talked about.>

I winced when I saw these words. I had always claimed to have a dead-man switch installed deep in Falling Man's system, in case the other partners decided to get rid of me. My story was that if I didn't type in a special code once a week, my dead-man program would recognize my absence and activate, rampantly destroying all the company's stored data. It was insurance, in case I ever found myself locked out of the office, or worse, cut out of the stock options. The truth was, however, I'd never bothered to implement the dead-man software. It was too much trouble. After all, as with nuclear weapons, a credible threat of massive retaliation was sufficient to maintain the peace.

Harriet continued:

was
so nasty, I guess.>

I briefed Harriet, explaining who the client was and what he wanted, but saying nothing about the payment plan. After our little discussion, I decided to wait until I was walking the earth again before I made any more hires. The last thing I needed was a load of people pestering me about the afterlife. I had that non-disclosure agreement to worry about, after all.

A few hours later, my eyelids started to flicker, and I found myself in the demimonde between an LA hospital room and my Hell cubicle. The Devil, like some gorgeous and jocular supervisor, came over to shake my hand and say goodbye.

"When do I get the Secret?" I interrupted.

"After delivery. Just don't get hit by a bus before then."

"I'll be careful."

"And don't forget my little non-disclosure clause," he added.

"Mum's the word."

He smiled cruelly at my show of confidence. I could see in his eyes that he fully expected me to fail, to spill the beans and wind up in his clutches for eternity. I started to say something brave.

But then the netherworld faded, and I was back. Bright lights, stiff bedclothes, and thundering unstoppably into my awareness: a world of pain. It turns out that even first-degree burns can take you to the extremes of agony.

I gurgled a scream, and flailed my arms. Someone grabbed my hand, and I heard a call for morphine.

So now I know what Heaven feels like, too.

Harriet and I did good work together.

For Hell's new lava, we used a liquid motion package designed by these hydrofoil designers in Germany. Extending its parameters with a little code of our own, we set the lava's viscosity to crazy--our lakes of fire hopped as lively as a puddle in a Texas hail storm. Cruel geyser heads lurked below the surface, periodically erupting to scatter a scalding mist upon the cruel abysmal wind. Harriet colored the lava an ominous dark red, texture-mapped with scanned photos of my still-scabby burns and run through with sinuous veins of eye-gouging electric crimson.

We decided to go fractal with the mountains. Each pointy crag was sharp enough to scratch a diamond, each lacerating jut of rock serrated with infinitely recessing edges-within-edges, razor-fine down to the microscopic level. You could cut yourself just looking at the stuff.

We also went fractal with the Styx 2.0, making it infinitely crooked, infinitely long. A boundless barrier between the mundane and the eternal.

Working alongside Harriet, I saw the project reflected in her eyes, their steely blue aglitter with the millions of reds in our perditious palette. My hand was always on her shoulder as we crouched over twenty-thousand-dollar monitors, and I felt the flutters of her soul in the taut muscles that extend from neck to mouse-arm. The hellish imagery turned her on, inflated her pupils like blobs of black mercury expanding in the heat of our virtual netherworld. She was hooked, transfixed, spitted by a primal sexual response to the visage of death.

She didn't really believe in our diabolical client, I could tell. But the project manufactured its own verity, until the view in the monitor became as real for her as for those who would one day occupy it.

I had known the project would capture her. Harriet was one of those artists who instinctually resisted computers, only to be ultimately seduced by them. She loved her paints, but a stroke of pigment can't be corrected. There are no RGB values to change, no pixels to nudge. You're stuck with the happenstance of that moment, without an Undo command or even a backup file. And that's a losing deal, it had always seemed to me. She always claimed that one day she'd foreswear the mouse and pick up her paintbrushes again, but the ability to tween and tweek was an irresistible siren. The algorithms that we geeks had used to colonize the screen had colonized Harriet as well.

It's an old story. Religions start with a madman's inspiration but end up with sensible canons and commandments. Barter systems are rationalized into the liquidity of cash and credit. Mythologies are repurposed as role-playing games. Communities are arrogated by IPOs. With the visual arts it took a while longer for the number-crunchers to take over, but eventually we always win.

Art may be pretty, but rule-governed systems rule.

Our biggest graphics challenge was hellfire, the ambient affliction of the damned. We needed something that would burn without devouring, a necessary provision for endless torment. But fire that doesn't consume its fuel always looks wussy. It hovers over the burning victim like it was Photoshopped on post facto, about as scary as the disembodied and exaggerated blaze of charcoal sprayed with too much lighter fluid.

We brought in some programmers and created dozens of new algorithms from scratch. We watched videos of forest and brushfires, warehouse conflagrations, accelerant infernos, the oil-well holocausts of the Gulf War. I picked my scabs endlessly, looking for answers in that crumbling, itching flesh.

Finally, we hit paydirt in that old standby: napalm. When napalm consumes flesh, it burns its own sticky fuel, charring the body beneath as a secondary effect. Sprayed with fire extinguisher foam or submerged in water, it remains alight, attached to its victim, demonically implacable.

Vietnam-era video has its limitations, of course, so we checked out a few second-amendment websites and got the recipe. We concocted a small batch of napalm from soap flakes and kerosene, and headed out to the Jersey swamps, bringing along cow-hearts and a couple of raw pigs that we'd scored from a loading dock in the meatpacking district. We burned the whole grisly pile.

During the filming, I had a flashback to my near-death in California. Waves of heat came from the crackling flesh, and a stench not unlike the sulphurous reek of Hell.

I looked over at Harriet, who had dropped her digital camera to stare at the flames with naked eyes. Tears ran down her cheeks, streaking the soot that had darkened her face. She gazed back at me with horror. Harriet had treated the whole project as an enjoyable lark until now. Vanity graphics for an imaginary client, my personal fetish. But I could see that the level of detail was starting to get to her.

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.