by Mark Teppo
Ramiel's voice was like steel beneath a bolt of silk. "Maybe nothing at all. Did you think of that?"
I jumped him. Rationally, I knew he was immortal and invulnerable and all those other ‘i' words that you use to describe angels, but I wanted to be sure. And if we were all wrong, then I wanted to be the one who broke his nose first.
III
I sat in Mrs. C's private office and nursed my black eye. She had a new computer—one with lots of RAM and a giant widescreen monitor—and I had a dozen windows open on a dozen different systems scattered across the world. Last time I had been going for stealth; this time I was using brute force. My code was busy gathering zombie machines and rerouting services, and there was nothing for me to do in the meantime but sulk and try not to fuss too much with the ice pack.
Rudolph had yanked me off the angel before things had gotten too out of hand, though Ramiel had totally taken a cheap shot as the reindeer hauled me away. A little sucker punch right in the face, burying a knuckle right in the corner of my left eye socket. Maybe he had been trying to egg me on, trying to get me to do something stupid enough that he could toss me off the building with impunity, but Rudolph lowered his horns, and the angel had backed off.
I had resisted at first, but when the pain from the angel's love tap forced its way through my anger, I relented and allowed Rudolph to lead me back to the stairwell down into the Residence. I had stopped at the door and looked back at the angel. Ramiel had never even gotten up, and he was calmly reading his book as if nothing had happened.
"I'm in," I had said to Rudolph. "Let's go find Santa."
"Give us some coordinates, Bernie," he had said. "We'll do the rest."
I had hacked into purgatory's system once. I could do it again.
Naturally, the Network Jockeys had forced a system wide password change as soon as we had gotten back last year, and some middle manager somewhere had been given a task force and a mandate to crawl all of the code to make sure there weren't any backdoors into the Elfnet. My fall from grace had been spectacular enough that someone had thought to be proactive and make sure I couldn't get all spiteful afterward. They had done a good job too. I couldn't fault them for missing the drop box in a Miami post office as well as a Platinum American Express card—the payments for which were coming like clockwork out of a union slush fund that no one remembered setting up. They had been worried about internal security, after all.
Like I said, I hadn't been planning on coming back. And while they could take away my union card, I was due a decent retirement plan. I gave a lot for the cause, after all.
It only took me a half hour to hack the electronic trail from that credit card account to the NPC accounts payable system, which was such a freaking black box that I knew none of the NJs or anyone in Technology Management had any idea what went on in the guts of that system. Which is where I had hidden my back door.
Spiteful? Me? No, just a careful planner. Like Rudolph said: always be prepared.
I had to assume that heaven's IT staff had done the same sort of audit after my last excursion, which meant a sledgehammer approach had a better chance of success this time around.
Ramiel had mentioned hubris, and I suppose you could apply that word to my the world is a nail and I've got a planet-sized hammer approach. But it's not my fault, truly. I blame technology. Technology screwed everything up. Sure, there are some truly labor saving devices out there (and I'm not talking about the Segway), and medical science has done a great deal in assisting humanity to a more prosperous, idyllic life on this planet, but, mostly? We've invented a lot of tech that does nothing but facilitate a ridiculous indifference to the world around us. Not to mention a rather unbecoming avarice and self-absorption.
It had happened to Santa, after all. If you want to talk about hubris, let's be honest about what happened last year. But it goes back farther than that, really. Back when your parents' parents were children, technology was a little slipperier. In fact, Santa was just coming out of what could be considered the Slippery Age. Christmas, more often than not, didn't happen overnight. It took anywhere from a couple of days to three weeks, depending on the surface mail or whatever horse and buggy routine the local carriers used. It was easier when half the world didn't believe in Fat Boy. Sure, the popular mythology says that bad kids got coal, but the way it actually worked was that bad kids (read kids who didn't believe) got nothing. It was easy, it was simple, and it drove the point home. If you believed, if you allowed yourself that tiny smidgen of imagination, then you made Santa's List. Well, the world got smaller, and the List got bigger, and the old methods weren't going to cut it anymore. Not only did these kids believe, but they believed that it happened on the night of December 25th. We didn't have the luxury of spreading it out over a week or two anymore.
We needed an angle, and the Trinity explosion in July of 1945 gave us that. We had a team inside Los Alamos, and while everyone was going all googly-eyed about the explosion in the desert, we were trying to figure out how to harness it. And with the help of a couple of big-brained pranksters from the labs, we did: we built the Nuclear Clock.
You remember Miracle on 34th Street? The film starring Maureen O'Hara and John Payne? You want to know the real reason it did so well when it came out in 1947? Well, think about it. The first time the Nuclear Clock had been used was the 1946 Season. Boom! Presents everywhere in one night! Santa's popularity exploded quicker than it takes small children to unwrap all of their presents under the tree. Sure a lot of social historians like to claim that the war being over was the root cause of all that festive year, but come on, the real reason? Santa Claus.
And when the Clock slipped in 1964, did we roll up the shutters and slink off? No. We made another clock—a better one—and kept going. Yeah, we lost some reindeer, and Rudolph became the strange thing that he is, but Christmas kept coming. Year after year after year. Nothing could stop Santa. The tech got better and better, as did the ability to deliver exactly what each and every kid wanted for Christmas. Capital M miracles aside, we were in the wish fulfillment business, and we got really good at it.
So good in fact that when the impossible request came in, Santa hadn't balked. We had gone into heaven and gotten a soul back. Because he could. Because he had the technology to do the job.
And that was why he died. Technology killed him.
If the world had been a simpler place, then it would have remained populated by simpler minds. And, frankly, simpler minds accept the mysterious and inscrutable as being just that: mysterious and inscrutable. They don't poke and prod and try to peek behind the curtain. You let the brain swell to fill the available space in the skull, and it starts to dream all sort of big dreams. Giant telescopes that can see to the edge of the expanding universe. Microscopes that look so far in the other direction that the fabric of reality can be measured. With these marvels, simplicity is left dead by the roadside, and the only companion you've got left in the vehicle is Complexity and his buddy, Fatal Error.
My windows started beeping, signaling that the code each had been running was finished. I had my army of slaved processors. I moused over the nearest window and typed the command that would launch my unified assault on the firewalls of purgatory. But my finger hovered over the ‘Enter' key for a second, not quite ready to commit to this course. I was about to launch such a denial of service assault that no one would be able to stream anything anywhere for at least an hour. All so that heaven's attention would be on their firewalls, and no one would notice the extra payload being slipped through on the back of the normalized data packets.
Complexity. Fatal Error. Hubris. While my zombie horde was tromping through the front part of the house, breaking the furniture and making a mess of the rugs, I would be casually perusing the books in the library, looking for a very specific volume.
There was still time to walk away. Still time to tell Rudolph that we weren't meant to do this—that we had been given a warning and left alive as an example to others.
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But I knew what he would say: we were meant to make a different example.
And with that in mind, I pushed the button.
IV
At first nothing happened, and then, after five minutes, the cursor blinked and the line fed. I stared at the cursor for a long moment, wondering what had just happened—or not happened, as the case might be—and then I remembered I hadn't bothered to put any error checking in my code.
The code had worked. My query had executed. Purgatory was there, as expected, but my stealth request had come back empty. As in no data found.
It would take a Silicon Valley hotshot IT department a couple of hours to break up my DDOS attack, and adjusting that time for supernatural agency meant I had about ten more minutes before the spectral swords of purgatory's defense system eviscerated my hack. Time enough to try at least one more query, and so I tried ‘Kris Kringle.'
Same result: a line feed and no data set returned. I got desperate and opened up a couple more windows so I could try every possible combination in the time I had left: ‘Father Christmas,' ‘Nicolas of Myra,' ‘Sint Klaes,' ‘St. Nicolas.'
They all came back empty.
I hesitated a second, wracking my brain for one last query, and then realizing I overstayed my welcome, I started to unload my code. But it was taking too long, and suddenly paranoid, I reached around to the back of the computer and yanked out the power cord. The screen went dark, and I sat there in the near-darkness, wondering what I had missed. But I knew my code had been good, which could only mean one thing: Santa Claus wasn't in purgatory.
"Keep it simple." The voice spoke directly into my left ear. I jerked upright in the chair, banging my knees against the underside of the heavy desk. My heart pounding, I glanced around, but there was no one in the room with me. The only sound other than the harried echo of my heart in my ears was the distant tick-tock of the old upright clock in the corner of the room.
"Rudolph?" I said. Just in case he was hiding—I don't know—behind the drapes or something. "Comet?" Of all the reindeer, Comet was the most prone to practical jokes, though even this sort of game seemed a little out there for him. Especially now.
A ghost light flickered across the monitor, and I squeaked in fright. And then immediately berated myself for doing so. It was just a phantasmal effect that some monitors had—a flicker of color through the pixels as the screen started to cool down. There was nothing there. There was no one else in the room. I was just spooking myself.
"Keep it simple," I whispered to myself. The oldest rule in the book. Good old William of Ockham. Maybe it was his ghost reaching out to tell me to stop spooking myself and actually apply some brain power to what I did and did not know.
"Okay," I said, nodding. "What do you know, smart guy?"
My code was good, as was my theory. So that meant the problem was on the other end, which meant 1) the data structure in purgatory had changed over the last year and I had been querying the wrong fields, or 2) Santa hadn't reached purgatory yet and no record had been entered into the vast data warehouse of heaven for him yet, or 3) he wasn't there.
Okay, rebuttals.
Doubtful. Nothing in IT is ever changed. If it is changed, it takes at least five years and many millions of billable hours to even rename a field much less change the existing data structure.
A lack of speedy data entry suggested that the dead could be in, what? limbo for some time before actually reaching purgatory. Okay, entirely possible, but I was willing to bet Santa Claus wasn't one of those who got turned away at the door. Yeah, old man, come back in a few hours. We're not quite ready to process you yet.
Where else would he go if he wasn't going to heaven?
Well, now there's a thought. Which thou shalt not would you like to begin with? I didn't remember my Commandments all that well, but I was pretty sure that neglecting one precluded you from going to heaven. It was one of the incentives to not break them.
I heard a sound like someone dragging a line of sleigh bells across a metal tabletop, and a smell reminiscent of melting chestnuts assaulted my nose. I glanced around Mrs. C's office. The room seemed a little darker.
My tongue was thick in my mouth. "Santa?" I croaked.
Near the doorway, a gentle snowfall sparkled. It melted before it touched the heavy carpet. My heart was making that loud noise again, and I tried to mentally shush it as I slipped off the chair and approached the small snow flurry. I heard the sound of sleigh bells again as the tiny snowstorm drifted toward me. I reached up to catch a snowflake, and my hand touched something cold. The tiny flake lay frozen on my fingertip, a perfect star shape. I withdrew my hand, and the flake melted, turning to a dot of water that ran down the pad of my finger.
And then I heard the voice again, and I knew it was him. "The gates of heaven are closed, Bernie." It was like a winter wind, teasing and tugging at your hair. "They won't let me in." The snowfall glistened.
Suddenly the door burst open, and a young reindeer bounced into the room. He hurtled right through the falling snow, and the storm scattered like a flight of dark birds, nothing more than shadows bouncing off the walls and ceilings. The reindeer was just as surprised as I was, and he bumped into me before he could stop himself. Fortunately, his horns were merely tiny buttons growing out of his skull, and the impact between his head and my stomach was only like getting hit by a Major League fastball instead of a being skewered like a slab of beef.
I landed on my ass and tried to catch my breath. The young reindeer rebounded like he did this sort of thing all the time, and he danced around me. He was covered with tinsel—it looked like it had been taped onto him in wide stripes—and his nose was quivering like a cube of Jell-O as he examined me. A mesh bag filled with ceramic canisters was slung across his withers.
"Gotta go. Gotta go," he squeaked.
"What?" I asked, still trying to ease my cramped stomach.
"Rudolph wants you. It's time to go."
"Go? Go where?"
I didn't know this reindeer. There were others outside the normal team, of course. Up to a hundred or so could comfortably range across the Park, and this youngster looked like he was still growing his first year's velvet on his horns.
"Launch bay," he explained.
I glanced around the room, half-hoping to catch sight of the column of snowfall. "I'm not done," I protested. "I don't . . . I haven't finished my research. I don't have all the information I need. I can't leave."
He grabbed the end of my trousers with his mouth and tugged. "There's no time," he said through clenched teeth.
I pulled back and discovered that even a young reindeer was stronger than me. The muscles in his neck bunched as he tugged me across the floor. "Wait. What do you mean there's no time? Time for what?"
He let go and cocked his head as he recited his instructions: "Find Bernie: ten minutes. Time before they leave: fifteen minutes. Time it takes to reach an altitude of five thousand feet: another five minutes. Commence dive bomb attack: ten minutes after . . ." His tongue wiggled in the corner of his mouth. "Subtract four . . . carry the one . . ." He shook his head. "Nope. You doing more research? That's what there's no time for."
"Hold on. Dive bomb attack?"
The young reindeer did a little jig in the doorway. The ceramic canisters rattled in the bag across his shoulders. "I'm the diversion," he announced proudly.
Rudolph. He was taking the team and heading for the South Pole. With or without me. This reindeer was right. I was out of time.
"You're late," Rudolph announced as I tumbled off the pneumatic carrier that ran between the Residence and the launch bay. He was standing on the dark pad, impatiently tapping a hoof against the control panel that raised and lowered the pad.
The launch bay could very well be turned into a historical museum if Christmas remained canceled. Each generation of the Sled was housed down here. Well, those that were still intact. The Mark V hadn't come back last year, and there was a version of the red sled from the l
ate 1890s that had been lost in the Arctic Ocean. But the rest were here, lined up in chronological order, covered with plastic, and permanently moistened with grease on the off-chance that they would be needed.
The launch bay was the only area underground that the reindeer were allowed to access. In fact, a service tunnel ran straight from the bay to the barn out on the Park, which made it easy for them to come and go when it was time to fly. And they were all here, standing off to the side of the pad, waiting for me.
They were covered in white and gray greasepaint, wearing their assault rigs. There had been some advances since the last time I had seen this gear. The cumbersome targeting visors had been replaced with a variation on the glasses Blizten had been wearing last year, though with a bit more theatrical flair in their wraparound style and dark lenses. We had dropped in on purgatory, bristling with guns and rocket launchers and flame-throwers like hardwired Visigoths out for a weekend of empire burning; now, with this next-generation gear (which looked like it had been designed by H. R. Giger and molded by Samsonite), they could pass as Elvis-impersonating Cold Warriors flying in for a black bag job before picking up their dates for a fancy costume ball.
"What's the rush?" I asked after I got done gawking.
"Mrs. C," Cupid supplied. "She's gone gray. Whatever Santa had, she's got it too." His grin seemed a little strained.
"You find Santa?" Rudolph asked.
"Uh, no. Not exactly."
He glared at me. "Bernie," he said menacingly. Vixen and Prancer shuffled a few paces away from Rudolph at the tone of his voice.
"He's not in heaven," I blurted out. "There wasn't any trace of him in purgatory." The other reindeer stared at me. Blitzen shook his head, adjusting his librarian nerd glasses with a hoof. "Look, I think we've made a bad assumption." When I was tearing down the back stairs to the basement, inspiration had hit—a clear blast of enlightenment that had forced my feet back up the steps to the library. I held up the book that I had gone back for.