“No,” said. “Not like the band.”
The Devil wanted them to take over the Internet.
“Not in a rule-the-world kind of way. I just think it could be more useful. It could be doing more with information. Information is good. When information moves, people improve.”
“Groovy jingle,” said Memory.
“Oh, shut up. I mean it. The Internet is the whole architecture of the future. We need to make it better.”
“And you’re talking to me about this because …?”
“The Internet needs a face. A wise face. A pretty face. And a voice.”
So they got in the JFK car and drove off to visit Zachary in San Francisco.
Memory started making up a song, out loud, with just the words “When information moves, people improve.”
“Stop it,” said the Devil, but she wouldn’t.
THEY FOUND ZACHARY in the lunchroom at Bullhorse Technologies.
He practically launched himself at Memory, picking her up and spinning her around. She kissed him on both cheeks, and then once, really hard, on the lips.
After a half hour of catching up, the Devil asked Zachary, “How come the Internet is so fucking slow?”
“It’s still getting off the ground,” answered Zachary, sounding hurt.
“No shit. I mean, everyone’s heard of it. But hardly anyone is actually plugged in. Everyone knows about e-mail and shit, but they don’t know how to get it and use it.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Zachary said.
“Cool beans,” said the Devil.
ZACHARY AND THE BULLHORSE techs designed what they called a “snowball.” It was like a glob of information that shot out over the Internet, and found similar information. The new information became part of the snowball, which was then able to move faster and gather more information. By the time it returned to the Bullhorse mainframe, it was a planetary ball of categorical data, containing links to documents all over the world.
The snowball allowed Bullhorse Technologies to map and index the Web.
When they made the new search technology available to the public, information all over the world accelerated overnight.
The Devil looked up some pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, and they loaded within a minute. They were pictures of huge columns of gas, light-years across, where new stars were being born.
“God’s still busy,” observed the Devil.
Then he called Memory and said, “Time to move back to San Francisco, kid.”
“Don’t call me ‘kid,’” she said, but she moved.
ZACHARY PRODUCED A new line of computers specially designed for the Internet.
Memory filmed a series of TV ads for these computers. The ads showed her flowing in and out of fiber-optic cables. She also became the spokeswoman for a new line of computer games. You could have these games piped right into your computer. You didn’t even have to go to the store.
Overnight, Memory was the psychedelic face of the future, recognized everywhere. She appeared on the cover of Electronics magazine twice in three months.
She became friends with Zachary, again, and with his wife, Clara. She got to know their kid, Seth. A nice kid, with a crossed wire or two. Like his grandmother, who lived in some kind of planned community in Massachusetts, he liked to bring people things. He might bring you a glass of water or a crayon, or something belonging to Mom or Dad that had to be put back.
Memory couldn’t help recalling the early days, with Dan Paul on Haight-Ashbury.
“San Francisco,” Memory told Clara one day, shoe-shopping downtown, “is one of the first places I remember.”
And now, having returned, she felt at home for the first time … when? Ever?
Memory did some calculations. If her guess was correct, and she had been about twenty years old when her memory kicked in on that long-ago gravel road, she was forty-eight now. And, for the first time in a while, she felt at home. Not just in San Francisco, with good friends and a fun job, but with herself and with the whole world.
She didn’t wish she were a music sensation again. She didn’t wish she were high. She didn’t wish anything. It all fit, and felt good. Even time didn’t seem to be able to get a grip on her, somehow. She flowed with it. She changed. It didn’t hurt that she had been artificially zipped and lifted and injected until she looked eternally thirty-one (she also, in the wrong kind of light, looked vaguely shrink-wrapped, but she avoided that kind of light). Even her amnesia seemed to have mellowed away. Everyone’s past did that, didn’t it?
She finally felt at home in her own life.
SOMETIMES MEMORY and the Devil went to the Bull Horses’ as a couple.
Seth always brought the Devil a tissue and said, “You look sad,” and the Devil always said, “Thanks, little dude.”
When Fish moved out there and started hanging around, too, Seth looked at him as if he were a kind of creature he’d never seen before. He liked to bring Fish cookies and hors d’oeuvres, like feeding an animal at the zoo.
“See if you can get Seth to bring him arsenic,” Memory muttered to Clara one night when they all gathered to drink wine and play trivia games.
“Be nice,” said the Devil, who overheard.
“Maybe we can get him to bring you some, too,” she said, but she smiled when she said it, and draped her arm around him.
FISH MOVED to San Francisco because, like lots of people, he hated Missouri after living there for a while.
He convinced Living Water Ministries to move their corporate offices west, for tax purposes. Once there, the church branched out into five new locations and a cable network.
“I’m finally doing what I should have been doing all along,” said Fish, drinking orange juice poolside with the Devil at the Logan Beach Tabernacle branch. “I’m not selling something that doesn’t exist. I’m doing something. You know what else?”
No, thought the Devil.
“I think I believe. I think it’s gotten into my heart, man.”
The Devil chuckled.
“What?”
“Fish, man, I knew Jesus. He’s dead.”
Fish stared at him from behind designer shades and said, “This is the new model I’m talking about.”
THE NEXT DAY, Fish showed up unannounced at Bullhorse Technologies. He strolled past the receptionist, found his way without difficulty through the sea of cubicles to Zachary’s office, and let himself in without knocking.
“Bless you,” he said to Zachary, who was concentrating on something.
“Mmm,” said Zachary.
“Got a business idea for you,” said Fish, seating himself, lacing his fingers behind his head. “It’s a game.”
Zachary looked up—annoyed but curious.
“Faith-based computer games!” said Fish, arms spread in rapture. “They’ll be really, really violent. Sell a million of ’em.”
The Devil materialized at Zachary’s shoulder.
“You’d sell a lot of computers to people who aren’t normally fans of scientific advancement,” he suggested.
“A whole new market,” said Zachary, the business side of his brain seeing the potential, like a sleeping pile of dynamite.
Fish leaned forward. “This is how people communicate, now,” he said. “No one listens or reads anymore. But they will play games! With games, you can sell computers and I can missionary the world. We might even convert all the pagans and heathens and wild Indians, still!”
“Shut up about the Indians,” hissed the Devil. “You don’t know dick about Indians.”
“Whatever. It’s all part of God’s business plan.”
ZACHARY’S DESIGNERS worked on a crash schedule. Zachary watched over their shoulders as basic character templates moved through a field program for a game called Revelation Ninja. Shots didn’t look like shots yet and blood didn’t look like blood, but when this particular game was finished, the templates would be Christians left behind by the Rapture defending themselves against soldier
s of the gay, married, double Antichrist. The Christians would know kung fu.
Other games would follow, including the Christmas debut of Abortion Clinic Assassin, projected to be the first digital game to sell more than five million units.
“This is making me kind of sick to my stomach,” Zachary told his money guys.
“We’re talking a lot of money,” said the money guys.
SOMEONE HAD ASSIGNED Fish an office of his own.
When Zachary found out who it was, he planned to give them a disapproving look. It was getting away from him. The whole thing.
At his desk, three weeks into the Revelation Ninja crash program, Fish was all eyes and thumbs, testing the product at his desk.
Zachary hovered in the doorway. Part of him didn’t want to enter Fish’s office. Didn’t want to admit Fish had an office.
“What if the player character dies?” asked Zachary. “Does he go to Heaven?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“You want effects for that, right?”
“Affirmative. Those other guys go to Hell. The ones in the Gay Antichrist armor. We need effects for that, too.”
SOMETIMES ZACHARY WENT to April Michael’s room, checked the nitro and the pressure levels, and told her, “You’d be thirty-two years old this year.”
It made him sad to say it.
“You’re not missing anything,” he told her.
ZACHARY BUSIED HIMSELF with other ideas, other games.
Rock-star games were his favorite. He paid real pop musicians to come in and be filmed against a green screen backdrop. Later, their images would appear on consumer TV screens and computer monitors, as if they were right there in the room. It made the Bullhorse crew feel sort of cool to find themselves rubbing shoulders with the stars. Some of them started reporting for work in sunglasses and leather jackets.
Even the Devil got caught up in the buzz. He wore sunglasses and a black cowboy hat on the coolest day of all, the day Jenna Steele came in, complete with entourage, paparazzi in tow, to film six minutes of digital video for next season’s showpiece, Atomic Top 40.
EVERY COUPLE HAS A STORY about the first time they met. Jenna Steele and the Devil met in front of a green-screen.
Jenna Steele.
Jenna Steele had been a child star. Then she had skyrocketed to even greater fame as a grown-up, writing and singing her own songs. She was wholesome. She was blond, with huge eyes and a million-dollar smile, and a body that made men feel bad for looking at it, considering she’d been a child star.
As the day wore on (green-screen shoots took a long time, and were really boring), it became increasingly obvious that Jenna was not as nice or as wholesome as her people wanted the world to believe. Despite the fact that a dressing room had been provided for her by Bullhorse Technologies, Jenna went right ahead and changed her costumes when and where she felt like it. She wandered around topless for ten solid minutes between singing her hit “Cream Cheese” and doing the action sequence for “Night Krush.”
The Devil went over and talked to her. A lot of cameras flashed.
These first pictures showed two great-looking people having a conversation.
The cameras flashed some more. This time, Jenna and the dark stranger were touching. Just a hand on an elbow, here. His hand on her leg, there, and her pretending not to notice.
Jenna’s bodyguards didn’t like it. These days, there were scripts for things like that, and this dark stranger was definitely off script. Later, after the shoot, a big mook in a jogging suit pushed up against the Devil outside the washroom and suggested he enjoy the memory of the day and not think about calling Miss Steele or bothering her.
The Devil turned the mook into something like a scorpion on the bottom of the ocean, a pair of ragged claws that lived for a split second before the pressure got it.
Goddamn if anyone was going to tell him who he could call. And he definitely wanted to call.
SHE CALLED HIM, as it happened. She asked him out on a date, and he said “Yes.”
The press followed them on motorcycles.
“Assholes,” rumbled the Devil. Maybe he’d raise a fog, and lose them.
“Oh, just let ’em,” said Jenna, squeezing his arm. “It’s free advertising.”
Jenna loved the press. She texted her fan club in the middle of dinner just so they could update her Web site and tell everyone she was having étouffée. And to maybe post a picture of this smoldering older man across the table from her.
The press was waiting for them outside the restaurant. They flashed and mooned over her, and were less worshipful with him.
“Who are you, buddy?” they called.
FLASH.
“I’m the fucking president of France,” he answered.
Jenna, playing along, acted blind and said she was fucking Helen Keller.
She was having fun. She liked him.
He decided not to tell her he was the Devil. Maybe later. Not yet. Maybe not.
MEMORY WAS HAVING a quiet night at home, watching TV and thinking about getting her belly tucked, when she saw the Devil on TV with Jenna Steele.
Jenna Steele, she thought, sneering. These artificial-sweetener dance bands today wouldn’t know an honest rock-’n’-roll feeling if it stabbed them.
Was that jealousy?
What did it mean, she wondered, when you felt sorry for yourself, not to mention surprised, that the Devil had let you down?
They weren’t married, after all.
If she could get to sleep before she cried, she decided, it wouldn’t count.
33.
The Coma Channel
New York City, 2001
“DON’T WORRY. Breece is a closer.”
“We’ll have it wrapped before lunchtime.”
“Guy’s a monster. M-O-N-ster.”
“Maybe by ten, if we keep ’em on track and skip small talk.”
Memory was having breakfast in lower Manhattan with two tall, thin lawyers. They were helping her buy Dingo Studios, which was going out of business.
Woo-hoo.
It was the kind of law firm the Devil recommended if you went to him and said, “I need lawyers.”
“Guns and cocaine lawyers?” he had asked. “Or—?”
“I want to buy something.”
“Gotteshalk, Hammer, Breece, and Pei,” he told her, and rattled off the phone number. “What do you have in mind?”
She had hung up without answering. It was either that or explain that she couldn’t stay on the West Coast and watch him make an ass of himself with Jenna. That she wanted to be as far from him as the U.S. map allowed.
So why had she called him? He wasn’t the only jerk who knew about lawyers.
The subconscious is a tricky bastard.
Gotteshalk, Hammer, Breece, and Pei had a catered breakfast brought in for their meeting with Memory. They treated her like a star, which said something about her. These lawyers didn’t give their attention to just any old thing.
So when someone said, “Goddamn. Look at that!” in a certain tone of voice, some of them looked and some didn’t.
Some looked out the window and saw the commercial jet come diving for them, and some did not. It was like an optical illusion, so fast it grew and filled the window.
THE DEVIL SAW IT on TV, like everyone else. He was in line at a San Francisco coffee shop when the news broke on three wide screens behind the pickup counter.
On-screen, a tall building was on fire.
An airplane had hit the tower, the TV explained.
Then, right there live on TV, a second airplane ripped through a second building. Millions of people gasped as if gut-punched.
The Devil bared his teeth and cried hot tears in the coffee shop. Like everyone else, he kept watching, frozen.
The two towers burned like smudge sticks against a perfect September sky.
MEMORY FELT HEAT like the sun.
Then it was all smoke, and the floor tilting crazily under her.
&n
bsp; Over here, sparks. Over there, an elevator.
Smoke, rushing across the floor. She pulled her jacket over her head, and started crawling … where?
Then the entire world shook, as if a freight train were cannonballing straight down out of the sky. Closer and louder.
Sparks. Smoke.
Then a sense of being expelled, of being shot through walls into cool air, surrounded by clouds of printer paper and dust, and falling.
FIREMEN BROUGHT HER on a stretcher into a tent, and paramedics rifled through her clothes, looking for wounds, finding only scratches.
“Some guy said she fell,” said one of the medics. “Like, came down with the building.”
“No.”
“I’m just telling you what the guy said.”
“She won’t wake up.”
They sent her way uptown, where she lay in bed and didn’t move unless they moved her.
THERE WAS A WAR, of course.
It had been a while since they’d had a good war.
War, the Devil reminded himself, was like ex-lax for money and new ideas. War cleansed the national pipes.
But something funny happened this time. It turned out people didn’t like war so much when they could watch it live on TV or stream it in real time on their computers. Every time an American got killed, they went pale. They grumbled. By the time ten Americans had died, the grumbling had gotten ten times louder. What country could fight a war like that?
The Devil, slouching in a chair at Memory’s bedside, stormed quietly to himself.
“Whatever happened,” he seethed, “to the days when you could wipe out five thousand soldiers and people would suck it up and talk about ‘duty’? We’ll never get any momentum going, at this rate!”
He called Fish.
“Distract them,” he said.
LIVING WATER MINISTRIES put seventeen new televangelists on cable, led by Fish.
“Trust Jesus!” cried the televangelists. “God has a plan! God has a war plan!”
Every fifteen minutes, flashy commercials offered new and exciting things God had provided for you to buy. There was a sponge-thing on a handle that would finally make it easier to clean the inside of your windshield! There was a chemical you could spray inside your shower, and it would fight mildew without any scrubbing! Many of the commercials were concerned about your health. There was a GPS unit that broadcast a distress signal if it detected that your heart had stopped. There was a pill that made it perfectly okay to have an erection lasting all night long. There was a fast-acting sinus medicine, and a sinus medicine that lasted up to twenty-four hours. It was usually expensive as hell, but now there was a special offer if you called within ten minutes.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 26