Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  On top of the timing issues, the yellows in a really kick-ass blaze are too sallow for digital video. They have a sort of jaundiced reticence, which we punch up to a hearty crimson glow. It's not reality, but it looks better.

  Despite the limitations of the physical world, Falling Man still burns down the odd house now and then. We study the results carefully, just to keep ourselves honest. For reference, basically, and to get a few fresh ideas. So out to LA I went, matches in hand.

  The Tribulation crew had evidently used the house only in exterior shots. It was empty of furniture, completely unfinished. It had a Potemkin-village flatness, the walls paper-thin and bereft of plumbing or wiring. For the first day and some, I had the crew install paneling, to keep the walls from burning through too fast, and spread some rolls of old carpet on the floor, to get the smoke right. Even though most of us haven't seen a house burn down, we know instinctively what it should look like. And if we don't, our kids will. That's our Golden Rule at Falling Man: every generation of movie-goers needs better and more expensive special effects.

  It's a philosophy that keeps the money rolling in.

  About lunchtime on the second day, I was satisfied with the flammability of things, and we wrapped until that night. This house-burning scene was in daylight, according to the script, but we always burn at night for better contrast. Sunlight's one of the easiest things to add: full spectrum, parallel light. An idiot can make the sun shine.

  Besides, real sunlight doesn't look good on TV. Except for the golden hours of dusk and dawn, the sun is a tacky, garish creation, which blows out what little contrast exists on digital video.

  I should have gotten some sleep before the big burn. I was still on New York time; passing out would have been easy. Maybe if I'd been better rested, I wouldn't have gotten myself killed that day.

  But I was on the company dime, so as I was driven back to my hotel, I contemplated the tiny minibar key that was attached by a tiny chain to the smartcard that admitted me to my room, the rooftop sauna, and the ice machine.

  I've always been fascinated with mechanical keys. I guess a lot of computer geeks are. Very early crypto. And a fascinating email screed had recently been forwarded to me. It proclaimed that one's status in society bears an inverse relationship to the number of keys in one's possession. The lowly janitor has rings and rings of them. The assistant manager has to get in early to open up the fast-food restaurant—the boss comes in later. And as we climb the economic ladder, more and more other people appear to open the doors, drive the cars, and deal with the petty mechanics of security. So here I was, boy millionaire in the back seat, armed with only my hotel smartcard and that tiny signifier of minibar privilege, as miniscule as the key for some diary of childhood dreams.

  Much like the empty pages of a blank book, this small key had limitless power over my imagination. I felt in its tiny metal teeth the ability to consume six-dollar Toblerone bars and twelve-dollar Coronas. To pick through exquisitely small and expensive cans of mixed nuts and discard all but the cashews. Indeed, in my initial reconnaissance of the bar, I'd spotted a child-sized humidor in the back, no doubt offering cigarillos of post-Fidel provenance and jaw-dropping price. And all these miniaturized delights would be charged to Falling Man.

  Fondling that little key in the back of the car, I realized a secret truth: This moment was why I had come to LA. To raid the refrigerator.

  Later, it occurred to me that if I had somehow known that my death was nigh, I would have done pretty much the same thing with my last hours, indulged pretty much the same sensuous pleasures and petty revenge. Perhaps on a grander scale, but with no greater depth of spirit. And I suppose that's why I was sent to Hell.

  · · · · ·

  That night at the burn, I was woozy.

  The six beers were nothing, and those airplane-sized bottles of Matusalem Rum wouldn't have inebriated a five-year old. But I was a child of the post-smoking era, and I should have stayed away from the cigarillos. I felt as if some pre-Cambrian 1950s dad had locked me in a closet with a carton of Marlboros to finish off. My mouth was horribly dry, and I craved a drink. Preferably from one of the giant hoses that drooped in the arms of the firefighters that the LAFD had sent to oversee our little inferno.

  With the desultory taste of ashtray in my mouth, I didn't even bother starting the fire myself. I left the honors to a production assistant with a cute smile.

  I just mumbled, "Action."

  She threw the large, Dr. Frankenstein-style connection switch, and the gallons of accelerant we'd sprayed throughout the doomed house ignited. A wave of comforting warmth spread from the fire, reaching us through the cool desert air a few seconds after the first flames burst from the bungalow's windows.

  A ragged cheer went up from the crew, rewarded at last for the hot work of prepping through two August days. Six of them held palmsized digital cameras. Four locked-down cameras shot the house from its cardinal directions, providing x- andy-references for the shaky images from the handhelds.

  We didn't bother with microphones. Real fires don't sound good on TV. Too crackly, they're just so much static. We generally insert a low rumble, like a subway going under you, with a white-noise wash on top.

  The six camera-jocks dashed in as close as the heat allowed, working to record the warp and woof of the blaze. They tried to catch the dramatic and particular details, a beam splintering in a gusher of sparks, a trapped pocket of air exploding. We wanted to capture this fire's effulgent specificity, so that the art director back at Falling Man could escape the tried and true spreading-flame algorithms that all the other FX houses used. We wanted something unique, almost real.

  Like nineteenth-century scientists taking spirit photographs, we were trying to capture the soul of this fire.

  The PA whom I'd allowed to start the blaze put her hand on my shoulder. I looked up and was struck by the simple, pyromaniacal joy in her eyes. The woman's touch was unselfconscious, unsexual, and I saw her twenty-something innocence writ by the dancing red light on her face, and in my jaded, thirty-something way preferred that to the blaze itself. I watched her, until a cracking noise and a sudden intake of breath from the crew brought my eyes back to the fire.

  One corner of the house was threatening to collapse.

  A gout of flame had sprouted from the base, running like a greedy tongue up the vertex of the two walls. The supporting beam hidden behind this column of fire must have been wet new wood; it was hissing, throwing out steam and sparks explosively. It began to buckle and twist, writhing like a snake held captive in a cylinder of gas and plasma.

  "This is the money shot!" I cried, waving all the handhelds around to that side. I was breathing hard, heart pounding and cigarillo hangover suddenly vanquished. I ran a few steps toward the house. Even in those meters the air temperature raised noticeably, the blaze now a heavy and scorching hand pushing against my face. It dried my contact lenses, which gripped cruelly at my eyes like little hemispherical claws.

  I felt as if I was waking up from a long dream, like when you realize the exquisite detail of the real world after a prolonged session in VR.

  I turned back to the PA, who had followed behind me, and shouted, "This is why we do this."

  She nodded, her pupils as wide as the zeroes on a hundred-dollar bill.

  One of the camera-jocks knelt just in front of me, his little camera a whining, frightened bee.

  "Give me that thing," I said.

  Nice last words, don't you think?

  I pressed one eye to the viewfinder, clenched the other shut to protect it from the heat, and moved forward. I pushed in close, the heat a strong wind against me now.

  Objects in viewfinders are closer than they appear.

  Someone shouted a warning, but this was my shoot.

  In the limited view of the camera, I didn't see the whole thing. But I presume the corner beam gave way near its base and fell outward, propelled by the gasses trapped within its green wood, or perhaps by some ra
ndomly concurrent explosion inside the house.

  It reached out, a hissing, flaming arm, and struck me solidly where I knelt, braced against the outdraft of the blaze. It wasn't the fire that killed me, just pedestrian kinetic energy. My corpse was hardly burned at all.

  · · · · ·

  The Devil (aka: Beelzebub, Satan, and the Artist Formerly Known as the Prince of Darkness) entertained me in an office rather like my dad's cubicle when he worked for IBM. There was that same penumbra of stickies framing the fat old cathode-ray-tube monitor, the rhythmic chunking sound of a far-off photocopier, the pre-email proliferation of paper everywhere, and Old Scratch himself was wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie.

  But it looked better on him than on my dad.

  He nodded a hello. There was no need for introductions; I knew who he was. He's the Devil, after all. The crafty smile, his seductive grace even on the pre-ergonomic office chair, the unalloyed beauty of his face all made his fallen-angel provenance clear. I had no doubt that this was real.

  But the IBM setting seemed a bit odd.

  "Is this some kind of ironic punishment thing?" I asked, imagining an eternity of writing Cobol code and wearing a tie. A fitting fate for New Economy Boy.

  "Not at all," Satan replied, waving one elegant hand. "Irony is dead. Your generation killed it. Besides, nothing beats hot flames. We're in the business of damnation, not poetic justice."

  His limpid eyes drifted across the jokey coffee mug, the dusty and fingerprinted glass of the CRT, the thrice-faxed office-humor cartoon thumbtacked to the cubicle wall, taking them all in with a kind of vast sadness. He was awfully pretty, just like they say.

  He looked at me and sighed.

  "My point with this apparition is to impress upon you my weakness."

  I looked at him in horror. "For bad office design?"

  "Not that," said the Devil. "Although I must say, the cubicle has crushed more souls than I lately." He regarded the screen saver on the terminal: the words DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ON THIS DESK rolled by in quiet desperation. He shuddered, then turned toward me.

  "To be frank, we need your help."

  "My help?"

  "With an FX issue."

  I narrowed my eyes.

  "You see," the Devil continued, "over the last few decades, we down here in Hell have begun to realize that we have a little trouble with our … look and feel."

  "I don't follow you."

  He smiled, perhaps at my choice of words.

  Then he shrugged. "I think it's these video games, although some of my minions say it's CGI graphics. But whatever is to blame, recent studies have found that the average American male spends fourteen hours per week in some sort of interactive infernal environment. And we just can't compete with the graphics in first-person shooters these days. Many of the souls coming down here lately find the underworld rather … cheesy, I'm afraid."

  "You mean …?"

  "Yes, alas," the Devil lamented. "Hell no longer looks good on TV. Nor even in reality."

  · · · · ·

  It was true.

  We soared over the damned, their voices crying in a great wail of pain. Although we were above the tongues of the flame, the heat clung to me like fishhooks. Every square inch of epidermis felt like sunburned flesh sprayed with jalepeño juice. And the smell was far worse than the sulfur we all know from rotten eggs. It was of a purer species: fifth-grade chemistry set sulfur, though tinged with a darker, murkier scent, like a dead rat behind the wall. The stench was awful even from our lofty height. I can't imagine what it was like inside that pit of fire.

  But Old Scratch was right. The visuals were very last-century. Gouts of hellfire shot across the damned in big tacky bursts, as if some Coney Island flame-breather were running around down there. And the flowing rivers of flame were so Discovery Channel: turgid and crusted with solidifying earth on top. Nothing halfway as cool as the boiling oil algorithms that Falling Man had created for the prequel to Death Siege, and that was just a Showtime original. We'd devised a mesmerizing and viscous black liquid all run through with scintillating veins of sharp crimson, like a negative of a bloodshot eye texture-mapped onto flowing blobs of mercury.

  And the Hadean backdrop of reddened craggy mountains were totally pre-fractal. I've seen scarier coral.

  "This looks like a heavy metal video from the early eighties," I opined, blowing my nose from the heat.

  "So you'll help me?"

  "I want a deal memo first," I said.

  Naturally, he had his paperwork already in hand.

  · · · · ·

  Now, this was not your basic Daniel Webster-style deal with Beelzebub—swapping my soul for unlimited wealth or devilish charm. The Devil had been priced out of the geek-soul market. Vast riches were at that point pretty unremarkable for anyone with a software background. Hell, geeks can even get chicks these days. Satan couldn't find anyone good to do the work, because he simply had nothing we wanted.

  This facet of the New Economy no doubt appalled the most beautiful of former angels, and had thus far stymied his upgrade efforts (uncleverly codenamed: "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 my 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 H
ell!

  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.