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 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