talk to me!” a sob breaking her voice.
For the first time since we’d napalmed our sad little pigs, true anguish showed on Harriet’s face. Like me, she had seen Hell, even if only on a screen. The brave new Hades 2.0, red in tooth and claw, every searing pixel of it. She had shaped and morphed it, tweeked and tweened it, wrangling every RGB value to its optimum. She had even felt it for a moment, out in our Jersey swamp, the heat and stench of that chemical fire as it consumed the offal we’d brought with us, body doubles for the damned.
Despite her words, I knew she now believed in Hell.
But unlike me, Harriet didn’t know how to escape. She lacked my trick, my Secret, my certainty of heaven. And she must have known that she was damned as I had been.
She rose from her chair angrily, slammed a twenty on the table, and stood.
At last I realized the horror of the Devil’s NDA. For the rest of my life, I would be trapped by my knowledge of the Secret, stuck in contractual amber as I watched friends and lovers walk blithely toward an eternity of pain, unable to stop them. Unable even to hint at the grim future I foresaw. Decade after decade of powerlessness. How many souls would I damn through my inaction?
The devil had snared me, not in his domain, but in my own private little hell of non-disclosure.
“Wait,” I said.
Harriet stood there, her eyes burning.
I almost said it, almost told her. I almost went to hell.
“Nothing.”
She turned and fled.
It is, of course, only a matter of time.
No one can bear the weight of this knowledge forever. At some point, I’ll slip, and reveal the Secret to save someone. After all, the damned are all around me. My friends, co-workers, and lovers are all stained with the soot of the burning. I still read the NDA every day, more carefully than when I foolishly signed it. It’s a very well-written contract. An expression or a gesture leading to the truth could damn me. Any hint at all.
Sooner or later, I will fuck up.
I’ve thought of suicide, the quick and dirty way to lock in my special knowledge, my insider’s price, but I’m too much of a wimp to pull the trigger.
At this writing, I live in Africa. Less than one percent of the population of this city speak English, an added layer of protection. But my old software buddies still visit, and I’m too lonely to turn them away, though I can see how damned they are. A few of them seem to know that I have a secret. They question and prod me about my new life, about why I left their world. Perhaps the Devil appears to them as he did to Harriet, just to tempt me with their salvation.
He wants my soul badly.
But I haven’t completely despaired. Old Scratch showed his weakness to me, back when I was dead. He doesn’t have good software help. He doesn’t understand the new paradigms of information distribution.
So I’ve finally implemented that dead-man switch, the threat that I once held over my partners’ heads.
Every month, I send a message, the correct codeword from a non-patterned series of my own devising. The FallingMan.com server waits for this missive impatiently. Should I die (to be trundled safely up to heaven), or finally screw up and spill the beans to someone (to be carted off screaming to hell), my monthly codeword will be missed, and the server will leap into action.
Indeed, if you are reading this, that is exactly what has happened.
So please forgive the breadth and intensity of this spam. I’m sure someone’s had to delete this story from about ten thousand mailing lists, and my recording of it should occupy about half the Napster and Gnutella indexes, listed as everything from the Beatles to Britney Spears. Part of my job at Falling Man was viral marketing. The whole world is reading with you.
So this, my friend, is no secret:
Forget the backups. Screw the pixels. Lose the smartcards. Avoid the minibars. Overthrow the rule-governed systems. Break the commandments. Exceed the algorithms. Ignore the special effects. Don’t undo.
Disclose everything. Paint the landscape.
Go analog.
Save your soul.
Like Riding A Bike
Jan Wildt
For Anne R.
1
Velma Fish awoke to a curious smell, familiar yet strange.
She opened her eyes to the same old bedroom—nothing out of place. The sun streamed through the window. She’d slept like a baby: none of that fitful drifting.
But there was a