Up Jumps the Devil (37 page)

Memory said nothing.

“Zachary's company is doing all right,” said the Devil.

“Duh. Everybody knows that.”

“I bring it up,” said the Devil, “because it might be nice if you guys worked together again, after all this time.”

“What, like the band? No way, José.”

He shook his head.

“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 soldiers 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.”