Good intentions

by

Charles Von Rospach

Originally published in Deals with the Devil, Daw, 1993, edited by Mike Resnick

After this job, though, being told to go to Hell won't be quite the same to me.

The project started normally enough, with a phone call requesting me to come down to the offices of Michael, Peter, and David, Attorneys to discuss a possible project. Which is how I found myself in a skyscraper in downtown L.A. at 10AM on a Monday morning listening to a lawyer trying hard to convince me that the slimeiest deal I had ever seen proposed was legit.

Jonathon Michael was a typical lawyerI've always hated lawyers, even my cousin Barney who I use when I need legal work done. Sometimes they're necessary, but I don't have to like them.. Michael was the epitomy of what I disliked. His silver hair was perfectly combed, a charcoal suit completely free of wrinkles, a smile that came frequently that made me think of rabid weasels.  Lots of teeth, all white and perfect, and he could stare you straight in the face and tell you that the sky was orange with a sincerity that would make you doubt yourself for thinking it was blue, at least until you could get to a window.

"The project, Mr. Chilson, involves some straight-forward modifications to my client's databases.  Some changes will be straight data modifications, and others will involve updates to the underlying algorithms."

"Why isn't this being done in-house, Mr. Michael?"

He smiled.  "My client's company doesn't have the resources and asked us to find an outside consultant to help out.  From our investigations, you seem to be the right person for the project."

"Who is the client?  I like to know who I'm working for."

He smiled again.  I was rapidly learning to hate that smile.  "You will be working for us as a sub-contractor.  The client wishes to keep a low profile, and so has requested us not to use their name at this time."

Little alarm bells went off in my head.  Nine times out of ten, companies hiding behind a lawyer are looking for someone to do something illegal, usually industrial espionage of one sort or another.  I almost always avoid these jobs.  They can pay well, but they're not worth the risks, and even the easy ones make me uneasy.

"To be honest, Mr. Michael, I don't normally work for organizations that don't identify themselves. That's a good way to end up in prison."

"I understand completely, Mr. Chilson. We'll disclose that data at the proper time. Until then, be assured that we're asking you to do nothing illegal."  He smiled at me. Yeah, I believe you. I tried to look sincere. "Our client's computer resources are limited, Mr. Chilson, so they wish to schedule you into the times when their computers aren't as busy.  These can't be planned too far in advance, so they've requested that you place yourself on call to them.  When their system is available, we will contact you and you'll come here to do your work.  We'll have assignments for you on every visit.  Once they are finished, you're free until we call you for your next assignment."  He smiled  that smile again.  Have I mentioned I don't like lawyers?  "You will, of course, be paid a retainer for the inconvenience of being on call."

"What exactly am I supposed to be doing for your client, Mr. Michael?"

"As I said, Mr. Chilson, modifications to their corporate database.  I can't release any further details until we've come to an agreement."

Boy, what a deal.  This job didn't just smell, this job qualified for the Superfund as a toxic site.  I've seen this setup before, and I didn't want any part of it.  You don't freelance computers for long without having someone try to haul you into one of their schemes.  They've got a pet hacker stuck somewhere, and whenever he can crack into the mainframe without being caught, they bring me in to do the dirty work of re-arranging someone else's data.  Of course, if we're caught, guess who's sitting at the wrong end of the phone line waiting for the FBI, while all the real criminals head off to Rio.

I had this sudden mental image of myself, standing in a Day-Glo orange jumpsuit listening to my wife explain through the Plexiglas that the divorce is the best thing for the kids.  Standing next to her, grinning like the devil, is her lawyer, who looks a lot like the Honorable Jonathon Michael. I thought the horns were a nice touch.

I pulled myself out of my daydream and did the only logical thing.  I closed my briefcase and stood up.  "Mr. Michael, I appreciate your interest in having me do this job, but I don't believe I'm interested."

Mr. Michael smiled and mentioned a number.  A nice, large number.

I sat down again.  With money like that, I might even afford a company like Peter, Michael and David, Attorneys at Law to defend me when I got caught hacking whatever company's database I'm being hired to hack, with a little left over for the church building fund to ease my poor conscience.

Michael had me hook, line, and sinker.  He knew it, too.  It was all over but the shouting.  The shouting, of course, being the contract negotiation.

Have you ever negotiated a contract?  It's guaranteed to take the best of friends and turn them into screaming maniacs over worthless trivia, because you never know which of those pieces of trivia is going to keep you out of court, or in this case, jail.

It took two hours, three breaks for him to consult with his client, two breaks for me to go to the bathroom and think, three ritual closings of the briefcase, and one ritual walk toward the door, but we ended up with a contract.  I'd held out for total indemnity against any wrongs committed under their employ, but they kept insisting we'd be breaking no laws, so we finally compromised on language protecting me against federal, state and local crimes.  I wanted immediate termination on demand, they wanted 30 days.  We compromised on ten, except in cases of breach of indemnification or situations which might cause significant harm to my professional standing.  And so on, and on, and on.

As soon as the papers were signed, Michael handed them to an assistant that appeared at just the right moment to whisk them off to some obscure part of the office and told me who I was working for.

I was working for God, and the project was cracking into Hell's databases.

I almost killed him right there.  He was so afraid that I might think he was crazy and walk on him that he almost killed the job, but he knew I'd worked with beings like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the King of the Leprechauns and various other non-existent beings, so he should have realized I'm not as skeptical as your typical person.  Hey, if you know Santa exists, why should you doubt God's existence?  If you can't trust God, who can you trust? Sigh. All that negotiating for nothing, but you never know in advance when it'll come in handy.

The first call came two days later.  I hurried down to the offices, fired up the CRT and started saving souls.  It started out with simple stuff -- looking up some data in one place, making a few simple changes in another, then going back later to make sure the changes had stuck.  It was clear they were trying to make sure they weren't being monitored, but if they'd asked me, I would have pointed out that any organization with brains would monitor us for a few weeks or months until they could get enough data to nail us in court.

Of course, this being Hell's computer, it probably wouldn't end up in court.  I'm not sure where it would end up, but I expected I wouldn't like it when I got there.

That thought bothered me.  Even having Heaven backing me up, I felt a bit queasy at the thought of a demon storming in here after my tail.  Legal indemnity is one thing.  Eternal hellfire is quite another.

I tried to shake that thought, but over the next few weeks, it never quite went away.  I was working three days a week, usually from two to four hours a day.  After the first three visits, Mr. Michael handed me to a flunky to work with.  We quickly fell into a routine.  I'd get a call, drive over to the offices where I'd be checked in, they'd hand me my orders and I'd sit alone in the office, making the changes they asked for, downloading the data they requested and quietly watching the system for signs that we'd been caught, keeping my usual log of everything I'd done.  When I was finished, I'd gather up the new printouts and the sheets of instructions, hand them back to the flunky and leave.

While they never told me what I was doing, it didn't take long to figure most of it out.  It was a database of souls. One record for every person on Earth. Lots of records. I didn't want to think about how many disk drives they had attached to that computer.

Each of the soul records had a series of numbers representing different aspects of that person.  There was  a number for greed, another for avarice, a third for ethics, a fourth for good deeds.  Charity, lust, murder.  You name it, Hell had quantified it.  The hellish computers then crunched all the numbers together to come up with a final number, known as a HQ, or Heaven Quotient.  What Heaven was having me do was locate as many of the marginal souls as we could and manipulate the data to lower the HQ enough to qualify them for Heaven.

This went on for six months without a hitch.  Some days I saved ten souls, some days I saved ten thousand. One day I saved three million with a simple accounting change on what words were considered profane.  I kept thinking I ought to be feeling good about life.   My bank account was finally flush again and the church building fund was halfway to its goal, and I still had a feeling that something wasn't quite right, and I just couldn't put my finger on it.

# # #

In retrospect, I should have caught on a lot earlier that something was fishy.  Unfortunately, once I'd bought into working for God, I guess I let my guard down.  I never thought that someone might lie about impersonating God.  I mean, who would have the audacity to do that?

Guess who?

I caught onto the scam almost by accident.  Programmers are by necessity curious people.  You never tame the innards of a computer without a lot of poking, prodding, and experimenting.  I've never met a programmer yet that, when given access to a computer, doesn't snoop.  The first thing we snoop, of course, is whatever the computer knows about us.  Wouldn't you?

One day, that's what I did.  The work had gone a lot more quickly than expected, and I didn't want to head home after an hour, so I decided to do some poking.  I had decent numbers, if I was interpreting them right.  Bonus points for going to church regularly, a few demerits for swearing and sometimes having a beer or two too many at the baseball game.

From then on, every couple of weeks when I'd finished up my normal work and the link hadn't shut down, I pulled up my record, just for kicks.  I found, much to my surprise, that my HQ was going down, even though I wasn't tweaking it.  Doing the work of God evidently had its side benefits.

Even that didn't clue me in.  It wasn't until I sat down one night and compared my data with data from a few weeks back, one item at a time.  I found out that my HQ was going down not because of good karma points or doing God's work, but because of large increases in my Mortal and Venal Sins categories.

Committing sins should my make HQ go up, not down.  My first thought was that something I'd done had caused those values invert in the final formula.  I started rifling through my notes to see what I could have done to screw things up that badly.

My second thought was that I was an amazing chump, and if I'd had any brains in my head, I would have figured it out immediately.

Satan doesn't control who goes where when they die.  Heaven does.  So I wasn't mucking in Hell's files, but in Heaven's.  Which meant that I wasn't working for God, but for Satan.

I was in deep, deep shit.

I wandered down the hall to the break room, refilled the coffee cup (caffeine use, 2 demerits), and walked back to my workroom, very casually and carefully making sure that everyone in the offices were somewhere else, even though I knew they would be.  Then I sat down and thought.

Finally, I turned to the keyboard and started looking.  I looked up myself again (two demerits added to the drug use category).  I looked up my wife.  I looked up Jonathon Michael, and wasn't surprised to find out he wasn't there.  Neither were any of the other people in the law firm.  I looked up my friend Barney, and two people on death row (one was innocent), and the Pope, and last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner.  I then went and got a phone book, and started looking up accountants, doctors and lawyers I picked at random.

Finally, I  packed up my stuff, handed the day's dirty deeds to the flunky and went home to do some serious thinking.

What to do?  What could I do?  I was under contract to the devil, legally bound to do what he asked as long as it didn't violate federal or state law, and while damning souls to Hell isn't exactly my idea of a piece of cake, last I looked, it wasn't a felony, either.  Unless I found a way to revoke the contract, I either continued to do what he asked of me and I'd go to Hell when I died, or I'd stop and be in breach of contract.  I had this nasty feeling that the Devil didn't sue in small claims court, either.

Either way I lose, so I did what anyone does in a no-win situation.  I sat down and spent a long evening alone with the contract looking for a loophole.

The next morning, I made some phone calls, and then put a certified letter in the mail.  Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't, but it seemed to be my best shot.  If it didn't, then no donation to the building fund would keep me from a free trip to damnation.  But I could certainly try my, if you'll excuse the expression, damnedest to avoid it.

I was lucky that things had fallen into a routine.  If the schedule held, the letter would arrive about three hours after my next trip into the office.

The schedule held.  When I arrived, they gave me the data changes they wanted done that time, and I walked into my office, turned on the terminal and tossed their requests into a corner.  I pulled out a list of my own from my briefcase and sat down to get to work.

The mail showed up a little early, so I wasn't quite finished when I heard the yell from down the hall and the terminal went dead.  Suddenly Jonathon Michael appeared in the office.  He didn't enter, he was just there.

"What's this?"

"I thought it'd be obvious, Mr. Michael.  It's a letter terminating our contract, effective upon receipt by you."

"You can't do this! There's a 30 day period in the contract.  We own you until then!" He was livid enough that he started losing control of his shape.  His skin darkened and the first hint of horns was showing through his carefully groomed hair.

"Ten days, actually -- except in cases of violation of law or harm to my professional standing, remember?  What do you think would happen to my standing if word got out that I'd been hired by Satan to program people into Hell?  If that doesn't harm my standing, what would?"

There was a roar, and what was left of Michael disappeared in a gout of flame, replaced by your typical, garden-variety demon.  No, not a typical demon at all.  A pissed-off demon.

"Your professional standing doesn't matter any more, since you're not leaving this room alive.  You belong to Hell now! Contract or no, you've damned your soul forever!" He reached for me with a hand that seemed all claws.

I stepped back.  "No, I don't think so", I said.  "First, I checked with the California Bar Association this morning, and it turns out that there is no Jonathon Michael, or, for that matter, a Sandy Peter or Mary David licensed to practice law in California.  By representing yourself as lawyers, you violated the statutes against practicing law without a license."

He screamed tried to grab me again.  I ducked out of the way.  The stench of the brimstone was almost overwhelming by now.  "Besides," I continued, "you originally declared yourself as a representative of Heaven.  Such a misrepresentation makes the contract invalid, because it was signed based on premeditated falsehoods.  No court would enforce it, so it was never binding."

The demon opened his mouth and belched a huge ball of fire at me.  The wall behind me exploded in flames, but I was untouched.  Not even warm.

"And finally, I've spent the last three hours undoing as many of the changes you requested as I could, and making as much noise as possible on the system so that the folks in Heaven will know something's going on.  Perhaps you could sue me for unauthorized use of your hardware, but somehow I doubt a court would rule against me, considering the circumstances."

The demon went crazy, his scream rising into hypersonics that caused my teeth to ache.  He jumped and landed next to me.  "This treachery shall not go unpunished.  I will spend all eternity making you rue your actions!" He grabbed me in a bear hug and squeezed.

The room became unbearably bright and I heard the sounds of harps and many voices singing.  The demon whimpered, and then there was a deep, muffled roar, a small explosion, and the room was empty.

"Son of a bitch," I thought to myself.  "It worked."

I decided the best place to be was elsewhere.  I grabbed what was left of my briefcase and started to leave.  When I reached the doorway, there was another muffled roar behind me.  I stopped and turned, and the demon was standing in the center of the room.  "You have won this round, but Hell has a long memory for those who betray It.  You're going to Hell when you die, and when you do, I shall be waiting for you.  I promise you that you shall not enjoy it."

"IF I go to Hell, demon.  I've undone most of the work you beguiled me into doing, and if it takes me the rest of my life, I will undo the damage you have done to my reputation.  If I fail to go to Heaven when I die, it will be because I fell short, not because of anything you did, and if so, you're welcome to my soul.  Until then, get out of my sight.  You disgust me."

Another explosion and he was gone.  For good this time.

# # #

It took four washes to get the smell out of the clothes, and even then I had to throw out the shoes.  I'm not complaining, you understand.  I'd rather have crispy shoes than crispy me any day.  I spent the rest of the day alternating between angry at myself for being duped and paranoid about whether I was really out of the frying pan, or whether I'd just deferred it.  I was almost a basket case by the time the phone rang about four that afternoon.  I ran for it, just because it was a distraction.

"We Wish To Thank You For The Work You Did For Our Master Today," they sang.  Sang in capital letters, no less.  "What You Did Was Honorable And Courageous.  You Have Our Gratitude.  And One Beer Early In The Game Is Fine.  We Don't Require Abstinence, But Common Sense.  Be Yourself And Worry Not."

And the line went dead.

I stared at the phone for a long time, and finally roused myself to go downstairs to get the checkbook and look up the Pastor's number so I could tell him he was getting a nice donation for the building fund.  When I looked in the mirror, I realized I was smiling.