"Scott Westerfeld - Non-Disclosure Agreement" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

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 randomly 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."