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

I narrowed my eyes.

"You see," the Devil continued, "over the last few decades, we down here in Hell have begun to realize
that we have a little trouble with our ... look and feel."

"I don't follow you."

He smiled, perhaps at my choice of words.

Then he shrugged. "I think it's these video games, although some of my minions say it's CGI graphics. But
whatever is to blame, recent studies have found that the average American male spends fourteen hours
per week in some sort of interactive infernal environment. And we just can't compete with the graphics in
first-person shooters these days. Many of the souls coming down here lately find the underworld rather
... cheesy, I'm afraid."

"You mean ...?"

"Yes, alas," the Devil lamented. "Hell no longer looks good on TV. Nor even in reality."

.

It was true.

We soared over the damned, their voices crying in a great wail of pain. Although we were above the
tongues of the flame, the heat clung to me like fishhooks. Every square inch of epidermis felt like
sunburned flesh sprayed with jalepe├▒o juice. And the smell was far worse than the sulfur we all know
from rotten eggs. It was of a purer species: fifth-grade chemistry set sulfur, though tinged with a darker,
murkier scent, like a dead rat behind the wall. The stench was awful even from our lofty height. I can't
imagine what it was like inside that pit of fire.

But Old Scratch was right. The visuals were very last-century. Gouts of hellfire shot across the damned in
big tacky bursts, as if some Coney Island flame-breather were running around down there. And the
flowing rivers of flame were so Discovery Channel: turgid and crusted with solidifying earth on top.
Nothing halfway as cool as the boiling oil algorithms that Falling Man had created for the prequel to
Death Siege, and that was just a Showtime original. We'd devised a mesmerizing and viscous black
liquid all run through with scintillating veins of sharp crimson, like a negative of a bloodshot eye
texture-mapped onto flowing blobs of mercury.

And the Hadean backdrop of reddened craggy mountains were totally pre-fractal. I've seen scarier coral.

"This looks like a heavy metal 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.

.