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

"That's harsh."

"And believe me," the Devil said, "salvation grows harder to achieve every day."

I looked back over my life, and wondered what тАФ besides my casual agnosticism, rampant Napster
piracy, and willing participation in the commercialization of Xmas тАФ could have damned me. It wasn't
immediately obvious. My recent near-death had made me realize that I was somewhat shallow. (I'd sort
of known that anyway.) But I didn't think I was really evil.

I could always try to be a better person once this bad dream was over. Give to charity. Be a Big
Brother. Pay the Falling Man pixel-jocks another buck an hour. But what if that didn't tip the scales?

I remembered the terrible heat of the flames. However visually cheesy and culturally specific, a real trip to
Hades meant pain for eternity. And pain never looks good on TV.

I also realized that I could leverage the subsidiary value of the Secret of Damnation. Once I knew the
Secret, I could spread the word. Start a new religion with guaranteed results. A new, streamlined religion
for the new century. Skip the rituals and dogma, and get straight to the part about not going to Hell!

Now there was a business model.
"Okay," I said. "It's a deal. You'll get the best infernal front-end this side of Fireblood IV. Just tell me the
Secret."

"First," he said, "you must sign this."

Damn, I thought when I saw the document. An NDA.

Now, I've signed about a thousand non-disclosure agreements in my day. In the software world, every
meeting, every negotiation, even the most tedious of product demonstrations begins with this harmless
and generally meaningless ritual. "We promise not to tell anyone what we learn here. Blah, blah, blah." If
you made a giant map of every non-disclosure agreement ever signed, with a node for each software
company and a connecting line for each NDA тАФ rendering the whole New Economy as a sprawling net
of confidentiality тАФ any point would be reachable from any other within a few jumps: six degrees of
non-disclosure.

But this was the NDA from Hell.

One peep about the nature of the Secret тАФ verbal revelation, gestural hints, Pictionary clues, publication
in any media yet to be invented throughout the universe and in perpetuity тАФ and I would be back down
here pronto and permanently. Damned.

This was the hitch, the gotcha that Old Scratch always puts in his contracts. I was going to have to keep
my mouth shut in a big way.

But I signed. Like I said, it was pure reflex.

And then I got to work.

The first order of business was getting an art director. Hades 2.0 was primarily a graphics upgrade, so
high-quality pixel help was essential. I decided on Harriet Kaufman, a freelance artist who'd worked with