THE INFERNAL BARGAIN

‘So you want to sell me your soul,’ said the demon. ‘What do you want in return? Power? Riches? World domination? A woman?’

‘I want to go viral on social media.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Have you heard of the internet?’ asked Max.

‘Vaguely. It’s some kind of electronic thing, isn’t it? Or something to do with spider webs?’

‘No, the World-wide Web. It’s a means of communication. You know what a computer is, don’t you?’

‘Someone who works with figures?’ The demon was looking progressively more baffled and he obviously felt out of his depth.

‘No, it’s a machine, an electronic machine. It deals with information – words, numbers, calculations. But in particular it’s a means of being in touch with people all over the world. People can access all human knowledge with a computer – or nowadays on their phone – it’s like a super-library - but mostly they use it to send each other pictures of kittens and argue with each other.’

‘I really don’t understand you. I know what a phone is. You mean a telephone, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how can it do what you say? How do you get through the operator? It doesn’t make any sense at all.’

‘Operator? How long is it since you were sent to buy a soul?’

‘Oh, about one hundred years. That’s not so long. I’m at least six thousand years old, you know.’

‘Well things have moved along a lot since you were here last. Nowadays we all carry our telephones in our pockets, we take photographs with them, we do our banking, buy stuff . . .’

The demon looked confused. ‘I obviously need to bring myself up to date,’ he said. ‘But you said you want to go viral. You want to cause a disease? I can certainly help with that. Is it for revenge? Do you hate humanity? Do you want to start a pandemic?’

‘No, we just had one of those. We’re still getting over it.’

‘Oh yes. I remember that. One of our more successful enterprises.’

‘On the contrary, I love humanity. I want to be famous and popular. I want everybody to know about me. When I say viral, I mean I want information about me to spread as fast as a particularly virulent virus. I want to be known and loved the world over.’

‘Have you tried being nice to people? That usually helps you become popular.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘You’re certainly right about that,’ replied the demon. ‘I don’t understand anything you’ve said so far. And I’m generally reckoned to be one of Satan’s more intelligent servants.’

‘You don’t seem very keen to buy my soul, if you ask me. Don’t you people value souls?’

‘Not all that highly any more, I’m afraid. We get so many already – weapons merchants, used car salesmen, politicians, lawyers, sugar industry lobbyists – there’s a special circle of hell reserved just for them – literary critics, and some new ones I don’t yet understand – influencers, authors who use AI . . . We’re rushed off our feet nowadays. I’m usually working in administration – I’m really just a clerical assistant – that’s why I’m so out of date.’

‘So you don’t want to buy my soul?’

‘Oh, I didn’t say that. But I need to understand just what you want in return. Value for value, and all that. You need to explain without all the modern jargon.’

‘All right, I’ll do my best. I’ll try to explain what I want from you. First, there’s the internet. Look, I’ll show you.’ And he took his cell-phone out of his pocket.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a mobile telephone. You can talk to each other like on a normal telephone from pretty much anywhere in the world to anywhere else. And you can send each other text messages through it. And take photos and send them to each other. Or videos – moving pictures – you know, like talkies?’

‘Oh yes. I remember. Like Charlie Chaplin.’

‘Yes, but in colour and with sound.’

‘That’s right. Like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. What will they think of next?’

‘But the big thing now is social media. You can put up a video – a talkie, let’s say, and people all over the world watch it and comment on it. People pay you to put these videos up on the Net . . .’

‘Sorry?’

‘Oh, the internet – the World Wide Web. No spiders involved. It’s just a name, because it’s all interconnected like a spider’s web. Anyhow, people watch your videos and put up ‘likes’. They hit a little picture on the screen of a hand with thumbs-up, and it gets recorded. And if you get lots of likes people pay you money, you get sponsorships, all kinds of things. You can get quite wealthy doing this. And if your video is a real hit, if thousands, millions of people watch and like it, they call it going viral – it spreads like a virus. And you have a chance to make real money. Here, look at this one . . .’

Some time later the demon felt he finally had a handle on the whole shebang. ‘Well, that’s an eye-opener and no mistake,’ he said. And he paused. ‘But you do understand the nature of infernal bargains, don’t you? That they never turn out the way you want to, or how you expect? You have to remember that we are the bad guys. It’s in our job description. If I can trick you or con you out of what you really wanted from the bargain, it’s my duty to do so. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.’

‘You’re curiously good-natured for a hellish demon.’

‘Blame it on working in an office for thousands of years. After awhile you become very aware of suffering and sympathetic to other sufferers. Do you know that our office is all Open Plan? With shoulder high partitions, so there’s no privacy? And an instant coffee machine? With non-dairy whitener instead of milk? And they have inspiring posters on the walls! They say things like Be Kind to Yourself and Dance like Nobody’s Watching! I don’t even know what they mean!’

‘Good grief. I’m so sorry. You do understand suffering. How do you keep records?’

‘Oh, you know. On a card index file. Each new soul we purchase, we write the name on a card – they’re filed in alphabetical order – along with the sentence – always eternity of course – and the punishment. You know, boiling oil, being roasted over hot coals or ripped apart by talons again and again forever, that kind of thing.’

‘And how do you update everything?’

‘Oh, one of us clerical assistants goes to a filing cabinet – they stretch for thousands of miles of course – finds the card – and sometimes they’ve been misfiled and you have to search and search until you find it – the punishment for losing a card is even severer than for the sinners - and writes the update on the card and refiles it.’

‘You know you’d do well to computerise your filing system. It would make it so much easier. I’m a computer tech. I could set it up for you. For a consideration, of course. A reduction in the severity of the sentence, something like that.’

‘Do you think that would help?’

‘I’m sure of it. Certain.’

‘Well, if what you say is true I could probably arrange for your torture to be a little less severe. Being evil, we’re also very much in favour of bribery and corruption, of course. A little bribe here and there, and I think I can safely say the job will be done. In the meantime, I think I can guarantee that you become so popular across the world that you’ll have nothing to complain of at all. Not about that, anyway.’

The contract was signed in Max’s blood (of course – the demon was a traditionalist).

And so it was that Hell was computerised and became hugely more efficient. For awhile. And Max became so well known that he had no private life at all, he received threats and hate-mail every day, the paparazzi followed him everywhere, even into the bathroom. His wife left him, his children disowned him, even his dog began to bite him.

But that wasn’t the worst. One day the demon re-appeared. ‘What have you done?’ he cried. ‘All our clerks spend the whole infernal day watching videos of cute cats, cat fails, cats reacting to cucumbers, car crashes, buildings falling down, people saying the earth is flat – at least they got that right – conspiracy theorists. I just sent sixty trillion dollars to someone in Nigeria who promised me a five hundred percent return on my money. Nothing’s getting done!’

‘Sorry,’ said Max. ‘I never thought of that. Tell you what - if you withdraw my fame and stop me going viral, I’ll disconnect your computer system from the internet - and you can go back to the old way of doing things, no questions asked. And you give me my soul back and tear up the contract. How’s that?’

‘Done!’ said the demon.

So Max went back to being just ordinary Max, no longer famous, no longer viral – just boring, insignificant Max. His wife and dog and children returned. He couldn’t have been happier. Occasionally he had strange half-memories of fame and wealth, but he dismissed them as fantasies of an over-stretched imagination.

What happened to the demon? He was promoted. Hell had discovered new and far better ways of torturing people than with boiling oil and hot coals. So if your computer crashes taking all your data with it, if viruses infect it, if you get overwhelmed with spam, you know who to blame.