Before the Devil Knows We're Dead

Science fiction story about evading death.

Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead

May we all get to Heaven 'fore the devil knows we're dead
—“Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead,” Turnpike Troubadours

A few ghosts watched as maintenance workers hosed down the East Wall of City Hall. This was a daily ritual. Even in GP, there were discontented teenagers. Every night, they threw graffiti up on the East Wall. And every morning workers hosed it down with solvent. Defacement of public buildings would not be tolerated! The wall was decorated with reproductions of classic artworks. The powers of GP had put a lot of effort into choosing those works. They weren’t going to stand idle while kids “improved” them.

A dapper older man observed the obliteration of the graffiti. He waved to the ghosts floating near the top of the wall. Then, he noticed a kid, maybe seventeen years old, also watching, with a glum look on his face.

“Did you ever notice that stuff they spray doesn’t hurt the old paintings?” he said to the teenager.

“Yeah,” said the kid. “I wonder if it’s some special kind of paint that the solvent can’t dissolve.”

Barra answered, “You got it, kid!”

The kid retorted, “I have a name! I’m Will. Who the fuck are you?”

Shamefaced, Barra replied, “You’re right. I apologize. I’m Barra. Good to meet you, Will. I shouldn’t have called you a kid. Won’t happen again.”

“S’alright, I guess,” Will answered ungraciously, appeased but slightly embarrassed to let go of his anger. To show that he could be friendly, he asked, “So what’s the deal with the paint? You know?”

“Yeah, the official stuff is a special epoxy compound. Practically indestructible.”

“Is it expensive?”

“You can’t buy it. They keep it in a secure warehouse. Only city maintenance workers can get it.”

“Huh.”

Barra’s phone beeped. He glanced at it and said, “Gotta bounce. See you around, Will.” As he hurried off, he bumped into Will’s backpack.

When Will got home, he noticed that his backpack felt a little heavier than usual. There was a brown paper bag in there containing half a dozen cans. They looked like paint. He hefted them and whispered, “Holy shit.”

#

Arriving home, Barra called, “Yuki! I’m home.” He sat down on the sofa.

Yuki answered, “Do you know the story of Baucis and Philemon?”

Barra, used to her random jumps, answered, “Not yet. But I suspect you’re about to tell me.”

Yuki danced into the room. She sat on Barra’s lap and said, “You want to hear it. Trust me.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, Baucis and Philemon were an old married couple. God was happy with them and offered to grant a wish.”

“Why was God happy with them?”

“Not important. I’m sparing your valuable time.”

“No hurry. I’m enjoying myself.”

“I’m also sparing my valuable time.”

“Carry on!”

“This is what Philemon answered, ‘Since we’ve passed our years in harmony, let the same hour take us both. Let me not see her tomb. Let her not bury me.’”

“Aw… sweet.”

Yuki laughed and gave him a little kiss on his nose. “Now, God is a hopeless romantic—bet you didn’t know that.”

“I did not know that.”

“He has a complete collection of first edition Barbara Cartland romances.”

“God does?”

“He does.”

“Has he read them all?”

“Of course he’s read them all. He’s God.”

“Righty ho. So God, this hopeless romantic…”

“Well, he said ‘Aw…’ like you just did and granted their wish.”

“And they died happily in each other’s arms.”

“Not exactly. One day, when they were weak with age, they turned into trees, Baucis a linden, and Philemon an oak, side by side. As far as I know they are still alive. Oaks and lindens can live a long time. But if they are dead, I’m sure they died in the same hour.”

“That’s what I call a nice arboreal ending! Just one question…”

“Hmm?”

“Who is Barbara Cartland?”

Yuki swatted him and stood up.

#

The people of GP raced great rockets of burnished metal for fun. Barra was one of the best racers. His rocket was called Bronze. Yuki had chosen the name. It came from one of the old books she liked to read. She told Barra that Bronze was the name of a legendary metal horse, and he was satisfied.

Secretly, Yuki had another reason for the name. Barra thought of himself as clever and cold. He was indeed clever. But Barra couldn’t help caring for people. He would always take the side of an underdog—the more under they were, the more Barra was on their side. He’d give a loser his last dime. More than likely, he got that last dime by picking the pocket of the previous person he helped. But when you were down on your luck, Barra was there.

In the old books, Bronze was ridden by a mythical soldier who had fought on the losing side in every rebellion in history. That, thought Yuki, was Barra.

Everyone knew what Barra was. They knew he could not be trusted. But because they loved him, they would sometimes tell him secrets. Yuki knew how to profit from the secrets Barra learned.

#

Barra was a grifter. He preferred to call himself a “market-maker”. “I figure out what people want. Then, when one person has something that another wants, I bring them together. And if a little something sticks to my hands after the trade, it’s just what I deserve for helping them find each other! Without people like me, an economy can’t function.”

Yuki was an embezzler. She did not use that word. “I’m an arbitrageur. I search the system for dollars on sale for 99 cents. That’s a market inefficiency, and I fix it. I buy the cheap thing—that makes the price rise, and the inefficiency goes away. Finance depends on people like me.”

It was never so simple. After thousands of years of operation, the legitimate economy of GP was almost frictionless.

(“GP” was another case of Barra and Yuki’s creative linguistic arbitrage. “Eukosmos” was the official name of the city in which they lived and plied their trades, but that, Yuki explained to Barra, just meant “good place” in a long dead language.)

The legitimate economy was almost frictionless. Even in the Good Place there were people who wanted things they weren’t allowed. The legitimate economy cast a shadow. In that shadow Yuki plied her trade.

Barra was her business partner and best friend.

They made a good team, Yuki cold as snow, Barra passionate.

#

Yuki and Barra were no longer young. The people of GP had no fixed lifespan, but they were not immortal. Accidents or malfunction or simple weariness could strike them down. Each citizen of GP had an immortal Soul, though. Well, almost immortal. There was exactly one way that a Soul could be destroyed.

Under City Hall, the same City Hall where Barra had watched the maintenance workers remove graffiti, there were two great machines. They were called the Adversary and the Advocate. When a person died, the Adversary weighed the Soul. If he judged them clean, he passed the Soul to the Advocate. But he swallowed tainted Souls—they were destroyed in the furnace of his fiery belly. That was the one way a Soul could be destroyed.

The Advocate was supposed to judge whether a Soul deserved immortality. But he was always on the side of the Souls. For more years than anyone could remember, the Advocate had welcomed each Soul that came to him. Since no one could imagine a place better than GP, it was their heaven. These immortal Souls were the incorporeal ghosts that inhabited GP.

#

Barra said, “I know you, Yuki. You told me that story for a reason…”

“I did.” She gestured and a screen appeared in front of them. Barra recognized the display. It was Yuki’s Soul.

“Ah, the Soul-hacking again. Any progress?”

“No,” Yuki replied. “It shouldn’t be so hard,” she continued. “My Soul”—she gestured at the screen—“records everything I feel, everything I see, everything I think. Every second of my life I change it. At this very moment it is recording our conversation, and my desire to hack it. And this very moment, as soon as it was recorded, became fixed. This moment, my thoughts of Soul-hacking, are enough to send me to the Adversary’s belly.

“No, Barra. I have made no progress on Soul-hacking.”

“But?” said Barra. “There’s an idea bubbling in the brain behind those eyes…”

“I can’t hack our Souls. But maybe, if I understood exactly how the Adversary and the Advocate work, I could find a way to fool them.”

“What do you need?”

“Do you think you could get me into City Hall?”

“Why can’t you just walk in the front door?”

“I need to get to the offices of the people who work with the Adversary.”

“Hmm… I have an idea. I may have made a friend who can help with that.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t. This friend needs to be a secret, even from you, Especially from you, in fact.”

#

Barra visited the East Wall the next day. Will was there again, but he looked happier today. A little. Will didn’t really do “happy.”

Will asked Barra, “Notice anything different?”

Barra looked carefully at the wall, but had to admit he did not. Will gestured at a painting of a large group of men. Still Barra saw nothing. “Help me out, Will. What am I missing?”

“Look at the third from the right face in the second row.”

Barra looked, and saw his own face up there on the wall. “Is that me?” he asked.

Will said, “It sure looks like it to me. It wasn’t there yesterday. I’ve been looking at this wall forever, and that face is new. I ain’t gonna say how it got there, but it looks as if someone figured out how to paint something on the East Wall. And it didn’t clean off this morning.”

“Do you think they noticed?”

“Nah. It’s just one face, and there are hundreds. I think the artist was just testing.”

“Cool! Do you know this artist?”

Will bridled. “You don’t ask that question!”

Barra said, “Well, you’re right. Wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble. It’s just that I want to ask if the artist could do somewhat for me. There might be a bit of cash or even art supplies in it for him.” “Or her,” he added as an afterthought.

“I might be able to pass a message,” Will said.

Barra handed him a picture. “Do you think they could get this face up there?”

“Maybe…”

“But more obviously. So it would be noticed.”

“Whoa! You know if that happens, they’ll take the woman in this picture in for questioning. You got something against this chick?”

“Actually, she’s my partner.”

“Whoa! Will she tell them about me?”

“She can’t. She doesn’t know anything about you. I didn’t tell her.”

“What about you? If she’s your partner, you could be called in, too.”

“No, I’m safe. They called me in for questioning a few weeks ago. I can’t be called in again for a year.”

“Yeah? What was that about?”

“They questioned me about a break-in at a secure maintenance warehouse.”

“Like the one that special paint is kept in?”

“Exactly like that.”

“What’d you tell ‘em?”

“The truth—that I knew nothing about it. Sometimes it’s not what you know that counts, but when you know it.” He winked at Will, who laughed.

Barra was delighted to have gotten a laugh out of Will.

#

Yuki heard a knock at the door. When she opened, a guard told her, “We’d like you to come with us.”

“Now is not a good time.”

“I’m afraid we have to insist.”

Yuki got her hat and went with the guards. At City Hall they took her to a security door at the back of the foyer. It opened for one of them, and he ushered her through. He took her to an interrogation room and asked her to sit. A Suit entered and sat opposite her. He looked into her eyes, and she felt him connect to her Soul. Until the questioning ended, he would know her every feeling and thought. She smoothed down her anxiety. She had been here before.

The Suit gestured, and an image appeared before her. “Do you recognize this?”

“It looks like the East Wall.”

“That’s right. Now I’m going to zoom in.” He touched the screen with two fingers and spread them” A bit of the display magnified. “Can you identify that image?”

“It looks like me!”

“That’s what we thought. What do you know about this?”

“Nothing. When was this picture taken?”

“You’re looking at a live image of the East Wall.”

“You’re telling me that a picture of my face can be seen on the East Wall right now?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How long has it been there?”

“We first saw it yesterday morning.”

“But that wall is cleaned every morning. How is the image still there after two cleanings?”

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

“Sir, I know nothing about it. This is a complete surprise to me.”

“Your partner is a gentleman named Barra, is he not?”

“Barra is my partner, yes.”

“What would he know about this?”

“I have no idea. He hasn’t mentioned anything about paintings on the East Wall to me.”

She was telling the truth. Looking into her Soul, he knew she was free of any desire to deceive him on this point.

Yuki thought, “When the abyss gazes into you, you gaze into the abyss.” She looked into the Suit’s eyes. She connected to his Soul, and to the City Hall machines looking through him. It was terrifying, but it was not the first time Yuki had seen through Cerberus’s jaws. The Suit saw nothing dangerous in her gaze—after all, he had initiated the connection. Just as he looked away to sever it, Yuki found what she needed.

#

Later, Barra asked, “How did it go?”

“I got what I wanted,” answered Yuki.

“Have you figured out Soul-hacking?”

“Not Soul-hacking. But maybe something. It’s super dangerous.”

“We’re gonna die someday, and the Adversary will eat our Souls. Nothing can be more dangerous than that!” he answered.

Yuki gestured, and a screen full of code appeared. “That’s the Adversary,” she said. “And this”—a second screen—"is the Advocate.”

“What do you mean? The Adversary and the Advocate are machines under City Hall.”

“Yes, Barra, they are machines. This is the code that those machines run. I snuck it out of City Hall yesterday.”

Yuki made a motion, and a small snippet of code lit up in each window. “This is the bit of code that notices when someone dies. It’s the same in the Adversary and the Advocate. I thunk I found a bug.”

“Is that possible? Wouldn’t someone have noticed?”

“Maybe not. It’s a subtle bug, and the probability of its being exercised is vanishingly small. If two people die at the same time, and I mean the exact same time, then the Adversary may deadlock.”

“What would that mean?”

“It means that it gets stuck. The Adversary can’t know about either death because one has to come first.”

“Would it just stay stuck forever? That would surely be noticed.”

“No, there’s a failsafe. The deadlock times out after a second. Then there’s a random wait and a retry.”

“I see where you’re going with this. After a deadlock, there’s an entire second when the Adversary is offline, at least for those deaths.”

“That’s it, exactly!”

“And then what? You got a plan for that second?”

“I have a smidge of a plan. The Advocate could act in that second. I think I have a trick to bring us to its attention.”

“Umm… When you say ‘us’, do you mean you and me, Yuki?”

“Yup. I told you it was dangerous.”

#

Barra asked, “So, what do we do? Stand on a bomb together and set it off?”

“Not good enough. An explosion takes milliseconds. For the Adversary, that’s a long time. We need to both die in the same microsecond. I’m thinking an antimatter-propelled missile. They reach relativistic velocities.”

“An antimatter missile? Does that exist?”

“It’s still just a research prototype. No one had a use for it, so it was mothballed.”

“And you know where, Yuki?”

“Of course. Easy enough to find. Because no one wants it, the security is weak.”

“Yuki, you’re telling me we can just walk into the warehouse where this missile is stored and drive it away?”

“More or less. We’ll need to hack the auth, but you know me.”

“You’ve done it already, haven’t you, Yuki?”

“Well, yeah… It was a fun little puzzle.”

“What about arming the warhead?”

“Doesn’t need one. Just crash the missile into the thing you want to destroy, and presto—instant crater. And I do mean ‘instant.’ You’re a racer. Do you think you can fly it?”

“Wait, this missile needs a pilot?”

“Well, the prototype does. They were using ghost pilots.”

“I can probably figure it out. When do you want to do it?”

“I think we should move fast. Will you die with me tonight, old friend?”

#

The heist had gone too smoothly for Barra’s peace of mind. The missile was ready to fly when they arrived—Yuki had taken care of that. To fly it one merely talked to the guidance system. They took it out to a stable orbit 400,000 km from GP. This, to Barra’s surprise, took only a few hours at one g. Then, a surprise.

The Guidance system spoke, “We are being hailed.”

Barra said, “Show us.”

Will’s face appeared on the display. “They took me, Barra.”

Yuki asked Barra, “Do you know this man?”

Barra answered, “Yuki, this is Will. He helped me get you into City Hall.”

Will said, “They Soul-questioned me. They saw the two of us talking on surveillance video and pulled me in. Now they know everything I know. It was enough to make them sus.” He grimaced.

“Not your fault. There’s no hiding from Soul-questioning. They let us take the missile, didn’t they?”

“Well, they didn’t tell me much, but I guess they did. They want you two bad. This is a lot of trouble for a couple of troublemakers. I’m to give you a message. They say you and Yuki must return peacefully and surrender. If you don’t, they take me, and they’ll still get you.”

Yuki muted the call and said, “He’s doing something with his hand. Do you see it?”

Barra answered, “It’s cant.” He replayed the conversation, watching Will’s right hand carefully.

“He says, ‘Fuck ‘em. You go. Leave me.’”

Yuki asked, “Do we care about him? Is this guy anything to you?”

“Well, I feel responsible. I got him into trouble.”

Yuki answered, “Good enough for me.”

Barra unmuted the call and said, “Tell them we’ll surrender peacefully,” while signing, “Yeah, fuck that. We’re coming for you.”

Ending the call, Yuki said, “We still have an advantage. They caught us, but they don’t know what we plan with the missile.”

Barra said, “Guidance, trace that hail.”

“It was from the desert northwest of Eukosmos.”

“Scan the location, please.”

“There’s a small building. No roads, but there is a landing for small aircraft.”

“Who’s there?”

“I detect only one inhabitant.”

Yuki spoke up. “Guidance, lock on to the source of that hail. Specifically, to the person you detect there.”

“Done.”

Barra said, “Shall we do it?”

Yuki answered, “Sure, unless you got a morbid fear of dying.”

Barra answered, “Punch it.”

Yuki told Guidance, “Accelerate at one g towards the inhabitant until impact.”

They screamed through the midnight. Two and a half hours later the missile, the cabin, and Barra, Yuki, and Will were a mushroom cloud over a glowing crater.

#

Yuki woke up at home. She walked out of her bedroom into the living room. Experimenting, she walked straight up the living room wall, then across the ceiling. Barra opened the front door and walked in.

Yuki called down to him, “Up here!”

He looked up at her, then leaped, planting his feet on the ceiling next to her.

“It’s a nice day. Let’s walk.”

Yuki asked, “Anywhere in particular?”

Barra answered, “Will is waiting for us at the East Wall. He’s thumbing his nose at City Hall. They’re pissed, but they can’t touch us. We’re all in the arms of the Advocate.”

Afterword

Philemon’s words are quoted from Stephanie McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In addition, there are references to Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness and to William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

The cover image is a phase portrait of

The portrait is rotated 20° clockwise.

A phase portrait is a visualization of a complex function introduced by Elias Wegert in Visual Complex Functions: An Introduction with Phase Portraits.

Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead