The IT Department of Hell

The Devil didn’t do fire and brimstone anymore. He did tickets.

Specifically, he ran the IT department of the afterlife, which was somehow worse than the fire and brimstone because at least fire was honest. IT support was passive-aggressive by design.

“Ticket 4,471,892,” Lucifer read aloud, rubbing his temples. “Damned soul reports that their eternal punishment loading screen has been stuck at 99% for three hundred years.”

His assistant, a demon named Gretchen who had been middle management at a health insurance company before dying of irony, looked up from her monitor. “That’s not a bug. That’s the punishment.”

“I know it’s the punishment, Gretchen. The problem is they’ve gotten used to it. They’ve started a book club during the loading screen. They’re reading Dostoevsky and growing as people. That is the opposite of what we want.”

Gretchen typed something. “I’ll escalate it.”

“To whom? I’m the Devil. There is no escalation path above me.”

“Then I’ll de-escalate it.”

“That’s not a thing either.”

The phone rang. Lucifer stared at it with the specific hatred reserved for devices that demand your attention without earning it. He picked it up.

“IT, this is Lucifer.”

“Hi, yes, my torture simulation keeps crashing every time it gets to the part where I relive my worst memory. It just shows a blue screen that says ‘AGONY.EXE HAS STOPPED WORKING.’”

“Have you tried dying and coming back?”

“I’m already dead.”

“Then the system is working as intended. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Actually, yes. The WiFi down here is abysmal.”

Lucifer covered the mouthpiece. “Gretchen, why do we have WiFi in Hell?”

“You approved it in the 2019 modernization initiative. You said, and I quote, ‘Give them just enough internet to see what they’re missing but make the connection too slow to actually enjoy anything.’”

“That’s diabolical.”

“That’s what you said at the time, yes.”

He uncovered the phone. “The WiFi speed is intentional. It’s 0.6 megabits per second. Fast enough to load a webpage. Too slow to watch a video. Just slow enough that every image loads one painful line at a time, like 1997.”

“That’s monstrous.”

“Thank you. We try.”

He hung up and turned to his inbox. 4,271 unread tickets. Not because the department was understaffed — they had exactly the right number of employees for maximum frustration. Three IT workers for eleven billion damned souls. One of them was on a permanent lunch break (his personal punishment was never finishing a meal), and another one only spoke Aramaic.

The third was Kevin.

Kevin was the worst hire in the history of the underworld, which was saying something because they’d once employed a guy whose entire job was to sharpen pitchforks and he’d somehow lost both his hands in the first week. Kevin was alive. He wasn’t dead, wasn’t damned, wasn’t even particularly sinful. He’d just applied for the job on LinkedIn because the listing said “competitive benefits and eternal job security” and he’d been too desperate to read the fine print.

“Lucifer, sir?” Kevin appeared in the doorway holding a tablet that was on fire. Not metaphorically. Actual fire.

“What is it, Kevin?”

“The soul database is corrupted again. We’re showing 847 people in the wrong punishment tier. There’s a war criminal doing the ‘mild inconvenience’ track and a guy who returned library books late getting the full medieval experience.”

“Which war criminal?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Kevin.”

“It’s the one with the mustache.”

“They all have mustaches, Kevin. This is Hell.”

Gretchen cleared her throat. “Also, Paradise submitted a merge request to share our authentication system. They want to implement single sign-on across the entire afterlife.”

Lucifer blinked. “Heaven wants to share a login system with Hell?”

“They say it’s for efficiency. Saint Peter is tired of manually checking the Book of Life. He wants a database.”

“Tell Saint Peter he can have a database when he stops using Excel to track immortal souls. I’ve seen his spreadsheets. He has a column called ‘Vibes’ and it’s half the admission criteria.”

“That tracks,” Gretchen said.

Kevin’s tablet exploded. Not dramatically — more like a phone battery giving up after a long, disappointing life. He looked at the smoking remains in his hands.

“Should I file a hardware ticket for this?”

“Kevin, you ARE the hardware ticket.”

“Right. I’ll just… get another one from the supply closet.”

“The supply closet is the ninth circle, Kevin.”

“I know. I have a coat.”

Lucifer watched him leave, then turned back to his desk. The monitor displayed the afterlife’s system dashboard: UPTIME: 99.97%. SATISFACTION: 0%. PENDING TICKETS: ∞.

Everything was working exactly as designed.

He opened the next ticket. “Damned soul requests font change on their eternal torment display. Currently Comic Sans. Requests literally anything else.”

He marked it: WONTFIX.

Some things were sacred.