Did you know you still get email after you die? Most of it is junk, of course. Pyramid schemes and penis pills, the lead bricks of the 21st century. I guess the bots will keep spamming me, long after my bones have sunk into the ground.

It’s the other letters that get to you, the personal ones that you never found time to answer. There was this girl I met at BU, a couple years after I broke up with Judy. Her name was Molly. She was some kind of writer, and she had just lost something important to a storage glitch.

I walked in and found her almost in tears at a coffeehouse, staring at a hovering error message. I asked her what was wrong and helped her get the file back. And even I can get a girl’s number when I get a setup like that.

I pulled up her contact info every day for a week before I finally sent her an email from my BU account. I sent her a letter in May of ‘57, and Molly wrote me back in October, apologizing for the late reply, since she had graduated soon after I met her, and hadn’t bothered to check her university account.

She wrote me a long, funny email about moving to Washington and getting a job writing ad copy for a travel magazine. She thanked me for saving her novel and assured me that she had finally finished it. Said my letter had reminded her that she really should submit it somewhere.

I never saw her reply, of course, because I dropped out of school that August, and never bothered to check my old account. I hadn’t thought about her in a long time, but her email was the first thing that came up, when Philo finally got done running cables for me, and plugged this terminal into an old I2 network connection. This machine can’t access modern Datacore nodes, but I was able to tunnel into my old BU account and circumvent the legacy firewall, revealing four thousand pieces of spam, and Molly’s letter.

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I thought about sending a reply from beyond the grave, but it would just be cruel to both of us, even if it did get through.

Stupid of me to waste time being sentimental, when it took forever to get this connection working, and I can’t say how long it will stay up. Philo has worked his fingers to the bone for me, running cable through this old schoolhouse, rigging circuits from my half-assed diagrams. I can’t pay him, but he says it’s worth it, just to fuck with the angels.

The attached manuscript is the confession I gave to Azael and the demons, but if you’re reading this, you have the other version, the version I wrote for my friends. Any modern network would reject an email from here, but I know you guys have been watching me. The churches have been watching my nodes ever since Baalphezar died, hoping I would slip up and send Taltorak through an open switch.

And for those of you who’ve been waiting, today is your lucky day. I’ve left an encrypted copy of Taltorak on the net, split between a dozen anonymous relay nodes. Don’t get excited. You’ll never find them all, even if you could use it without me. I refused your offers when I was alive, but now I’m dead, and I’m ready to make a deal. I don’t care about good or evil, and I don’t care what you are. Angel, demon, dragon, or god. Spring me from the afterlife, and I’ll give you the book. You have my Word.

TIMOTHY KOVAK WILL RETURN IN TALTORAK BOOK 2: THE HERO BUSINESS