The Complete Afternet
All three Afternet novels in one bumper volume
Peter Empringham
This book is dedicated to our friend Mark. I think, all in all, he would have hoped that this might all be true.
Thanks to Jo and Jayne for all the work casting a critical eye on both writing and grammar. Their attention to detail through the creation of the trilogy has allowed me write in an entirely slovenly manner in the knowledge that what I create will be corrected.
This work is copyright 2015 Peter Empringham
CONTENTS
The Afternet Part 1
Found Footage 1:
Can You Feel The Force
Something About Mary
The Afternet Part 2: Redemption
Found Footage 2:
As Ye Reap
1000 Years Of Solitude
The Colour of Money
The Afternet Part 3: Games Without Frontiers
The Afternet
Book 1
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddle masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me”
Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’
CHAPTER 1
It was sometime in the 8th century AD that one of the most incredible yet largely unnoticed resignations in history occurred. In the ether between death and judgement, St Peter had thrown his Book of The Dead to the floor, and proclaimed that he was going for a fag because this was ‘all shit’. He stalked off, leaving a bemused number of new arrivals observing the unmanned Pearly Gates. After seven hundred or so years of delivering the judgement of Heaven or Hell upon millions, the sheer number of new arrivals finally exhausted his patience.
By now, the teeming hordes were dying at a rate greater than ten per minute, meaning that the good Saint was faced every six seconds with a new applicant. Most were by and large innocent, insofar as their troubled times allowed. Each batch, though, invariably included some new pox-infested rapist, murderer, or purveyor of child-pornography carvings. Processing this would have been enough of a test, but then came the added trial of the appeals process launched by The Spirit Rights Society, for whom no sin seemed bad enough in isolation to justify an eternity of punishment.
He was repeatedly called upon to explain his decisions about these undeserving applicants as he listened to some bizarre arguments in mitigation, from cultural droit de seigneur via justification for tribal bloodletting to requests for inter-familial slaughter to be excluded on the grounds of the right to privacy. The queue for judgement lengthened, and he came to the conclusion that he had paid enough for having denied Jesus three times, and if the young man’s dad wanted this done he had better get Job or someone else with unlimited patience to do it.
This had been in his mind on the morning he finally gave up the ghost. In front of him, demanding entry to eternal peace was a grizzled fat man who ruled a small North Indian territory by, he claimed, Divine Right. His pockmarked features were spattered with gore and chunks of flesh, remnants of the violent punishment he had been handing out to a poor family who had refused him congress with their daughter. With his dying breath, the father of the intended victim had thrust the potentate’s own sword through his fat chest. The irony of that very family being after the Caliph in the queue was not lost on Peter. Behind them, expectant faces stretched as far as he could see. As the fat man expressed his refusal to accept the Saint’s decision and a demand to see ‘someone in charge’, the hopelessness of his task struck Peter with some force. He downed tools, swore as noted above, and walked off the job.
It was almost an hour before the news got to God. He was in the gym with a personal trainer who was still trying to convince Him that bicep curls worked a whole lot better when done with the arms rather than the mind. The Supreme Being secretly acknowledged that perhaps Peter had done enough to make up for getting the Holy offspring into the cak, and decided that maybe it was time to let the benighted Saint know what He (as of course He would) had known all along.
It was left to Saraswati, wife of the Hindu Creator Brahma, to show Peter his own salvation. He was somewhat hyper after half a packet of Number 666; cigarettes so strong they were deemed to be bad for people already dead - and a couple of double espressos. It took some time for him to take his eyes off Saraswati’s multiple pairs of arms and concentrate on what he was being shown and told. Okay, so one of the hands held a lotus, very nice, very fragrant, one some scriptures or other, but the other two were scratching away at a violin and he had the mother and father of all headaches.
“Can you cut the flaming violin?” He leaned against the wall of the room to which she had taken him and held his pounding head.
“Sorry,” she said, laying the ill-tuned instrument on the floor, “it’s a habit.”
“What is it with Indian music, anyway, that only Asians think it’s melodic?”
“What, only 60% of the world population you mean?”
He nodded in reluctant acceptance of the point.
He looked around the room to which she had brought him, riding on a white swan and waving her arms all the way like a synchronised drowning team, whilst playing something which could have well been The Devil Went Down To Georgia. The place gleamed. White walls, rubberised floor, argon sprinkler system, soft hum of electronics. Before him was bank upon bank of tall metal cabinets, stretching into the distance, warm and softly humming.
“What is it?” He asked.
“It’s called a computer. It hasn’t been invented yet, but it’s one of the heavens, apparently waiting for something called nerds. We’ve changed it so that it does your job. You are looking at…” she scraped a crescendo for dramatic effect, “The Afternet.”
Saint Peter walked across and gently touched the cool metal jacket of the nearest processor. In front of him was a big red button, flashing rhythmically; as a reflex it created in him a desperate need to press.
“What’s this?” he pointed to the button.
Saraswati did some kind of extraordinary shimmy with her arms, like an epileptic fit at a darts tournament, then smiled at him benignly.
“It sets the machine running. Press it, and all of the admissions to Heaven and Hell will be performed by this machine. Let’s face it, you’re eight hundred years old and you can’t cope with the workload you have now. Imagine what it’s going to be like when they really start going at it.”
Peter looked from the smiling deity back to the sweep of the enormous lighted room and then his eye was drawn to the flashing red button. No more whining usurers, loan sharks, stinking thieves, beggars, devil worshippers, sister-, daughter-, brother-, son-, or motherfuckers demanding their place in heaven. Conversely, no innocents, blessed children, good Samaritans, devoted worshippers…Saraswati began to play Greensleeves. Saint Peter pressed the button.
The computer mainframe worked happily without supervision for some seven centuries, to all intents and purposes forgotten as it quietly hummed, whirred, and every so often clicked away in its pristine surroundings. St Peter had the occasional twinge at the loss of his responsibilities, but he was not really one of those people who are defined by their job. His rediscovery of the joys of fishing led to him spending ever longer stints with his rod and net at a productive spot down by the Styx, as the machine processed the steadily increasing numbers of dead with barely a glitch.
However, St Peter and his ledger turned out not to be the only method of judgement with a breaking point. The automated vers
ion had its own limitations. This was to some extent understandable, since it had been designed as a place of eternal pleasure for geeks and now was, well, running the place. Even as the human race continued to expand and consequently die in increasing numbers, the system proved quietly competent, even through volcanic eruptions, floods, landslides, and debilitating diseases that ravaged local populations. No-one, however, had factored in the bubonic plague.
In the mid-1300s, as the population of the earth marched inexorably beyond three quarters of a billion, the dominant species was stopped in its tracks by the most virulent and wide-ranging natural, or even unnatural, catastrophe before or since. The Afternet, which had smugly performed its binary algorithms with almost no errors for centuries, was suddenly a crawling mess of misallocation, when it allocated at all. As the death intake tripped beyond St Peter’s tipping point by 20, 30, even 60 percent, the Afternet issued its entirely correct decisions, but when in a matter of months the stream of souls crossing planes became first a torrent and then a flood, digits began to be crossed and then as good as stopped altogether.
The first to be stricken and arrive for judgement were the Chinese. After them the plague struck the Tartars, and then a panoply of broadly-based Asian folk, followed by the Italians and afterwards, like a longitudinal layer cake, a slice of Europe from south to north. By now there was no particular logic to the stuttering way in which the system worked, but for most, there was no instant reckoning. A third of the world, coughing, sweating and passing blood, stinking of their ravaged deaths, turned up at a hastily erected entrance gate, and the last one who raised his wasted hand to take a ticket saw the sign ‘Now Serving 100,010,179’. His ticket was 215,632,418, which meant he could have been seen to at the delicatessen and the fish counter and still had time to cruise any aisle he so desired to find the right ready meal. And would still have had to wait for a few decades.
The plague was actually an early example of the theory that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Satan, who every so often made a personal trip to look for some souls to corrupt, happened upon a warlord in Schengju Province feeling regret for his reckless beheadings. The Dark Lord wasn’t about to lose the soul of this murderer just because he was feeling a little squeamish, and dropped in to give him some immoral fibre. The Devil, who loved to indulge his sense of the theatrical, took on the form of a talking monkey, and left the warlord with a promise of earthly riches, which unluckily for him would turn out not be fulfilled. This was due to the inadvertent deposit by the monkey of a vicious invasive bug which would not only cause its first victim to die in horrible pain, but also wipe out large swathes of the human race.
God’s followers on earth believed this was the plague foretold in Revelations. In actual fact God’s back was very much turned. He was incognito at a two-week seminar being held by a late Kurd who claimed to have found the way to mental peace through the judicious application of wintergreen ointment.
The Afternet, as though in sympathy with its applicants, coughed and spluttered, and inexorably slowed in its processing, never to recover. The Gods and Demons, preferring to discuss philosophical questions such as whether or not there should be Fire Exits in Hell, largely ignored the increasing backlog. When it was finally discussed, centuries after the problem originally arose, they agreed that each side would nominate an individual to manage the system and look for ways to diminish the queuing hordes before they drowned in a glacier of foul smelling sputum. For no rational reason the individuals selected turned out be Marcel, a 17th century French libertine murdered after a night’s adultery; and Geoffrey, a 7th century Cumbrian turnip puller who died in equally prosaic circumstances.
The night Marcel died, in February 1662, was unexceptional for almost everyone else in Paris. For him, too, that night was in many ways the same as strings of others in his 32 years. The only, crucial, difference was that the customary acts of violence, gluttony, drunkenness and lust with which it ran its course were concluded with him taking his last breath.
He had run through the marketplace of Les Halles, kicking through the abandoned debris of the day’s vegetable market as he went. Behind him he could hear the thudding of the soldiers’ boots and their cries of instruction to one another as they pursued. Cutting down a narrow passageway he tugged at the waistband of his trousers, which he had not had time to tie when his pursuers burst in upon him, then he scuddered to a halt at a narrow intersection. He wanted to avoid the main boulevard, which was too light and offered no cover, but needed to get to the river to have the best chance of escape. A sharp voice behind him, closer than ever, made the decision for him and he ran directly ahead, along a narrow alley stinking of the foetid soil oozing down the channel along its centre.
He was younger, and, he thought, faster than the soldiers. Even so, his breath was laboured in the coldness of the February night. He had no weapon, no money for bribes, having left his cloak and belt in the floozy’s room in his haste to depart. He was running uphill now, the alleyway curving persistently to the right, cobbles slick beneath his feet. He stopped. Apart from his own panting he could hear nothing. His pursuers must have taken another turn at the junction. He smiled and began to casually tie the ribbon at his waist as he walked on, for the first time feeling something of the cold in the air in the absence of the warm cloak.
The end of the passageway loomed in front of him, arched and lit by a burning torch outside one of the houses at the corner. Only when he reached it, almost beginning to hum a tune, did the captain step out of the shadows, followed by two of his men. The men had pikes and the captain a thin blade that looked worryingly sharp. Even as Marcel began to turn to retrace his steps, the captain gestured away to his left, grinning all the while. A hundred yards or so down the street he could see the other soldiers, one of whom waved with mock familiarity. Puzzled, Marcel looked again, and realised with a sense of stupidity that the other soldier was standing at the beginning of the street he had just travelled. It was a crescent with two outlets. The captain’s mime of a horseshoe shape in the air emphasised the error in Marcel’s escape route. His blackened grin underlined the hopelessness of French seventeenth century dentistry.
“Let’s get on with it.” The captain said to his companions, “It’s late and cold.”
Marcel was grabbed by two huge pairs of hands and slammed against the wall, held under the armpits, his feet off the floor. He was tall, but thin, and the soldiers raised him easily from the ground
“You shouldn’t get into bed with the cardinal’s wife, my friend. That’s the wrong lady in every way.” The captain stepped closer, the blade held towards Marcel’s throat.
“Should cardinals really have wives?”
“Who are you to judge?”
Marcel could almost feel the earthy excitement of the two men holding him as the captain stared into his face. What the soldier saw was a dark-haired, olive-skinned young man with an almost tangible self-confidence. It was fair to say, though, that what Marcel would have thought of in himself as sophistication, good looks, and charm, the soldier regarded more as untrustworthiness, vanity, and asking for a smack. In fact, apart from the opinion on looks, the soldier was probably closer to being a good judge.
“How much? I can give you money, jewels…”
The captain thrust his grizzled face close to Marcel’s. The advent of breath-freshening products could not come soon enough. “Normally, yes.” He said, deadpan. “But you killed my brother.”
Marcel thought about denial, having no idea who the sibling might have been, but given his central role in any number of unnatural deaths in those days, chances were the captain had him bang to rights. He silently congratulated himself for at least having done up his pants, and looked to the blade which was held in front of his eyes by the grinning soldier.
“Not the face.” He said.
His dying words were honoured not through any sense of nobility on his killer’s part but because it was cold and the captain wanted to get back somewhe
re warm. The blade simply thrust up under his ribcage into his heart, there was a sharp pain, a flicker of his eyes, and his body was left in a heap on the floor.
It just so happened that his death occurred during a brief sliver of time in which the now-inundated Afternet performed to specification and whisked him to his fate. To his surprise, he did not drift into a bright light and see the white-robed figure of Saint Peter before him, which was a shame, because he had his story ready, largely along the lines of society being to blame. Instead there was a moment of conscious silence and blackness and then he felt and saw for the first time the glare and suffocating heat, the brimstone stink of Hell. Which was less of a surprise.
Almost exactly a millennium earlier, Geoffrey’s death, like his life, had been a fine example of benign incompetence. The Cumbrian turnip picker had lived at subsistence level for all of his years, and at almost any time during those years it would not have taken much to nudge him over the edge. There may not have been threats from traffic, sharp machinery, or marauding gangs of knife-laden school-age children, but the constant dearth of food, the summer heat and winter cold posed enough of a threat to the likes of Geoffrey.
On the fateful evening he had been slowly making his way back from a field over the hill, a mile away from his village, where he had managed to locate a single root vegetable to feed his family. Even this meagre catch had taken a huge effort, the ground frozen hard from weeks of frost, and now as the evening drew in the temperature was dropping rapidly and he opted to pass through a small copse, in the hope that it may have retained a little more of what warmth there had been during the day.
In the midst of the stand of trees was a small pond in a state of deep freeze, and he stopped and peered at the ice to see if there were any fish he could somehow get to.
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