The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  He’d never caught a fish in his life but assumed they may move a little slower in this winter glacier. In fact, nothing was moving at all, but, having stopped, he decided to relieve himself and rummaged through the grubby skins and cloth wrapped around his abdomen until he located a warm penis with his freezing hands and withdrew it, arcing a long stream onto the frozen pond.

  As he did so, he heard a soft rustle beside him, and turning his head was surprised to see a rabbit, which had hopped through the grass and now seemed enchanted by the vision of the unexpected waterfall onto a solid pond. Geoffrey’s thought processes were not highly developed, the life he led requiring little in the way of understanding of act and consequence. After a moments thought he set in train a chain of events which perhaps even one more enlightened could not have foreseen.

  The static rabbit silently screamed ‘Dinner’, and Geoffrey fixed his rheumy eyes upon it before reaching with what he imagined to be stealth to grab it by the twitching ears. He was short and gaunt, his body beneath layers of rags ravaged by the paucity of his diet, and it was his weak skinny legs which let him down as he twisted awkwardly to make the catch with his extended arm, the other hand still clutching his member.

  The rabbit hopped a foot or so, and Geoffrey’s involuntary lurch to trap it caused him to pitch slowly forward onto the pond, his knees and elbows breaking the ice and causing the freezing water to rush up into his clothes, making a dead weight. With one arm trapped beneath him and the other outstretched he could make no purchase on the ice and his face was flooded, water forcing its way into his nose, eyes and mouth. It didn’t take long for him to die, face down on the crystal pond. The rabbit, after watching him twitch for a few moments, hopped away unconcerned.

  Although the water froze around the corpse overnight, the soul was long gone, and in direct contrast with that of Marcel a thousand years later was met with a reception much more in keeping with a traditional idea of the moments immediately after death. Geoffrey still felt cold as he ascended a seemingly unending stairway bathed in a ghostly translucence. Clothes saturated with icy water, he happened upon the back of a small group of people who stood before a set of magnificent gates, by the side of which stood a bent figure with a straggly white beard, leaning on a lectern with a bored look on his face. Geoffrey shivered and edged forward as those in front of him in turn talked to the old man at the gates, and then either entered into whatever lay beyond or, on a couple of occasions and to his surprise, pitched off the edge and plummeted to wherever, screaming. He had not the slightest idea what was going on.

  When he reached the top of the stairs, the old man asked his name, and Geoffrey, shaking with cold, told him. The man looked briefly at the enormous book, and then back to the hapless peasant.

  “Welcome,” he said with a smile, “Enter.” He gestured expansively towards the gates and the blue space beyond. Geoffrey nodded and began to walk through the gates and then stopped and turned to the bearded figure.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “Heaven.” The old man looked at him. “Oh, and-“ he gestured towards the turnip-puller’s groin, where one hand still frozenly held the acorn of a penis, “you might want to put that away.”

  That the deaths of two such massively different characters so many years apart should have any effect on the course of the cosmos seems unlikely. The fact that they did, and that their experiences in transit after their deaths should differ so wildly was due to the simple but earth-shattering advent of The Afternet.

  CHAPTER 2

  Heaven had been rather kind to Geoffrey; in fact it did what Heaven is supposed to do, which is give him everything he had wished for. His blameless life was rewarded with an eternity in which turnip fields were 99% turnip and only 1% field. However it’s hard to be careful what you wish for when you know so few of the options, and he would have admitted that there were times when he, in death, yearned just a little for the a taste of the blinding hardship he had endured in life, if only to have again the thrill of actually finding his quarry rather than tripping over it.

  As luck would have it, he had happened upon an advertisement for the position running the Afternet whilst flicking through a copy of ‘The Son’, which asked for people with computer expertise to apply for a position critical to the ongoing management of heaven. Reading wasn’t part of the National Curriculum for 7th century peasants, but he was nevertheless good with pictures, and having spent some time salivating over Page 3 (Joan of Arc: Hot, or What?) he was able to follow the map accompanying the advert. Apart from Geoffrey, the only other applicant for Heaven’s representative was a stray Javanese Gorilla who missed his interview slot because he was eating the finger buffet, and almost certainly would not have been hired due to not being human. The bored minor deity doing the interviewing had no hesitation giving Geoffrey the job, not least so that he could get back to lording it over some handmaidens.

  Since the Dark side took a little longer to make their choice, Geoffrey had plenty of time to sit in the control room, looking with utter bewilderment at the bank of VDUs in front of him, gaze at the instruction manual as if it were in Greek (which it was), and generally perform no useful function whatsoever. He had inadvertently created a template for office workers to follow long into the future. It was when he was joined by Marcel that things really began to take off.

  Marcel had a rather less benign eternity thrust upon him. The system had without hesitation consigned him to the dark and fiery depths of Beelzebub. It was a decision with which he could have little dispute, his life on earth having been a litany of vileness that at times had surprised even him. He had just been moved into a new vat of boiling oil when he overheard the other occupants discussing, between shrieks, an opening in a new office that had something to do with admissions. Marcel was nothing if not smart, and even as the others pleaded for the opportunity to apply, he conversely screamed his horror of such a terrible fate.

  This he clearly did with such conviction that he was plucked forthwith from the bubbling fat, stabbed a few times for good measure, and whisked through the interview process. He blubbed, begged, and at one point plucked out one of his own eyes in his attempts to convince everyone he would rather be impaled upon living spikes. His subterfuge worked, and a couple of cackling demons, in total belief that they were inflicting further horrors, awarded him the job.

  On arrival in the control room he found an item of internal mail addressed to him, which upon opening he discovered to contain said eye, instructions for re-insertion, and a note saying ‘You’ll be needing this’.

  It was a mismatch of unimaginable proportions. On the one hand an illiterate, ineffectual purveyor of root vegetables who had lived hand to mouth and died before the invention of the printing press. On the other a 17th Century French libertine who had lived in unseemly luxury in a system designed to give him maximum opportunity to exercise his perverse appetites. The onus on Marcel to perform, however, was much greater than for his new co-worker. For Geoffrey, failure would lead simply to a return to a turnip glut. Marcel had, amongst other horrors, been pinned under a millstone being gnawed by carnivorous slugs and subjected to the occasional blast of blowtorches, as well as enduring the relative holiday of the boiling oil. He therefore recognized a good gig when he saw one, and knew that if he screwed up it would be back to crush, gnaw and burn for time immemorial.

  It was only because of this need to succeed that Marcel over time taught his partner to read, an occupation which tested what little patience he had to its utmost. Their role, given the horrendous queues that had built up over the years, was to make sure the system was working to its optimum capability, and where necessary just to make the decision themselves. They spent some hundreds of years proving that by and large they were wholly incapable of doing either.

  Now, Marcel twirled his chair, admiring his new sharkskin suit. Sleek looking but abrasive, it fitted like a glove and he had begun to be able to control its propensity to become agitated at the sigh
t of lunch, particularly where it involved red meat. The wingtip sunglasses were largely for effect, adding nothing to his ability to see the computer screen at which he peered under the harsh fluorescent light of the control room. On the wall behind him was a huge LCD display over which hung the title SPECIES EXTINCT TODAY, and upon which the counter clicked over to 007, and the words read BOLIVIAN SWAMP SLOTH. Whatever the state of the Afterlife, the last of the slow moving slime-encrusted fly-eaters of Bolivia had just bought the farm. Were there an animal afterlife, which of course would be ridiculous, it would even now be contemplating a hundred day climb, with plenty of rests, up the staircase to be judged by Saint Peter’s Gecko for fitness to enter Sloth Heaven.

  Marcel’s pleasure in his clothing was in direct contrast to the misery which had spread amongst the pair when they realized that all of their efforts that day (which admittedly had been increasingly half-hearted), had led to the processing of a grand total of 6 souls. Marcel emphasised the scale of the problem to Geoffrey.

  “So,” he said, working his keyboard, “at a current rate of 80,000 or so deaths per day, that gives us…” tab down, Enter, “a daily deficit of about 79,994. Barring natural disasters.”

  “Isn’t 80,000 deaths a day a natural disaster all on its own? When I was around, there were only 80,000 people in Britain. And I only knew about 20 of them.”

  “Well I have to tell you that there are sixty million now, and most people only know about 20 of them. In Cumbria, in any case.” Marcel swung his chair to face Geoffrey.

  “What are we going to do Geoff? Six is a new low, even for us. It’s less than a third of the people you knew in your pathetic life.”

  Geoffrey ignored the implied insult, if only because he didn’t recognise it as one. Even after several centuries in Marcel’s company, and with the newly gained powers of numeracy and literacy, he had the interpersonal skills and social nuance of a turnip puller from the Borders, deceased in 683 AD.

  “It’s not really our fault, though, is it? The manual says it has the capacity for a million a day. Now it does six, and we have to check those. Richard the Third caused one heck of a fuss in Provence Heaven, didn’t he? I had no idea Monarchs had any idea how to disembowel on their own behalf. I thought they had people to do it for them.”

  “I suppose that did get a bit bloody, but we got him to the right place eventually, eh? That soon cooled his ardour. Having your hump industrially sanded on an hourly basis soon makes you review your attitude to industrial co-existence.”

  He paused for thought, then went on.

  “Actually, where I come from the Royalty would never have done their own disembowelling, not with the risk of arterial spray all over their crisp white linens. I knew a couple of disembowellers; lovely people, but you needed to keep just a few paces behind them.”

  The gloom was almost palpable. They had just spent an hour arguing in an attempt to batch process a group of gaily-dressed individuals who had all just failed to be elected to the Papacy. For once, Marcel hadn’t taken pleasure in proving to Geoffrey that ‘goodness’ and a senior position in the Church were not necessarily the same thing. After a long and lively discussion he showed his workmate a group of wedding pictures featured in Brevitt’s ‘Close But No White Smoke’, the definitive reference work on borderline Pontiffs. Geoffrey had argued that the fact that some of the applicants were married was not really a deal-breaker, but had drawn the line when Marcel revealed that some loved animals more than could be thought natural.

  “And in one case, both.” Marcel had said with a degree of smugness, flipping around the enormous tome to give Geoffrey a better view of the large colour plates. “Look.”

  “What is it?”

  “Wedding photograph.”

  Geoffrey looked back to the picture, horrible realisation dawning on his face with the creeping stealth of ink on blotting paper.

  “Streuth!” He looked to Marcel with a gurning distaste, “Bad taste or what? I wouldn’t have put the brideslambs in pink, would you?”

  “Crime against mammality, I’d say. And look at that veil! What were they thinking?”

  Geoffrey nodded his agreement. “Tell me about it. I thought it was traditional for the bride to wear it on her face.”

  It got worse. Brevitt revealed that Cardinal John-Paul the dyslexic had his congregation worshipping the Holy Goat, a Sicilian Papal candidate was reportedly partial to the odd portion of braised supplicant, and almost without exception the near-Popes had cheated at cards. In his misery at having his basic beliefs punctured yet again, Geoffrey did not notice Marcel glance at his watch, and only looked up when the Devil’s man slipped on his shiny jacket.

  “Where are you going?” Geoffrey was still looking at the list of Catholic apparatchiks as though there were a solution in there somewhere.

  “Party. Just look after things for a while and see if you can find anybody good in that list of wannabes. I don’t know why, Geoff, but I’ll trust you; if you give me a list when I get back of the ones you want, I’ll put it through on the nod.” He pushed back the hair at the sides of his head, teased the quiff, grinning with self-love.

  “Why can’t I come?”

  Marcel turned from the glass, satisfied with his sharp image, and surveyed, with something between disgust and pity, the figure chosen by the Almighty to represent him in this key position. Geoffrey still wore the smock in which he had died, its yellowing and frayed cloth offset with a blue and beige zip up cardigan he had been given during a familiarisation trip for the new entrants in the late 1960s.

  The zip itself had entertained him for more than a decade, filling many a tedious moment with its remarkable interlocking. On his abdomen he wore a skirt of roughly tanned cowhide which was home to a range of weevils now into their six-hundredth generation, and beneath which, as Marcel was all too often reminded, his private parts were unrestricted. Geoffrey’s feet were bound with cloth, which to his credit he replenished regularly, the latest incarnation being some relatively recent offcuts from one of the many Turin Shrouds.

  “Geoffrey. Take a look at yourself. There is no such thing as a party at which you can merge into the background. Besides, the one time I did take you, you hit the cider really hard and started ranting about how few real angels there are these days, and if you had your way you wouldn’t let any of these fringe religions in. What was all that stuff about ‘Minor religions really get my goat.’?”

  “Just a figure of speech”

  “Well”, said Marcel, combing his silky hair, “I don’t think Pan saw it that way. And it wasn’t funny throwing up and telling Thor you were hammered, either.”

  Geoffrey looked down at his cardigan, which had a large yellow stain on one side. He pointed to it and grinned at Marcel, who huffed and looked away. “He gets right up my nose, that Thor,” Geoffrey said with something approaching passion, “he’s such a poseur. All that ‘By the icy gates of Asgard’ crap”

  “Whatever,” Marcel said, “you’re off his invite list. Anyway, I’m after something at this one. I think I can use my devilish good looks to our advantage, Afternet-wise. See you later”

  Marcel strode from the room, slamming the door behind him at the exact moment Buffy’s Vampire Toad of Borneo keeled over to take the extinction count for the day to 8. Whatever was happening with the ever-filling God’s waiting room on the video screens, non-human species were kicking the bucket with unmissed regularity. Geoffrey swung his chair back to face his screen, and looked up with some desperation to the grainy pictures from the holding areas. He sighed, looked briefly at an advert for sensible drinking on one of the other screens. He pulled Brevitt’s masterwork towards him, looked again at the colour plate of the proto-papal nuptials.

  “I thought only rams had horns.” he muttered to himself, and then decisively thrust the book away to turn once more to his computer and the awful crowds of souls reliant upon him for their eternal fate. If only they knew.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gunt
rick looked around the dull, featureless terrain before him, sat on a rock, and sighed. His forty or so followers were standing, lying down, or strolling with little purpose, occasionally accosting a passer-by, usually gaining only stares, looks of horror, and a rapid departure. Guntrick and his band of men were the longest serving inhabitants of the huge holding areas that characterised the Afternet.

  They shouldn’t have been there, of course, since the computerised system had only started to fall significantly behind sometime in the sixteenth century. Even then for a while it appeared simply to be following some kind of invented rule-making, which condemned apparently random groups of people to this purgatory rather than their destined place of rest. Guntrick would just look around one day and spot a wandering and bemused group of left-handed ginger haired people; African dwarfs, or Spaniards whose names began with ‘F’. As the system fell into overload, however, the stream of arrivals became more constant, and to be truthful, Guntrick had seen a whole lot more people since he died than he had before. He had also hit a lot fewer of them with his double headed axe, although there are a number of late left-handed gingers who might take issue with this view.

  Sixteen hundred years is a long time to spend wandering around a wasteland, ever-changing as it may be. Guntrick and his fellow Visigoths are the classic proof that even in the Afterlife, there are cracks through which you can slip, and that your luck doesn’t change just because you are dead. His Visigoth battalion had played a small part in the slaughter of the Romans at Adrianopole in the late fourth century, although at that time they were very young and basically on snarling and looking fierce duty. They had, however, fully engaged in the rampage to the gates of Rome itself, becoming a part of the siege of the capital of the great empire. They sometimes reminisced about how boring they had thought a siege to be. The 1600 years or so of waiting for judgement made sitting outside a city for a few months seem, in itself, like heaven.