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

by Peter Empringham

  In the halcyon days of the Afternet, when the system hummed quietly with smug efficiency, its silicon circuits warm with effortless capability, there would have been no time for anyone to observe others entering the tunnels. The soul of the deceased would ripple only for a picosecond in the air of the limbo landscape before the incredible machine tagged them for eternal joy or punishment, assessed the environment which would best provide it, and zoomed them off into the requisite tunnel.

  The Visigoths, Ron and Ethel, even Staveley-Down, whose willingness to believe his eyes and instincts had led him to spot the entrances, had no idea in truth about the scale of what they saw. They did indeed come to the view that there were hundreds of tunnels, but their minds could not have taken in the actuality: the tunnels extended to the wood, through it, and beyond to infinity.

  Each had at its distant end a rendition of heaven or hell for the individual transported from life. Some were very populous, some giving succour or torment to just one soul. On occasion the self same manifestation of eternity was shared by those being rewarded and punished for their stay on earth, it being a fact that one man’s heaven is certainly another man’s hell. Many of the tunnels, of course, led to the burning cankerous inferno traditionally rendered for the Devil’s domain, although sometimes he and his acolytes would tweak the victims beard with a brief view of some ideal existence before casting them into the flames. Buddhists, or at least the majority of them who hadn’t somewhere exercised some elasticity in the following of their faith, were zoomed into something which looked very much like the mortal coil off which they had just shuffled, but in the shape of a slug, or a mouse, or an eagle. Every fifty years or so their consciousnesses would all move one to the left, allowing them to continue their belief in reincarnation in their ersatz world. Infinite time, infinite bliss, infinite horror. Alas, eventually an infinite number of ways in which things could go wrong.

  Just as in those trouble-free days the tunnels would be replete with travelling souls, so in those days Marcel and Geoffrey would simply have had to monitor the throughput, file the daily reports to the ruling classes and trigger the Afternet every now and then to generate a new destination for one of the arrivals, although even this demand slowed down as just about every possible permutation was fulfilled. Time itself made sure, nevertheless, that the task was never finished. Few Middle Ages Knights pursuing Good Deeds and Holy Grails had entertained the notion of driving a Lamborghini Murcielago on the Cote D’Azur forever, although conversely, the odd well-meaning high flying city executive who had done his bit for charity did end up roaming a verdant hillside in heavy silver armour rescuing the odd rural French housewife who had yearned to be a damsel in distress. It being the dream of the executive, and on occasion the French housewife, hand-hammered iron was often discarded and wanton congress ensued.

  That was then. The mismatched system supervisors had no threat to their cosy arrangement, allowing Marcel to become a regular on the minor deity party scene, ever hopeful of finding a drink which didn’t taste like buffalo snot, and Geoffrey to run the gamut from learning to read and counting, through to watching the first series of ‘24’ in one sitting.

  This was now. The chaotic control room, the mounting backlog, and the Afternet screens blinking error or bringing up with aching slowness the picture and details of the latest candidate and demanding a manual decision. Worse, their lords and masters were well and truly looking over their shoulders and they could quite easily be summarily dismissed with no recourse to an Industrial Tribunal. Marcel had a chance of severance pay, well severance, in any case, since he would be back to the sulphurous pit, which was never short of someone looking to relieve you of a limb or two. It may seem that the threat was much more benign for Geoffrey, who after all had passed the entry exam for Heaven, but the centuries, and particularly exposure to Bonanza, Mission:Impossible, and The Love Boat, had made his choice of his own swamp seem a lot less like Heaven than when he had first arrived.

  The pair were munching on sandwiches, Geoffrey having opted for Coronation Chicken, which he found deliciously moist and tasty, and Marcel, after much deliberation, choosing the same and finding it as much like a dehydrated plateful of athlete’s foot as the breakfast he had already hated that morning. Marcel had his hand cupped over something on the table, and looked expectantly at Geoffrey, who wiped a sliver of moist sauce from the corner of his mouth, poked his ear, licked it, and rolled a die.

  “Six!” He cried, looking at Marcel with boyish exuberance.

  Marcel, whose stomach was now squirming further from the sight of his partner’s mulched sandwich, lifted his hand from the table. His die showed a four. “He’s yours.” He said, and they both turned to the screen. Geoffrey’s eyes dipped to the text under the picture.

  “Bokassa!” he looked at Marcel with approval, always happy to encourage ethnic diversity. For a long time he had thought black people were just dirty, like most of the people he had ever known, and had been delighted to find that there were people on the world of all kinds of skin shades. Now he was trying to some extent to make up for what he assumed might not have been a complimentary idea by welcoming all-comers to his Lord’s Heaven. He looked back to the screen and read on for a moment, then buried his head in his hands. After a moment he looked back to Marcel.

  “Oh, perfect! An Emperor, like we need another of those. Slaughtered millions of his people for the fun of it. Killed their babies and stored them in his refrigerator for packed lunches. Waged war on everything that moved, never went anywhere near the fighting himself and proclaimed himself a hero. He’s going to make the Choir Invisible’s weekly sing-song go with a real swing, isn’t he? It’s no good, Marcel, this ‘chance’ idea isn’t working either.”

  “I think you’re probably right. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get that Florence Nightingale past the Demonic Standards Committee in any case.”

  Marcel leaned back in his chair, a look of despair on his face. A bleep from one of the screens interrupted the gloomy silence and they looked at each other, shocked.

  “What’s that? Haven’t heard that noise for ages.”

  “Me neither. Sounds like the thing it used to do when we got A-mail.”

  Geoffrey, having left this last sentence hanging in the air, began to mop up the crumbs on his plate with a moistened finger, but Marcel regained some animation and began to tap away at the keyboard whilst staring intently at the screen.

  “Of course, the last time we got any mail, none of it had any vowels, but even so, it would be a step forward if that was starting to come back.” He scrolled down, intent on the screen, and then tugged at Geoffrey’s sleeve.

  “Look.” Geoffrey leaned forward. The screen appeared blank.

  “Are you suggesting that someone sent us a blank mail?”

  “No, Geoff, really look. There!” He pointed at the centre of the screen with a real look of satisfaction, “I think the consonants have gone as well, but look at that!”

  “So no actual letters? What does that leave us with?”

  “Punctuation. Look, look here!” Geoffrey wasn’t sure he had ever seen Marcel quite so excited, he looked from his workmate to the screen, apparently blank but for spots of filth from some long-forgotten lunch.

  “There’s a full stop there. And that’s a comma. Oh, and yes! A colon!” Marcel leapt to his feet and paced around the room, deep in thought. “Who do we know who knows how to use a colon?”

  Geoffrey, still seated, unable to get excited about the sub–ether transmission of four dots and a curve, gave a terrible impression of racking his brains.

  “Jack the Ripper?” he said at last. If looks could kill people already dead he would have been toast. Marcel angry not good, he thought, seeing for the millionth time the look on his workmate’s face which hinted at the reasons for his rapid and unquestioned transition to the other place.

  “Okay, let’s look who it’s from, that might give us a clue. Maybe it’s your goddess bird telling y
ou she’s found someone more suitable. John Merrick, perhaps, or Keith the Nasty of Durham.”

  “She’s not my bird, goddess or otherwise. My bird, as you would have it, has been embedded in a tomb of lychees for several centuries.”

  Led by Geoffrey’s prompt, although he would not have admitted as much, Marcel was working the keyboard, found the ‘From:’ line on the dotty incoming mail.

  “Bloody Hell, it’s only from the Reaper.”

  “Wonder what it could be? Hey, he could have got us help! They could be on the way right now! That” he pointed at the screen portentiously, “is the colon of salvation.”

  In normal circumstances such a pompous utterance would have been Marcel’s cue to grasp Geoffrey firmly by the shoulders and pummel him until he calmed down. Pleasures were few, for him. Food and drink, however beautiful on the eye, tasted of sick, while the people next to him smacked their lips with appreciation. He could still pull women, but either was unceremoniously dumped before the denouement or had endless, unfulfilled sex. He prayed for the invention of Deagra to make the engorgements subside. In any event, he was invariably infested thereafter with some tiny weevil more used to the deepest Atlantic shelf than the genital regions. On one occasion when the B-52s had sprung onto MTV playing Rock Lobster as he screamed with the pain inflicted by something in his pants bigger than his pants, he had, just for a moment, thought of becoming good. It passed. Just as, for the moment, the desire to set light to Geoffrey’s cardigan came and went.

  Geoffrey, oblivious, was astride his high horse and cantering into the wide-open prairie of hyperbole, leaning back in the chair, hands behind his head, his eyes taking on that dreamy look he sometimes adopted when something sparked a memory of the happy days of his youth scavenging for grubs.

  “Just think of the things we’ll be able to do again. A-mails with visible letters, for a start. We can look at all that leakage between some of the heavens and hells, stop the Gods complaining every time there is a small massacre of innocents. We can tidy up some of the hells-” he leant forward towards Marcel, conspiratorially, “between you and me Marcel, some of them seem to be getting just a little soft if you want my opinion.”

  I don’t, since you haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about, thought Marcel.

  “Best of all,” Geoffrey continued, “we can get some time off. First, though, is to get this admissions system working properly.” He began to pummel the keyboard, staring at the screen, blank but for the scraps of punctuation the Reaper had managed to force through the befogged Afternet.

  “That’ll take us decades. Where’s the help? Is there any way of interpreting this stuff? Maybe it’s Morse. Is there a colon in Morse?”

  Marcel watched in silence as the older man became ever more frantic, pounding the keyboard, thumping the top of the screen as though this would shake some letters into it. He finally yelled with frustration and, standing, pounded both hands onto the top of his VDU.

  There was a huge bang, and a cloud of smoke filled the room. The two men waved their arms frantically, almost choking on the smoke.

  “O you’ve really done it this time.” Marcel used the waving of his arms to take the opportunity to bash Geoffrey hard on the back of the head. He believed he was in the company of the man who had broken the system that processed all earthly souls to their final resting place.

  As the smoke cleared they both hauled themselves urgently in front of their screens and looked for evidence of something working. What they hadn’t seen was the actual cause of the mayhem, which was not the VDU, nor the keyboard, nor the Afternet itself. On the floor behind them lay the figure of a man in his early thirties, face down, and dressed in a singlet, running shorts, trainers and a headband. Around his wrist, a complicated looking watch had stopped at the precise moment the Reaper had sprayed the fatal blast into his face.

  As the control room inhabitants peered at their screens in desperation, still wafting smoke from their faces, he very tenderly lifted himself to his feet, and feeling as though he had spent the night mainlining eggnog, leaned sideways against a distempered wall. He tried not to inhale the acrid fumes lingering in the air. Without thought he gently brushed dust from his NASA designed breathable running kit as he befoggedly watched the scene in front of him. It looked vaguely like a remake of the odd couple: an elderly man who had the garb and aroma of a refugee from a Care Home and a flashily dressed younger bloke were clearly in a fug about something or other. Marchant quietly worked his mind to regain equilibrium.

  “Oh bloody hell, the thing’s finally blown up. Just before we get the repair man in, too.” Marcel haphazardly pressed keys in front of him as if one of them held the answer. “I’ll check the processing thingy. You see whether we’ve still got camera control.”

  Geoffrey began to work his computer keyboard, staring at the screens banked on the wall behind the computers. As he did so the pictures on them changed. A Serengeti-like plain, a sleepy fishing port, a writhing pit of snakes, flame, and naked bodies, a church choir, some Visigoths standing around looking at an imposing figure with a bushy black beard…Geoffrey gasped a sigh of relief.

  “Looks like this is still okay. Have we still got The Afternet?”

  “It’s asking for a password. What’s the password?”

  “How on earth would I know? When was the last time we used a password?”

  “No idea. I vaguely remember we needed one when we tried to get Cleopatra strip-searched at the Egyptian Rulers Reunion.”

  Both of their faces twisted momentarily into ghastly leers, brought on by fleeting internal visions of one of their happiest moments.

  “Hang on!” Geoffrey was almost punching the air with excitement, and Marcel assumed he was about to be told the answer to the Riddle of The Sphinx. The actuality, as ever with God’s man, was entirely more prosaic. “If it’s asking you for a password, that means it must be working, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “I think so. I seem to remember something about, er-“ the elation had been short-lived and Geoffrey had fallen back into his more normal state of confused inefficiency. After a moment he twitched again, as if a light, somewhat smaller than that of a moment ago, had come on in what passed for his consciousness. “The manual! Let’s look in the manual.”

  Not a bad idea, in fact, for Geoffrey, thought Marcel, not that he was going to give him any encouragement.

  “The manual, of course! Where is that, then?”

  “I’m not sure. Didn’t you have it last? When you wanted to shut off that alarm which came on every time somebody from India came in? Which was very often, after all. Come to think of it, I reckon we wrote the password on the front for safe-keeping.”

  “Terrific, so we just need to find it in our easy to follow filing system.”

  They looked at the desks in front of them. Paper, flat, scrunched, folded and aeroplaned, ring binders, food remnants, dust, writing implements, and Geoffrey’s VDU stick-on mascot collection were just a few of the items stacked across the desks in front of them. As if in the hope of finding any evidence of design they swung their chairs 180 degrees to face the rest of the room. Amidst desks, tables and floorspace ridden with detritus similar to that which they had just observed, one thing stuck out like a sore thumb, and it wasn’t a great big book with ‘AFTERNET USER GUIDE’ written on the back.

  The last visitor had been Hermes, and he of course had affected the look of an athlete, although with a distinct Greco-Roman influence. The one now staring back at them was also clad in athletic clothing, and definitely did not look like a God, but then neither did a lot of the Gods. In any case, the look of blank confusion on this one’s face had entirely too much mortality about it to give them the impression he had descended from any particularly lofty peak. It was apparent that this was a lost soul of some kind, which was new, but not entirely out of the question considering some of the things the system had managed to perform recently.

  Certainly their
accrued scientific knowledge over the last few centuries had led them to understand that the emergence of smoke and the presence of a large bang were generally the sound and smell of shit hitting the fan.

  “Interloper, I think, Geoff. Better get on to Security.” Marcel had gathered his wits first (notwithstanding that there was no such thing as Security), which was usually the way, although he would have assumed this was because Geoffrey had so many fewer to gather.

  “That explosion must have caused some real misdirection.” Geoffrey began to lift some of the debris from the desk in search of the telephone. “God knows what’s going on out there.” Marcel looked at him with ill-concealed doubt. “Allegedly.”

  “You talk to it Geoffrey, you know I can’t deal with new arrivals and their pathetic denial of reality.” Old Nick’s employee gently pushed his workmate forward on the chair, and sat back to watch.

  When Justin Marchant had run into the doom-laden figure in the burial ground, his main concerns had been 1) getting away from him without it costing him any money; 2) making sure that he got home, showered, and changed in time to meet Mike The Shiv at the Wideopen Arms to discuss issues with a tenant who had broken a kettle in one of his rental properties; and 3) the gonad chafe being imparted by his new Ultratech shorts, which had promised to banish for ever the curse of Crotch Itch. The brief conversation with the Goth had interrupted the train of thought, but didn’t immediately create further issues fit to override this trio. The spray, on the other hand, did wrench his conscious thought instantly from the state of his bollocks.

  First was the feeling of falling, which was because he was actually falling. In the instant of death, the aneurism generated in his brain was utterly painless, and nothing flashed before his eyes, whole life, furniture, good deeds, nada. There was a strange disconnected feeling, perhaps even a recognition that there had been no stop to the fall, no bump or feather cushion. There was no white light towards which he could walk, no backlit steps to ascend to bearded angels, no Book of Life, no Register of Death.