The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)
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“So, how do we get whoever is in charge to do something about this without getting us cast into some inferno?”
“The trick we always used was to do enough to get them to make concessions but not enough to really annoy them. It also helps if you have some naïve agitators you can use to divert their anger.”
“Who did you use for that?” Ron looked at Staveley-Down, who cast a sheepish glance at Lincoln before replying.
“The Americans mainly. Brave as you like, but they could be guaranteed to throw themselves into any escape plan, no matter how flaky. As long as they kept getting caught it kind of took the spotlight from us.”
“I happened upon a place recently where I am sure we can create the kind of unrest you seek.” The US President showed no sign of taking offence at these comments upon his countrymen, “You wont find many Americans there, but the place seems to be a home to many of the – shall we say- wilder elements inhabiting this place.”
“Excellent. Let’s go.” Ron was visibly excited at the prospect.
“Oh, and,” Lincoln tipped his bearded chin in the direction of the chuntering Visigoths, “we might want to take some protection.”
CHAPTER 10
Marcel was looking from the face of Justin, which, as if it hadn’t adopted a bewildered enough expression from being thrust into the dusty environment of the control room, now also had to cope with there being another here who had the same issue, to the face of Mary. This at least only seemed to have one layer of confusion with which to cope. Mary had actually been at the back of the room for some time, listening to the exchanges between the man dressed for athletics, the man dressed for an old folks home and the man dressed for the window of Emporio Armani, trying to make the connection to the pub, the cemetery, the figure in black. When that became just too difficult, she had stepped from the shadows, which didn’t seem to have cleared up the confusion at all.
“Okay, deadguy,” Marcel said, “I know we told you to go away, but actually now we know how you got here, we need you to stay. You, on the other hand,” he gestured towards Mary, “are a mistake. We’ll get you out of here and into a normal death as soon as possible.”
“I don’t believe this.” Marchant had begun to feel that he wasn’t under a physical threat here, and regained some of his bluster, “Somewhere along the line I’ve had a blackout and ended up in a cellar with two madmen, so why don’t you just show me the way out. I shouldn’t be here.”
“None of us should, mate, it defies science. And no way out, I’m afraid.” Geoffrey adopted his best caring tone, “It’s a disappointment for a lot of people who arrive in the Afterlife, having spent their lives waiting to walk to the bright light, get the seal of approval from a couple of luminescent blokes in frocks and then go back for some more living. Doesn’t happen. The end is just that. It’s rough, but it’s the same for all of us.”
Mary, who had been half-listening to the exchange, had slowly walked over to where Marcel and Geoffrey were sitting, looking around at the screens showing the CCTV (and also an early episode of Land of The Giants, which Geoffrey still thought was just one of the closed circuit TV feeds from a Hell for people terrified of really big cotton bobbins), and peered at the computers in front of them. She had spent most of her adult life working with them, but she had never seen anything like this.
“What do you two actually do?”
Marcel and Geoffrey looked at her in shock. Having told her that she would be dealt with in due course whilst they tried to persuade the computer expert that he should give up on any career ambition and get on with helping them, they had thought she would just sit in the corner and wait. Their experience of women was limited, of course. Marcel, during his lifetime, had spent a good deal of time with women who succumbed to his physical charms either because they were paid, procured by a friend, or had a member of their family imprisoned and threatened with torture. Naturally this didn’t stop him from believing implicitly in his own irresistibility, or indeed that his brutal but mercifully short enactment of coitus was anything but welcomed; what it did not do was educate him in the complexities of inter-gender discourse.
Geoffrey, on the other hand, lived in a time when the motley selection of animal skin, fur, and plant extracts which people had to wear in the absence of Chinese imports obfuscated gender to such a degree that the only way to deal with human interaction was to assume that everyone was a beast. He never in his life saw a woman naked, nor had much desire so to do, found a wife only because what he took home thinking it was a bundle of rags turned out to be an eligible spinster, and broadly believed that an erection was God’s way of telling him it was time to get up and find root vegetables. Marcel had cultivated a charming manner after his terminal demise which unfortunately was geared entirely to gaining acquiescence to sex, and therefore had little application in general verbal interplay. Geoffrey, on the other hand, had found the limited company of women he had endured in the centuries since his death a torture, not least because he couldn’t figure out what was going on with their chests and seemed to believe that staring might provide an answer.
For Mary, even though her most recent experience with a man had been an unprepossessing exposure to Neanderthal behaviour, and indeed as one who had suffered constantly the patronising disregard of less talented male workmates, the initial contact with this deceased duo was still to come as something of a shock.
“Not now dear, and don’t touch anything. Just go over there and wait until we can sort out somewhere for you to go whilst we talk to our new friend here.”
Marcel firmly pushed her away from the computer screens, which she was looking at with some interest.
“You wouldn’t understand any of this. You can’t cook with it and it won’t go on your nails.”
She looked at him amazed, then at Justin as though he might give her support, but something about his face suggested that this was exactly how he would have liked to talk to women if employment law only allowed. For all that, Marchant thought she had asked a good question which might bear repeating.
“What exactly is it you are doing here?”
“We run The Afternet. I’m Geoffrey, and this is Marcel.” Geoffrey gestured at the drab surroundings as though he were giving a guided tour of the Pope’s summer palace.
“The Afternet?”
“Yes, the Afternet. What you see around you,” which after all was a distempered office with no windows, piles of files and paper and a good layer of dust, and therefore, apart from the display pronouncing the Lesser Striped Thark extinct, wholly unremarkable, “is the throbbing hub of control for all entrants to the Afterlife, their Heavens and their Hells. And we are the people who make it tick. Or strictly speaking not tick at the moment, which explains your presence, since you have selflessly been taken from existence against your will to help us to fix it.”
Marchant paused to take in this proposition, flinching when Marcel slapped Mary’s hand as it edged towards his computer keyboard.
“Can I do a reality check here?” he permitted himself another sweep of the unprepossessing setting in which he found himself, still half expecting at any moment someone with a large forehead and very long arms to leap through the door waving an enormous pair of pliers and shout ‘Surprise!’.
“According to you, I’m dead, and you’re dead. I suppose she must be dead, too. What happens to you after you are dead is now run by a computer system, which itself is malfunctioning, and you two retards have somehow brought me here to help you fix it.”
“Brilliant. I told you we’d get someone brilliant Marcel.”
“We control everything, Deadguy,” said Marcel, and he also essayed a grandiose sweep of the hand indicating his dilapidated empire, “through the computer system, and with these screens here we can make sure everything is running smoothly.”
“Yes,” Geoffrey thought a little levity may help the pill go down, “we may be ignored, underfunded, and overlooked when the rewards are handed out, but we
are critical to the smooth running of the biggest operation in the cosmos.”
“Okay, if you control it all, what’s going on there?” Marchant pointed towards the bank of screens, and the other three pairs of eyes followed the direction of his arm.
“Oh, I’ve seen this one!” Geoffrey let out a light laugh, “the guy with the bandage round his head is running a hotel and upsets these Germans. I can’t believe they would let anyone like that into a senior role in the hospitality industry.”
“Not that one, the next one. A hairy bloke with a sword up his arse just appeared out of nowhere.”
Geoffrey and Marcel peered at the screen with some alarm. Mary also watched, although with less concern, having no idea what was going on and also being distracted by Basil Fawlty’s goosestep on the next screen. There was no doubt about it, someone in the waiting areas was using the tunnels, and that was serious. Given that everyone there was unallocated, if they all started wandering willy-nilly through the tunnels to the Heavens and Hells it would take more even than the power of the Afternet to locate and repatriate them. As they watched, a second man, over six feet tall and wearing a bear skin coat with the head still attached, emerged to join the first, who was adjusting his anal appendage with some discomfort.
“Bloody Visigoths!” said Marcel. “Some of the greatest brains of the last 500 years are wandering round that scrubland, and who finds the tunnels? Monomaniac rapists who speak as though they are regurgitating furballs. Come on Geoffrey, we need to close these tunnels down.”
Justin and Mary stepped back and watched as the two men pulled their chairs up to their computer desks and began to rapidly tap away at the keyboards. It would have been quite impressive if it had had any effect whatsoever. A third, and then finally a fourth bearded heathen materialised on the screen and Justin couldn’t help thinking that if this was some kind of scam, the special effects were brilliant.
“Are you their nurse?” He glanced sideways at Mary, who looked at him as if he were mad.
“Why would I be a nurse?”
“Well, you’re a woman. And somebody has to be looking after these two and providing their medication, don’t they?”
“That’s a bit like me thinking you must be a prick, since you’re a man. And I think maybe you should start to consider that they might actually be telling the truth. What happened after you met the bloke in the black coat? You woke up here. Have you ever seen anywhere quite like this? Who would bother to build this just to hoax us? And this technology is old, but the scale is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Oh, and there are ancient Germans appearing out of nowhere.”
Marcel finally pushed his chair back and he and Geoffrey looked at each other with obvious relief. On the screen, the Visigoths exchanged a few words and then collectively began to relieve themselves hugely against a rock.
“Right, Deadguy.” Marcel turned to face the new arrivals. “This system is so slow we nearly didn’t get the tunnels closed in time. You’re the expert, that’s the first thing you can figure out. You, love, can make some tea.”
Justin stared back at him. He really expected him to do something to the computer, which was going to be a test, but he figured it was better to create the illusion of knowledge whilst he worked out what else to do to get out of here. He walked with an attempt at bravado towards the desks, leaned on one of them, and looked at the incomprehensible information on the screen in front of him. After a moment he drew himself back to his height and looked at Marcel with an air of confidence.
“It’s probably a problem with your WORM.” He said at last, drawing on the last thing he had heard about computers. Geoffrey grinned, hugely impressed, and looked happily at Marcel. The Frenchman maintained a stony face, wanting at least to know what they might do about a ‘worm’ before granting Justin any particular credibility.
“And..?”
“And, er, that will need fixing before you can change anything really. And get at your WHAM. Or is it QUIM?”
He nodded sagely, vaguely disconcerted by the enquiring looks from Marcel and Geoffrey. The men heard a short laugh from behind them and were astonished to find Mary pushing Marchant out of the way and leaning over the keyboard.
“Look, one of the reasons it’s so slow is that you’ve got too much stuff going on in here. When was the last time you closed anything down?”
Geoffrey and Marcel had shrivelled into themselves as though the very contact between woman and mouse could cause an explosion at any moment. Marcel in particular was very much afraid. There could be no good to come from a woman interpolating herself into men’s business, certainly no good for him. Any minute now, instead of processing the dead, the system would be comparing the price of wallpaper and choosing table linen. Possibly, she didn’t even know what the device was and would start plonking her hands up and down and caterwauling away about lost love at the top of her voice as did some of the women he’d ever met when confronted with a keyboard. They seemed to think it was some kind of sexual attractant, but it just made him remember his various techniques for tongue removal.
If she did that with this piece of kit, anything could happen and his stint in the control room and away from pain and endless terror would be over, replaced with furry things inveigling themselves into his body, the gnawing teeth…in his fear he heard Geoffrey admit that they had no idea what she meant by close things down and that they had never done such a thing.
“Never? You’ve never closed a program? What does this do?”
Geoffrey and Marcel peered at what she was pointing to on the screen and looked at her with vacant stupidity. Men invariably become twelve years old when confronted with a schoolmarm voice.
“I’m not surprised you don’t know. You opened it in 1822 and haven’t touched it for over a hundred years. It says it’s something to do with rickets.”
“Well, thank you for your all of your efforts.” Geoffrey got to his feet and tried to shepherd Mary away from the computer, “You should be resting, I’m sure.” He looked at Marcel for assistance. “Don’t they need lots of hot water or something?” His partner’s fixed expression hid a feeling of impending doom. Mary was unmoveable.
“I’m closing this. And this. In fact I’ll close the whole page, they haven’t been used for years. Whoah, and what’s this? It’s massive!”
Justin’s immediate thought was to throw in a line about how every woman said that to him but had already got the feeling that Mary was not be messed with in her current mood. Her cry managed even to draw Marcel away from his dark imaginings, and he and Geoffrey peered at the screen, then looked sheepishly back at each other. When she folded her arms and looked at them as though they would have to stay there with their hands on their heads until someone owned up, Geoffrey finally offered up the explanation.
“That’s a record of all the meals and snacks we’ve had. We need it. To avoid repeats.”
“There are 300,000 entries! And then there’s another subsection for drinks.”
“You’ll understand the danger, then, with that many meals. When did I last have a baked potato? It’s an unknown known.”
As Marcel shivered in fear of retribution, Geoffrey made a last bold attempt to avert the impending storm.
“Look, dear, that’s lovely, thanks. You’ve done very well with your feminine intuition, but I really think it’s time we handed this problem over to an expert whilst you go and sit down and take deep breaths, don’t you think?”
Mary’s look would have withered a more sensitive man, whilst Justin’s equivocal response to the suggestion of involvement would have invoked doubt in someone more sensitive to nuance than Geoffrey, which by and large was anybody.
“Hey, er, the chick seems to have a way with the machine, you know. Maybe we should just, well, let her bury the corpse in the coffin and see how it rots, you know?” Justin suggested.
Pausing only to give him a pitying look, she closed the food log, which took rather longer than necessary as she automatically clic
ked on ‘Save Changes?’. At least as the machine chuntered away attempting to heave the enormous file into storage somewhere she had the time to look through some of the other seventeen thousand or so programs Geoffrey and Marcel had opened over the centuries, immediately forgotten about, and left to use up processing power. Torture Wars IV, (paused since 1791 with a naked man lying on the ground as a scantily clad vixen prepared to smite him with a barbed club) was closed; the entire downloads of every Grattans catalogue originally sourced and subsequently forgotten by Geoffrey, who wanted to look at the Fair Isle variations, were deleted; a programme which purported to calculate the time until your reincarnation; Dalai Lama Bingo, which called upon you to imagine the next number through Karma; and a rather large file of thumbnails from Barely Legal Handmaiden Babes were all consigned to the Trash, amongst a host of other programs performing a range of unfathomable tasks. The last click deleted an unbelievable number of requests for revalidation of bank details from a group of Nigerian scammers, whose email system knows no bounds of life and death.
Throughout this burst of activity, without doubt the most that had ever been undertaken at either of the control keyboards , Geoffrey sat entranced. Some of the buttons were being pressed for the first time for two hundred years. Given that he had previously saved his deepest respect for a woman who could detect a big parsnip by licking the ground, this display was a revelation; the flying hands, the glances at the screen, the decisiveness! Marcel was simply glazed over. Rocking slightly, fear coursing through his veins, he paid no attention to the activity at the keyboard, the rattling of the CPU as it divested itself of baggage heavy with age and disuse. He simply waited for the bang, the appearance before him of some sneering satanic acolyte, the descent to the black and red pit, the heat, the moil, the hell.
Marcel’s unpleasant revelry was brought to an end, and, it turned out, so was Justin Marchant’s scepticism about his situation, by the soft padding feet approaching which all of the group of four could hear through the hole in the wall left by Hermes. Actually the footfall merely made them look at each other with concern; it was the roar of the lion that really alerted them to the impending arrival of a visitor.