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

by Peter Empringham

  Notwithstanding Marcel’s immediate thought that the sudden rise in frequency of godly visits could not have anything but a deeply undesirable outcome, the appearance of Baku did at least bring to an end the alive/dead bickering with Marchant , although not without some typical bluster on his part. He had given serious thought to exactly which kind of mind-expanding drug could have been administered to him. Now the combination of the pain from the pinches he had given himself, and his discourse with a figure which not only had the head of a lion, the body of a horse, and the feet of a tiger, but could also speak pretty good English, forced him to give serious consideration to the stated opinion that he had kicked the bucket.

  When the composite beast, a tribute to inclusion policy if ever there was one, dragged itself over the rubble at the entrance, it gave that haughty look that lions just can’t help even if they feel like shit, and then fixed its eyes on an already obeisant Geoffrey and a really worried Marcel.

  “Is this the Afternet Office?”

  “Sure you aren’t looking for a vet?”

  Marchant couldn’t help entering the communication mode he saw as evidence of his wit and intelligence, but which, truth be told, had seen him punched on more than one occasion by those who immediately grasped that he was actually just an unpleasant egomaniac.

  If he had felt like dominating the proceedings however, the brown eyed stare from the spirit, coupled with a silent peeling of lips from enormous teeth soon persuaded him that for the moment silence may serve him better.

  “What is it now?” Marcel sighed, ever more rapidly resigning himself to a future of horrors unspoken, “This place is getting like Piccadilly Circus for Gods. If I wait here long enough, you’ll all pass by.”

  The beast sneered again and pawed the ground.

  “It’s her.” Said Baku after what seemed an interminable silence. “You were given permission to get someone to help you with the system. Which,” he turned briefly to Marchant, “would be him. She isn’t supposed to be here.”

  “You’re right, your Godship.” Geoffrey was almost bent double in supplication, “I am afraid the Reaper got a bit carried away.”

  “She has to go back. We cannot play with life and death”

  “You’re playing with mine.” Marchant leapt angrily to his feet.

  “That is for the greater good, and besides for you it was only a matter of time. You two-“ Marcel and Geoffrey looked into the calm face of the lion, “have to return her whence she came. You have 48 hours.”

  “Woah, woah there.” Marcel stirred himself from visions of pain, “five days to fix the Afternet, two to return the woman. We’re getting a lot of ultimatums around here, and there are only two of us, you know.”

  The lion sniffed the air as if inhaling the fear seeping from Marcel’s pores. “The fact is, eternity can’t wait, either hers or everyone else’s. These things have to be fixed now. For five hundred years you have watched the decline, now you have a very short time to begin the recovery. A recovery which cannot include this one who should not be dead. If she is not back in two days she cannot return, and who knows what effect that could have on the development of earth?”

  Not much, she’s a woman, thought Marchant.

  Who cares? Thought Marcel.

  What’s that crust on my sleeve? Thought Geoffrey.

  Two days or I have to stay here? Bloody Hell! Was what whisked through Mary’s mind.

  Baku turned slowly, padding out through the hole in the wall, his parting words; “Oh, two things. It was five days, you have only three left. And I thought Anubis told you to get this lot cleared up.”

  The tiger feet padding away fell to silence very quickly, a quiet echoed within the room. Finally Marcel spoke up.

  “Wouldn’t have thought Anubis would get on with him, would you? Surely he must be in two minds as to whether to chase him or wait for him to be made into food.”

  “Er, who was that?” Marchant looked at Geoffrey and Marcel.

  “That was Baku.” Geoffrey cast a glance at his screen and then back at Justin. “I don’t really keep up with all of the Gods and spirits, but you have to admit he’s a pretty memorable combination. Marcel, you do realize the Afternet is actually processing some people?”

  Marcel turned to his screen and then after a moment to Mary, a look of slight surprise on his face.

  “Whatever you did, you seem to have accidentally caused the system to start up again. Not fast, but better than nothing, which after all is where we were before. All we’ve got to do now is get you back to life in two days, then a day after that get the system from here to a hundred thousand a day so that it starts to eat into the backlog, and I won’t have to worry about having my colon pulled out with a grappling hook. What could possibly go wrong?”

  Despite their initial resistance to any belief that a mere woman may know anything about anything other than breast-feeding or peeling vegetables, both Geoffrey and Marcel realised that this woman had done something which had made the system work a little better. In addition, perhaps she knew something that could help them achieve their testing objective. The man, on the other hand, had proved thus far to be something of a disappointment despite his apparent credentials.

  Any doubts they may have had about Marchant were only confirmed when it came to the discussion they had about how to fix the system. Geoffrey naturally asked him first how they could do this within a week, only for the entrepreneur to drivel on for a while about system synapses and binary dysfunction, all the while as Mary watched with an amused smile. It was only when Marcel asked him the direct question that their second bequest from the Reaper became clear.

  “So what do you actually know about computers?”

  “In what way?”

  “In the way of knowing how they work and how to fix them when they don’t.”

  “Ah. That way. Not a lot actually. I’m more managerial.”

  “In what way do you know anything whatsoever about computers?”

  They took his silence as something of an admission as to the breadth of his knowledge. Not only had the Reaper brought them a woman who shouldn’t be dead and whom they now had to somehow return to life pronto, the ‘computer expert’ was nothing of the kind. And something of a pain in the arse to boot. Their depression was palpable.

  Mary was finding it hard to assimilate the facts that firstly she was dead, secondly she shouldn’t be, and thirdly she soon wasn’t going to be. However harrowing that all may seem, it made her lifestyle of recent years all feel rather Trappist. Amongst the rest of the amazing circumstances, even in the short time she had been here she had seen a combination of animals in a single skin it would have taken genetic engineers centuries to create. Not that, all in all, it had been a combination with any particular marketability.

  “Let’s face it, we’re screwed.” Marcel stood and began to nervously pace the room. “That prat in the black has brought us a fake computer expert with a ‘get one free’ woman thrown in. I’m going to go and drink a lot of something which tastes like horse piss for a couple of days so that when the attack on my internal organs begins again they’re already knackered.”

  The cramped, grubby control room seemed to match the doomed state of its inhabitants’ minds. The yellowing walls, the curled edges of the hilarious poster reading ‘YOU DO HAVE TO BE DEAD TO WORK HERE’, the chunks of brick and mortar strewn on the floor. The two new arrivals stayed silent as Marcel paced back and forth, Geoffrey staring silently at his feet. It was when Marcel actually made to leave in search of colourful cocktails which would slide over his tastebuds with all the flavour of faecal matter that the older man came to life.

  “Don’t go Marcel, we’re not doomed yet. I can’t let you just wander back into whatever horrors the Devil has for you.”

  Marcel paused at the door and turned to listen to the man with whom he had worked for over two hundred years. Listening was not something he had spent a lot of time doing during that period, he would have been th
e first to admit.

  “This is so far beyond my experience that I could just possibly have got it all wrong,” he paused, allowing Marcel to decide that he did not have time left in eternity to think of all the things beyond Geoffrey’s experience, let alone those he may get wrong, “but I think we may have the answer here, and I think it may be you. Woman. Whatsyername?”

  “Mary”

  “That’s it. I think it may be you.”

  Marchant looked as though, despite his absolute lack of anything to offer to aid the situation, he was a little hurt to be overlooked. Marcel paused at the door, thinking that given how long his impending tortures were to take, he had a couple of minutes to hear more of whatever errant nonsense Geoffrey may have conjured.

  Given the floor, Geoffrey appeared momentarily to have adopted the demeanour of Rumpole of The Bailey, and tugged at the lapel of his faded cardigan in a judicial manner.

  “It seems to me that nothing the other three of us have done here has had any effect on helping the Afternet to work. One of us, however, has,” –he shared a silent complicit chuckle with Marcel and Justin- “done something today which we can all see has in some way helped us on our way to full recovery. I am of course, talking about you, little lady.”

  He metaphorically sat down and rested his case, as ever unaware that the stupefied looks on the faces of Marcel and Justin masked puzzlement at his sudden lawyerly frame, and on Mary’s of bewildered anger.

  “Fuck off.” She said. “Little lady?”

  Geoffrey had already moved his perception of the point of women very far from a belief held for centuries that they cooked, produced children through some arcane mechanism and smelt marginally better than men. This unexpected verbal assault punctured his momentary confidence absolutely. It also added to the sum of his incomplete knowledge.

  For Mary it was doubtless a product of her exasperating and unique circumstances. It also was a response to years of condescending treatment at the hands of much less talented men, and she had no time to regret that the short expletive wounded the one present who was not likely to demean her, deliberately at least. She looked at the aged face and rheumy eyes. He was frozen in time at an age perhaps only ten years older than she was now and yet looked so much more worn, not least now when his momentary confidence had been deflated with two words. Her anger was visible on her face and Marcel and Justin shared a look of recognition even as Geoffrey’s shoulders sagged.

  “Look, er… Geoffrey,” she said, “it’s not you. Well. Not just you. I know more about computers than any of the people I worked with and certainly any of you. That didn’t stop them pawing me whilst I fixed their problems, calling me infantile sexist names, or stopping me from getting anywhere in my career because of their lads’ club. I’m not anyone’s little lady and I think the best thing is you just get me back to where I should be and then you shambolic lot can carry on failing to fix this system. Just what the afterlife needs, a bunch of useless testosterone-fuelled halfwits and spivs who think a flash drive is a naked woman in a car. I’ll just come back in sixty years and take my chances. If you’re still here wondering whether it’s time for a cheese sandwich I’ll look you up for old times sake. How do I leave?”

  In the silence that followed, the three men masked what were very different responses to this fulmination. Marcel was seriously aroused, and truth be told didn’t really hide it very well; Marchant had become bored halfway through a speech he was sure he had heard before, and was beginning to wonder how he might maximise the benefit of his early demise; and Geoffrey felt first ashamed that he had caused so much upset in the woman, and then, in the slow-moving machine that was his brain, began to think about something she had said. Mary looked at him, his face a fallen mask, and almost regretted what she had said. Almost.

  “Any chance of a coffee?” Justin looked towards the two operators. “I’d like a double skinny macchiato.”

  Marcel pointed to a grubby kettle in the corner, some unwashed mugs and a jar of impacted instant powder, a few RIPG Tips tea bags sitting alongside. Marchant sighed, stood, and together with Marcel, wandered over to what the long-term occupants liked to call the ‘Refreshment Hub’, a term Geoffrey had gleaned from a Microsoft induction video he had seen on one of the video screens.

  He looked at Mary, wondering what it must be like to find that you are dead but shouldn’t be (as opposed to his own experience, which was less of a dichotomy). Her anger was subsiding, a realisation coming to her that not all of her shabby treatment over the last few years at the hands of inconsiderate men could not be blamed on these apparently hapless specimens. As the kettle hissed and gurgled in the corner, each wondered how to break the tension, and it was Geoffrey who first found the thoughts pinging round his head coming to some kind of clarity.

  “I’m sorry.” He said.

  Mary looked up at him. An old man in a bad cardigan with the debris of many meals.

  “Yeah, well. Never mind, you’ll be getting me out of here soon, anyway. How long have you been here?”

  “I’ve been here, that is actually here, for about 300 years, but I’ve been here in the Afterlife for nearly fifteen hundred.”

  She gasped. “Fifteen hundred years? And they put you in charge of a computer system?” He shrugged, as though it wasn’t that much of a strange occurrence, which truth be told it wasn’t, given that Herod was running a string of nurseries.

  “You said you know a lot about computers?” She nodded. “Do you know how to fix this thing?”

  Mary saw something like pleading in the watery eyes.

  “ I probably do.” she said, “It’s not rocket science.”

  Geoffrey privately admitted to himself that this was a good thing, since he had no idea what rocket science was.

  “Basically, the requirements of the system have just got too big for what you have. You need more RAM.” Had it been possible, Geoffrey’s look became even blanker. He had no idea how a horned beast was going to help this crisis. “Processing power. You just need to upgrade it, make it work faster, add more storage too. Lots and lots of both I would say.”

  “And where would we get that?”

  “Well, if I was at home, I would know exactly where. There are loads of places. In the realm of the dead, however…” she left the words hanging.

  Marcel and Justin returned with their coffee, Mary having declined the offer on account of the grime of decades adhering to the mugs, and Geoffrey on the grounds of never having developed the taste for many other drinks than water and fermented rotten fruit. Justin looked with some suspicion at the murky liquid in the mug, but sipped it nonetheless, as Geoffrey, in perhaps the nearest to a positive leadership position he had ever adopted, laid out his view of a possible solution to the many issues and deadlines under which they were labouring.

  He began, naturally, by apologising in a roundabout way for having the temerity to have an opinion, and not least for having an opinion which it would seem might elevate a woman to a position of saviour. He expounded his view that there was just a chance that the Reaper’s incompetence could have inadvertently led to he and Marcel being provided with an answer to their problems.

  The look on Justin’s face when the ancient peasant ventured to suggest that this intended target for the Reaper’s commission was about as much use in fixing the Afternet as was the sun god Ra in preventing skin cancer, may well have been a deep hurt at what he deemed to be a slur. More likely it was an effort to control his retching at the sight of the fossilised bivalve which had freed itself from the detritus at the bottom of the mug and now floated on the scummy surface of his refreshment.

  Driven by Marcel’s exhortation to get on with it as he had only a few days left before the inferno, Geoffrey went on to suggest that Mary, in contradiction of their beliefs, was neither a self-obsessed Goddess nor a harridan alternating childbirth and vitriol. By happy accident she was actually the bearer of the knowledge which could avert the summary sacking of the Afternet’s supe
rvisors. He revealed, further, that she knew where they could get the equipment they needed to make the system run effectively. All they had to do was get hold of said equipment, return her to the living where she would suffer from recurring dreams about having died and gone to a subterranean, blasted office with terrible furniture, install the kit, get the system running, and sit back to enjoy eternity. Preferably having shovelled Marchant off somewhere he could do little harm. If there was such a place with only infinity available.

  He sat back in his typist’s chair, typically having managed to offend just about everyone without realising it, and waited for the plaudits to roll in.

  Which they didn’t.

  Marcel took a sip of his coffee. Unlike Justin, to him it mattered not atall what kind of unwanted ingredients may be materialising from the centuries of scum, since whatever happened it tasted like an armpit after the London Marathon. The last thing he wanted was the short, slow walk towards the screaming of millions. The second last was a diatribe from Geoffrey, especially if to some extent he was right. He gritted his teeth and turned to Mary, who had regained the composure to see the humour in the view of the role of women of twenty first century man and a peasant from 1500 years ago being by and large identical.

  “So, woman-“

  “Mary.”

  Marcel paused, wondered if it was all worth it.

  “As you wish. Where do we get this equipment which you say will make the system work?”

  “There are lots of places. But they are all, well, where I come from- life I suppose you call it, but we would need money.”

  “What about you, expert?” The term was laced with sarcasm as Marcel looked at Justin. “Do you know where we can get what we need?”