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

by Peter Empringham

  She approached a desk near the entrance at which were seated two sprites, scrunched into typists chairs, only their heads and short stubby hands visible above the edge of the table.

  “Name?” the voice was reedy and high-pitched.

  “Mary.” The stubby hand moved slowly with a marker pen over a name badge, his brow furrowed and the tip of a pink tongue protruding in concentration.

  “Portfolio?” He said, handing over the shakily inscribed badge, and pulling towards him a thick checklist.

  “Er…” . “normality.” He flicked through the pages.

  “I don’t see that here.”

  She looked around the room at the mix of shapes and shades. There was a rich smell of earth and horsehair.

  “It’s new. EU Regularions.”

  “EU?”

  “Oh, Eunuchs Union.” She took the badge and moved away before the sprite could pursue the question any further, just as a bell sounded and the assembled beings played a rapid game of musical chairs.

  Her first candidate was a musclebound young man with a beard teased into curls to either side of his chin, skin of a livid red that made her want to reach for some salving ointment. The interchange was depressingly familiar.

  “So you’re…Mary.” He said, leaning towards her badge and booming out the words in the midst of the cacophony around the room.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s enough about you, let me tell you tell you about me.”

  He did. For the entirety of the two minutes. Gerra, the Babylonian god of fire had a litany of impressive achievements in the field of burning things, not least, it transpired, most of the women who had the misfortune to get too close. She was saved such a fate by the bell, as well as his complete lack ofinterest in anything non-Gerran.

  The next two were satyrs, amply demonstrating the lottery involved in their physical characteristics. All satyrs are a mixture of man and horse, but the order in which these constituents are assembled seemed utterly random. They did, though, have the central commonality of satyrs, which is that they are blessed, or cursed, depending upon how you view it, with a permanent erection. This, to Mary, was seriously disconcerting.

  The first, Ephides, actually had a lovely young face and tightly curled dark hair, but she couldn’t help finding her eyes drawn to the purple glans bobbing around over the edge of the table like the creature from Alien on the verge of escape.

  “Is it like that all the time?” She asked.

  “Oh yes. Don’t take it personally.” She had the inkling this wasn’t a compliment, but if he was prepared to ignore it she would give it a go. How did he pee?

  “So, what are your interests, Ephides?”

  “I like a bit of a canter. I’m horse from the waist down, hence the…” he gestured to the bobbing bald head poking over the table.

  “Hung like a horse, ha ha.” Things you wish you hadn’t said at speed dating #1.

  The next was the reverse, which at least meant the only head she could see was his head, that of a chestnut thoroughbred. Alas, horse’s mouths are not formed for conversation, so he formed questions by writing on a slate with chalk held in surprisingly small hands.

  “What’s your favourite food?” She asked politely.

  “Hay.” He wrote. “Although I am partial to an apple or sugar cube as a treat. You?”

  “Oh, the same.” She said, unwilling to discuss curry with half a horse. When the bell rang and he stood, she noted the paucity of his manhood when compared to his predecessor. It was difficult to figure who got the short straw. As it were.

  It was as depressing as the process must be in Ealing or Edinburgh. A mix of the lonely (many for a good reason), the arrogant and vain, the terminally shy and the plain boring. The fact that they could explode mountains, gallop a mile in two minutes, and were the colours of the rainbow, didn’t obfuscate her view that there is always a reason why people are on their own; she just couldn’t figure out what hers was, or she could have done something about it.

  When she walked disconsolately back into the Control Room, it was as if nothing had changed except that Marcel had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with a charming and considerate man. He made her tea (having sterilised the kettle), asked her whether she had had a nice time doing whatever it was she had been doing, asked her to show him how to work some functions on the computer. He laughed at a joke and at one moment, as they sat side by side and she was pointing to a line on the screen, she felt his eyes on her and turning found him in a gaze with a slight smile that sent a small frisson of energy down her spine.

  “Are you lonely, Mary?” He wrinkled his eyes as he said this, as though expressing real concern.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you know, you aren’t supposed to be here, and you’re the only one. This,” he swept his arm around the room, the other two figures hunched over computer screens, “isn’t a very exciting environment, is it?”

  “I’m fine, I just sometimes wish there was a little more.”

  “Don’t search too hard,” he said, “sometimes what you need is really close at hand.” He looked back to the screen and she felt herself blushing as she stared at his aquiline profile.

  He even volunteered to go for food. Something special he said.

  “What’s speed dating, Mary?” asked Geoffrey.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Well, we were watching you earlier.”

  “What?”

  “Marcel found it. Live on the Love Channel.”

  If she had blushed before, she was livid now.

  “Weird thing.” Geoffrey continued. “All those funny gods. Marcel seemed quite upset with the whole thing. Especially that horse with the enormous knob.”

  THE AFTERNET

  Part 2: Redemption

  The Afternet Part 2: Redemption. A Novel by Peter Empringham

  Cover Design by Hemp Enterprises

  Copyright Peter Empringham 2012

  “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

  Bill Shankly

  One

  Satan was, to put it bluntly, bored. He gazed absently at the fully-armoured conquistador sitting on the hot coals- the metal on his breastplate just beginning to turn red- and sighed wearily. There had to be more to pure evil than this.

  He never thought he would look back fondly on the days when St Peter stood self-righteously at the top of the heavenly steps and passed judgement upon the newly dead. He had even been happy to pass control of this decision making to a computer system, the Afternet, and that too had provided a steady stream of sinners for him to punish. Then, of course, it had been overwhelmed, and stopped sending anyone, with the result that millions of souls that by rights were his were now wandering around in a simulacrum of life, some of them for hundreds of years.

  At least the system had now been fixed, but the backlog meant he was having a long wait for any reasonable numbers for whom he could make death a misery. In the Afterworld created to hold those waiting for judgement were also huge numbers who had lived faultless lives. For them, this unexpected reality of what awaited them bore no relation to their expectation. Satan had no hesitation in mocking God, other gods, demi-gods and the hosts of namby-pamby goody two-shoes who had failed to provide the blissful eternity righteous followers apparently deserved.

  That was fun, but didn’t replace the kick he had always got from tormenting new arrivals. Of course, not all miscreants ending up suffering directly at his hands. There was an infinite number of Heavens and Hells, on the basis that people got the Heaven they wanted or the Hell they dreaded. In the absence of a steady inflow, he had taken the opportunity to visit some of the hells and he had come to marvel at the ingenuity with which the human mind could find ways to torture itself. A particular favourite was an eternal Englebert Humperdinck concert (the artist, of course, being a
construct, until the real thing comes along).

  This was one of the eternities that fulfilled both roles, reward and punishment. Half of the seats were filled by swooning ladies of a certain age who cooed and moistened at every rendition of The Last Waltz. Their dreams of Heaven were fulfilled. The other half were occupied by a squirming mass -mainly men- for whom the cyclical reprise of Please Release Me seemed to cause an agony beyond any of the tortures he had been able to dream up of his own accord.

  He stood at the rear of a box to the left of the stage watching a group of Slipknot fans (and, as it happens, dealers in impure drugs to the under-sixteens). They writhed in horror as Englebert, draped in well-aimed underwear, exhorted them to release him and let him love again. After a couple of days of this, he had to admit that you could only go so far with fire and crushing and the bite of sharp-teethed beasts, and that this was an infinitely more subtle and horrendous fate.

  The Afternet had been fixed in the nick of time by the dolts running it, with the aid of some expertise they had somehow reaped from life. This was a little disappointing to the Devil, who had relished the opportunity to heap some more pain on Marcel, who was managing the system on his behalf. He really hated Marcel, cocky French nothing that he was, and had been dreaming up some particular vilenesses to visit upon him, when the system had somehow whirred back into action at the last moment. But, to his regret, he had promised that Marcel could stay should the system regain its processing, and an all-powerful incarnation of evil has to keep his promises.

  So the computer had struggled back to life and begun to process the waiting souls. It had spent a year on the easy stuff, and munched its’ way through 160 or so million under two years old. Bad news for The Devil, who got none of them. It may be thought that Original Sin would actually channel a good number his way, but that had only ever been a trick played on humanity to buy a few more gold candlesticks for the church. These innocents winged their way to an eternity of swaddling, mothers’ milk and adoring glances. Meanwhile Satan twiddled his own and others’ thumbs and waited for fresh blood. He had high hopes for the moment The Afternet turned its’ attention to toddlers, who have forever had a capacity for demonic behaviour.

  He knew, though, that even then it would be some time before the real sinners stalking the waiting areas began to arrive at his doorstep, and had decided that he needed urgently to do something to fill the time and keep his hand in at visiting chaos upon the cosmos. He looked out at the assembly of demons, succubi, imps and wraiths of the underworld he had ordered to attend him. They shrieked and chattered, stabbed and bit at each other, pulled chairs away as others tried to sit down, and generally behaved in a way which would have made him proud if he hadn’t hated them all so much. His eyes flashed red as he called the meeting to order, and the baiting and random violence died down. A humpbacked demon finally returned the eye he was hiding in his pocket to the Cyclops blundering around at the back of the cavern, and silence fell.

  Beelzebub’s deep voice bounced around the black, seeping walls.

  “This is all going too well,” he said. “I want to know how we can cause some real trouble around here.”

  Two

  God had been holding a team-building event attended by his senior management followers. It was eternally confusing, because many of the attendees, such as Zeus, Jupiter, and Odin were Him, really. This made it difficult, amongst other, more transcendental issues, to know exactly how many finger buffets to order.

  The whole shebang was being led by a Californian ‘self-awareness psychologist’ (PhD from the Correspondence University of San Berdoo, $14.99) called Randy. His specialism, removing money from the pockets of the gullible, hadn’t really helped him in preparing the course for various deities and archangels, but he felt that if you are dead, currying favour with the management committee couldn’t really hurt.

  For all his outer confidence, sitting opposite the Supreme Being was something for which neither a lifetime of quackery nor the ingestion of mind-expanding drugs had prepared him. He was beginning to regret asking the assembled group to do a SWOT analysis.

  Under STRENGTHS God had written ‘everything’.

  “Are you sure that you are strong in every area, er, God?”

  “Well, I am omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. There are probably some other omnis I can’t think of as well. But I am them. Unless they are bad.”

  “Okay, let’s come back to that and move on for the moment.” Randy scanned the page in front of him. “Weaknesses. You’ve put none. Do you think that is an accurate representation?”

  The glowing figure before him appeared to consider the question, and Randy wondered whether asking God where he was weak might be a little dangerous.

  “I can be a bit soft, sometimes.” He said, “although not when I’m vengeful. Nope, can’t think of anything.”

  Let’s not talk of illness, poverty, man’s inhumanity, the subjugation of women, natural disasters, thought Randy. Just go along with it. He looked again at the page before him.

  “Ah! I see under THREATS you have put Satan. Is he a real threat?”

  “Oh yes.” Said God, “he can be a real pain the arse. So I am told by people who have arses. Which of course I don’t.”

  The arrival, at that moment of the specially invited Afternet management team came as a blessed relief to Randy. The next scheduled activity involved dividing everyone into teams and asking them to get an imaginary log over an imaginary river using only string and the inside of toilet rolls. Now he had established that God didn’t even have a bottom he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to identify at least one of the available tools.

  “Ah! Visitors.” Said God, who seemed as relieved as Randy. Even after all this time he wasn’t really comfortable talking about The Devil, not least because it made him feel a little less omni than he thought he should be. He stood, looking over towards the figures arriving in the small garden chosen for the escapade.

  It was not an entirely prepossessing spectacle. There were four of them and, with one exception they seemed less than enthusiastic about being there. Their invitation (if you can by any stretch call a request from God to attend his presence an ‘invitation’) had been delivered to them in the Control Room of The Afternet. The Holy Beckoning was delivered by Tawhirimatea (Tawhiri to his friends), and the motley crew manning the computer heard it coming a long way off.

  Geoffrey, the 7th Century turnip puller who represented the Heavenly axis in the management team, had been getting a little tetchy about the treatment of Neil in an episode of the Young Ones he was watching on one of the bank of screens in the Control Room.

  For a reason he couldn’t explain, Geoffrey identified with Neil, who was constantly put down and picked upon by his colleagues, railing alone against the injustice of the world, and appallingly dressed in clothes spattered with gobbets of food from God knows when.

  Apart from the last detail, Geoffrey had nothing in common with Neil. His colleagues at worst ignored him, and he didn’t know enough of the world to begin to question its values. He did dress appallingly though, and quite often stank due to the gathering of leftovers in whatever unpleasant fibre happened to be hung shapelessly upon his feeble frame.

  Marcel was Geoffrey’s counterpoint. He had been chosen to represent the Devil in looking after The Afternet, partly for his utterly sociopathic life in 17th century Paris, and partly because he was the only applicant who appeared to really not want the job. He had feigned disinterest in escaping the horrendous tortures he had suffered much as he had feigned interest in any number of married women he had tupped and virgins deflowered during his brief, lustful life. As feigning goes, he was much better at disinterest than interest.

  Invariably, when Geoffrey began railing at the television in annoyance at occurrences he took to be fact but which were usually fiction, Marcel’s disinterest was genuine, and required no acting ability on his part.

  For many years he had been forced to listen
to his co-worker rail at the barely believable adoration of Samantha in Bewitched for her effete husband, Geoffrey’s opinion that the crew of the Starship Enterprise were weak due to a lack of root vegetables, and that Charlie should stop putting his Angels into such terrible danger and do it himself if he was any kind of man. It took decades to educate the ancient innocent as to the concept of fiction. The fact that Geoffrey was still trying to locate the episode of a programme which revealed who was on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963 illustrated perfectly Marcel’s view that you can lead an idiot to fact but you can’t make him understand.

  The other two visitors to God’s development programme shouldn’t have been there, by any laws of nature. Mary, a late twenties computer expert, had been mistakenly terminated by the incompetent Grim Reaper sent by Geoffrey and Marcel to find them someone who could fix the malfunctioning Afternet. In a rare logical event in the post-existence chaos, she had been offered the chance to return, but having taken a long hard look at her miserable life, illogically chose instead to order a takeaway curry and return to her new-found friends.

  Well, friends? The final member was Justin Marchant, a small-time embezzler and owner of an IT company who consistently managed, through sheer chutzpah, to pass himself off as an expert in whichever field he happened to be committing fraud at the time. Not exhaustively, this had included used cars; film-making (Neasden Nobbers won two Golden Dongs); used cars; Fitness Clubs (20-year debentures for the morbidly obese), used cars, and Personal Shopping for the blind. And he still had a few old Ford Capris parked around the back.