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

by Peter Empringham

  The biggest worry Ron had, with regard to his eventual destination, was that he had once claimed a catch in a school cricket house match, which he knew had hit the floor seconds before he wrapped his fingers around the ball. The batsman, Tim Oaten, had been sent back to the pavilion and Ron had resisted the urge to shout that he had lied and Tim should stay. This episode had played on his mind many times since his death. For him, his wife Ethel had no flaws and could never have done anything that would mean that she wasn’t going to be rewarded with the Heaven she dreamed of, but that moment of juvenile madness could mean that he would not be with her.

  He comforted himself with the idea that Ethel’s Heaven would absolutely feature Ron and therefore he would be bound to go with her, despite his heinous sin. This may have comforted him but he was of course deluded. If the Afterlife was capable of creating a Heaven with a full-scale model of China for a monk who wanted to walk the Great Wall forever, it could crack out any number of former painter and decorators from Essex. Most of whom, it has to be said, would probably be more likely to appear in one of the Hells. What Ron didn’t actually appreciate was that his biggest sin had actually been a liberal provision of Artex to unsuspecting customers throughout his career, most of whom now knew that ceilings would fall should it ever be removed.

  Ron and Ethel had teamed up with Guntrick’s men not long after their vehicular catastrophe, and the relationship had proved utterly symbiotic. This purgatory was not Hampstead or The Hamptons, it was populated by seven hundred years of good and bad, and what passed for good seven hundred years ago might have been described otherwise more recently. The Visigoths dissuaded others from bothering the innocent couple and Ron and Ethel had provided Guntrick and his men with a jaw-dropping education.

  When they died, they knew how to eat, fornicate and kill. After a decade of Ron, they knew not to twist on sixteen at Pontoon, not to use the A12 after 4pm on a Friday, and that in France, your aunt’s pen is always inside your uncle’s desk.

  Now, Ron and The Visigoths had decided to establish some roots, and had built a small camp on a hill overlooking a stream. For Guntrick and the boys it had been a welcome opportunity to work, get a sweat on, craft something. For Ron it had been a chance to sit on a rock and expound on the virtues of the Black and Decker Workmate. For Ethel it had just been a huge source of pride and pleasure to see the settlement come together through the efforts of her new family.

  “What will we do when we’ve finished, Ron?” asked Guntrick. The pair were seated high on the hill a hundred metres above the village they could see taking shape.

  “All sorts of things.” Said Ron.

  “Like what?” Guntrick was insistent. To be fair, Ron had come up with an amazing range of activities over the past twenty years, which had somehow made him realise how much he knew despite never having deliberately learned much. A good deal of it was imperfectly learned, of course, but in the land of the 5th century marauder, the 20th century Know-It-All is King. Even so, His Highness was having to give this question a bit of thought.

  “We could invite people round for tea.” He said after a while.

  “That would be nice Ron, but I’m not sure the lads would be happy with that for too long.” Ron looked to the sky for inspiration. If you were in the afterlife, was God still ‘up’? Maybe He was ‘across’. Ron gazed over the valley, tiny figures walking without apparent purpose on the hillside opposite. Two huge white trees stood on the riverbank, and in the incline behind them there was a scar in the ground, lateral, as if something huge had scraped a fingernail across the earth. The upright trees were crossed by the lateral scar. Ron smiled.

  “Football!” he shouted. Some of those working below looked up to see where the exclamation had originated.

  “What’s that, Ron?” Guntrick looked just a touch excited. Although in the past few years Ron’s well of ideas seemed to have been exhausted, he still occasionally came up with a cracker, like Visigoth Jenga.

  Ron couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. With all of the warlike leanings of his friends, their overt physicality, their lust for competition to replace, well, lust. It was perfect.

  “Football,” said Ron who knew little about the game, “is a game between opposing sides who try to kick an object between two upright posts more often than their opponents.”

  Guntrick looked excited.

  “Is it good?”

  “Brilliant. Millions of people follow it.” Guntrick was convinced. He looked down the hill to where his battalion heaved trees and earth to complete the homestead. “LADS!” He yelled, echoing around the valley. All work stopped and faces looked expectantly at the figure on the hill. They just knew this was something extraordinary.

  “We’re going to learn to play football!” They cheered, without having any idea what he was talking about. He looked at Ron, who was delighted at their enthusiasm. Guntrick cupped his hands around his mouth, and cried, “Somebody go and get me a foot!”

  Four

  Mary was playing hard to get. Only she wasn’t really playing, to the greatest extent she really meant it. Justin had spent some time explaining to the other three his grand plan for making a posthumous fortune through The Afternet. Geoffrey, who had no idea what he might be talking about, had reverted to the benign look of interest he used when he wanted people to think he was listening, whilst in fact he dreamed about Elizabeth Montgomery. Marcel, who understood very little more, was nevertheless intrigued at Justin’s determination to part dead people from anything they possessed and wanted to know how this might be fulfilled. Mary knew from the very beginning that if this was going to work, she was the one who would have to make it do so, since apart from pressing the keys occasionally, none of the others had a clue how the system actually worked. Or why, or whether.

  Justin was not one given to original thought, his business philosophy having been based on the theft of any good idea. His death hadn’t changed this technique, but he presented it to the crew as though he were Einstein. It was like a brainstorming session for The Teletubbies.

  “Ok, yeah, let me run this past you, okay?” He instantly reverted to the mid-Atlantic business-speak that, he had convinced himself, added cachet to his words.

  “We have, like a captive audience, yah. These people have all the time in the world, well, afterworld, nothing to do, and things in their pockets. With me?”

  “Are we providing a pocket-emptying service?” asked Mary.

  “That’s it, in a way. You’re on the ball. Or button.” Justin looked at the three faces in front of him as though he were Nelson Mandela with Wembley Stadium in the palm of his hand. “When they die, they have things, don’t they?”

  “Things?” asked Geoffrey, largely to prove that he was listening.

  “Yup, things. Watches, jewellery, chewing gum, cigarettes, hats, jackets. All kind of things they carry with them when they buy the farm. Some of them have money.”

  “Some of them have things and money.” Said Geoffrey.

  “Right!” said Justin. “But the things might not be things they need or want. Loads of them walk out in the morning with no idea that it’s the last journey they’ll ever make. Look at me, I arrived in Nike sweat gear with a sports watch. If I had known I was going to kick the bucket I might have made sure I had something else.”

  “What, like a decent pair of boots?” asked Geoffrey.

  “It’s metaphorical, Geoff. I didn’t literally kick the bucket. Anyway, point is that there are millions of people out there with things they don’t want but which other people might. We can bring those two things together and at the same time part them from their money. It’s win: win.”

  “Petty larceny, really Justin.” Mary looked less than impressed. “I thought you wanted to give them Space Invaders. Make their afterlives more full.”

  “Wait ‘til they get going on this.” He seemed genuinely energised. “They’ll have more fun than they ever had when they were alive.”

  In
the end, Mary agreed to write the software largely because, since The Afternet had started to buzz, there wasn’t a great deal to do. Marcel had promised to take her to some of the parties that were held by the Gods, but so far the social diary remained empty. This new idea was definitely a challenge, to some extent the kind of work she had dreamed of when she entered IT as a career. That was before she discovered that the men in the business were given all the juicy jobs and that her greater talents would be channelled into screen design and font choice. Now, surrounded by computer incompetents, she was the only one who could bring Justin’s dream into reality.

  On a more practical front, before she retired into a corner of the room to work on the program, she had thrown a large spanner into the works.

  “How will you collect the money? It’s not like they have bank accounts.”

  The three men were left with this bombshell to defuse. It took a little longer to even begin solving the conundrum because Justin had to explain to the other two the nature of a bank account. It was a familiar situation, trying to describe something none of them would ever require, but Geoffrey was in one of those moods when he really needed to spend a lot of time talking about something he would never comprehend.

  To compile the list of things Geoffrey would never understand would probably have tested the capacity of an infinite number of scribes if they could borrow some typewriters from a similar quantity of monkeys. It wasn’t just that he had been exposed to so little during his very limited existence in 7th Century Northumbria, but also that he had the capacity to cease understanding things that he had previously grasped. Thus, for example, one day he would know that the screens in front of him were connected to a big old machine somewhere that sent words and the pictures for him to watch. The next day he would wake up and be amazed that he had so many windows on other existences. Or would have if he could remember what a window might be. When almost everything is beyond your experience, the sheer volume of novelty can be overwhelming.

  For example, one thing that he knew, but by no means understood, was that the environment in which the un-judged souls wandered didn’t work like the world he had known. Although the area it covered was massive, with fields and mountains and lakes and rivers, and although it housed several billion people, it actually took up no space at all. If he had bothered to listen to what the Dalek Hawking was saying, rather than waiting for the Tardis to appear, he might have learned that it was a singularity.

  Geoffrey knew that there was a door at the end of a corridor which he could open on one minute to a sandy seashore, and a minute later to a pitch-black night in the desert. If you were one of the unfortunates in the hinterland you would have had to trek for years to go between the two locations. If you were part of the management, you had it somewhat easier.

  Justin was feeling frustrated. Probably the most brilliant money-making idea he had ever had could be scotched just because he had no way of getting hold of the money he made. Four billion suckers, confused, miserable, and ready for the taking and he couldn’t find an answer.

  “What if we employed a few thousand of the children to go around and get the money?” Marcel looked at him as if he was mad.

  “Oh, that’ll work. First we round up children, then we train them to go and collect money all over the afterlife, then hope that they don’t either steal it or get robbed. Then somehow we have to get them to bring the money to us, wherever we may be.”

  “Only saying.” Said Justin, feeling bullied. “Haven’t noticed you coming up with any brilliant ideas. Beginning to get the feeling you are all mouth.” Marcel stood slowly and glared at Justin with clear menace. When he began to reach for his inside pocket, still holding Justin’s look, the entrepreneur began to think he might just have pushed the Frenchman a little too far. Over the time in the Control Room he had learned more than he cared to know about Marcel’s murderous lifetime.

  “Why don’t we just put a box outside The Door?” asked Geoffrey absently. He was chewing a scone and staring, rapt, at an episode of Only Fools and Horses. “Don’t lean on the bar!” he yelled, too late, as Del Boy disappeared off screen.

  Both Justin and Marcel looked at the old man with disbelief, although, as it turned out, for very different reasons.

  “You complete idiot.” Said Justin. He had hopes that this nonsense would distract Marcel from whatever punishment he had been about to mete out. With some justification as it turned out.

  “Brilliant.” Said Marcel. Mary looked up.

  “Did you just call Geoffrey ‘brilliant’? You must be getting soft, Marcel.”

  “Brilliant piece of comedy.” He said, pointing at the screen where David Jason was dusting himself off. “The Door. Of course I was going to suggest The Door.”

  “So we can collect money from all over that holding area with a tin outside a door? Forgive me, but I think that seems unlikely.” Justin was at his most patronising.

  “Not with the Everywhere Door. It goes, well, everywhere.” Geoffrey licked his finger the better to pick up the crumbs of the scone.

  “Did doors go everywhere when you were alive, Geoff?”

  “We didn’t have doors when I was alive, Justin. They are a new-fangled thing. Especially the everywhere one.”

  “So,” said Mary, “this everywhere door. Is it near the Magic Faraway Tree and the Wishing Chair?”

  Geoffrey looked puzzled, and glanced at Marcel for help. “I don’t know those, Mary. Where are they?”

  “They’re Enid Blyton, Geoff, an environment I am beginning to feel we may inhabit if there is such a thing as an Everywhere Door. Through which, at any moment will burst four lemonade swilling kids, a sentient dog, and several pixies.” Geoffrey looked doubtful that something so extraordinary would occur. “Look Geoffrey, since I’ve been here, I’ve met a gluttonous multi-armed elephant, a half man half-lion, and a celestial messenger who can’t figure out how to stop, so the strange world of Blyton appears relatively easy to explain in comparison.”

  “Anyway.” Justin held out his hands to pray silence, “Let’s just for the moment imagine there is a door which opens everywhere. And that we could use it collect money from the unsuspecting dead punter. All we need to do now is create the website.”

  They all turned to look at Mary.

  “We?” she said.

  Five

  Satan’s assembled company had been singularly unsuccessful in satisfying his desire for some urgent havoc. The problem, he knew, as he gazed listlessly at the casual acts of petty violence they were enacting upon each other, was that they were the victims of twisted psychologies.

  Once, just for the hell of it (sic) he had subjected a small number of vicious imps to the Myers-Briggs psychological profile. Notwithstanding the difficulty of getting them to concentrate for more than a few minutes upon anything that wasn’t to do with hurting others, the results were depressing for one hoping to have assembled a team who would generate ideas.

  A Behavioural Psychologist from Sunderland, also a serial arsonist, had performed the analysis. The Devil had, perhaps unwisely, watched for a while as the unsuspecting academic had posed his questions to a purple Byzantine demon called Shad, who had a particular fondness for a rotisserie, especially if the person involved was on the plump side.

  “Would you rather be more just than merciful, or more merciful than just?” The shrink took off his glasses and observed Shad, who did a passable impersonation of someone thinking.

  “Just what?” croaked the purple people-baster.

  “Just, you know, like with justice.”

  “Just his what?”

  “Whose what?”

  “He is.” Said Shad, pointing at the waiting queue of demons.

  “He is who?”

  “No. Watt. He’s Watt.” Which he was, the next one in line.

  The psych drew a breath. Thought for a moment.

  “Would you rather be merciful?” he said eventually. Remove the alternative, he might get an answer.
r />   “Never. Never been, never will be.” Shad crouched on the office chair he had been given and picked at the long nails on his grimy purple feet. His questioner, momentarily happy that he had an answer, looked with dread at the next question, which concerned feelings for children. The demon saved him, looking up suddenly and asking a question of its own.

  “Do you like fire?” It glared at the psychologist as though challenging him to provide the wrong answer.

  “Actually I do. I really like fire.”

  “Me too. Fire, yes. Mmmm. Fire. Love fire.”

  The man looked at the question paper in front of him. Time to paraphrase.

  “Do you prefer fire to be neat and orderly or optional?” He asked.

  “Optional. Martini. Anytime. Anywhere. Any…other things.”

  “Are you more comfortable after a fire or before a fire?”

  “Yes. Before, during. After. Love fire.”

  The Devil had sighed and walked away, gasping for a drink. This was going to be a long process. When he finally returned to the psychologist for a debrief he found the poor soul spurting blood from several wounds. His glasses were protruding from a gaping rent in the rear of his trousers, and he was hopelessly entwined in the office chair.

  “How’d it go?” asked The Devil.

  “Oh, you know.” The psychologist mumbled through a mouth full of what appeared to be chilli peppers. It was possible that just for a moment he may have regretted his murderous fire-setting history. “Challenging.”

  It turned out, the analysis suggested, that all of the followers were cut from very similar cloth. They all had low attention spans, drew almost all of their energy from others (in some cases literally), revelled in conflict, and rarely finished anything, so desperate were they to move on to the next escapade. On the plus side they had enormous propensity for self-sacrifice, in that they were prepared to suffer a great deal in order to inflict pain on others.