So, the group of gnarled, bent, shrieking beasts he observed in front of him were not going to help him create a strategy for undermining the newly operative Afternet. They were playing the equivalent of a drinking game, only without the drinks. Each was allowed to hit the next person in line using only the previous person in line. And that was it.
His train of thought was disturbed by a polite cough just behind him. He turned slowly to see a tall, thin young man dressed in a blue suit, leaning forward towards him with a hint of formality.
“Is it a survey?” asked The Devil, “Because I’m not interested.”
“Er, no sir. You asked me to look into Clause 19 of the Passage of The Deceased Act.” The man gestured slightly with a sheaf of papers as though this would make everything clear.
“I did? When?”
“About four years ago, your viciousness.”
The Devil was worried about his short-term memory. What happens if the Lord of The Underworld gets Alzheimer’s, he thought? Alzheimer must be here somewhere, I could ask him. Four years? That was nothing, and yet he had no recall whatsoever of this bookish looking man or indeed of the search he said he had been set upon. It occurred to him that there could have been a security breach.
“Where was this?” Satan asked.
“We were in Bundy’s Bar and Grill. I’ve been working there for twenty years as a bottomless waiter. You were in the guise of Mata Hari. We were getting, well, friendly, when-”
“ I know. Your genitals imploded. They always do.”
“Quite, sir. Then you discovered that I was of an investigative bent and gave me a pass to the Afterlibrary. You were, if you don’t mind me saying, sir, somewhat tired and emotional. You said that all of this waiting for judgement was dangerous and you wanted to know whether it had any effect on the customers you could expect.”
“I did?”
“Yes sir. You said that I could have a break from eternal sexist innuendo about the state of my tackle and the endless physical attacks if I would go and check out the rules for you.”
Satan looked at the man, who was peering at him through the rimless glasses. He had sweat on his top lip. Perhaps he was thinking that maybe it had been Mata Hari after all and she just was explosive in the sack. The Devil sniffed.
“So what did you find out? What’s Clause 19?”
“Clause 19 is an amendment to the original Bill concerning the processing of the recently deceased. The Bill was quite simple in the early days when everyone was judged quickly. Clause 1 for example is ‘If you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it.” However, it was amended almost continuously as the processing became slower, to deal with issues arising. Clause 12, for example, relates to people dying while waiting to be processed once they are dead. Clause 13 addresses the problem of people wearing Do Not Resuscitate labels and who die whilst waiting to-”
“Yes, yes I get it! Clause 19, man, what’s that about?”
The young man pushed his spectacles back onto his nose and shuffled the paper in front of him until he found the one he wanted.
“It was an amendment proposed at the 1275AD Mortality Summit. By Francis of Assisi, so called Saint.”
“Oh God,” the Devil put his head in his hands. “I hate him, and I remember something about that conference. He just pitched up as if he owned the place, drivelling on about the little birdies and what would happen to their souls, like anyone gives a shit apart from some budgies. He was so pious he made God look like Jack The Ripper.”
“Ah, Jack! Is he here, my lord?”
“He’ll be out in that waiting mess, somewhere. Anyway, the clause.”
“Well, Clause 19.” The man paused as though trying desperately to find a way to phrase his discovery that would not result in terrible repercussions. He failed, and just decided to plough on.
“It states that “In the event that processing for Judgement should exceed six months from the moment of death, the behaviour of the individual from that moment until the moment of his Judgement shall be given equal weight in deciding his or her afterlife with events prior to the moment of death.’
“Christ! Yada, yada. What does it mean?” The Devil was beginning to smoke, tobacco not involved. The young man noticed the closeness to combustion and cracked on, fully aware that what he was about say may not help.
“It means that all of those souls out there, if they should become good whilst they wait, may well be judged to be good. And go to their Heaven.”
There was a silence. The Devil was visibly reddening, and the young man was aware of the heat filling the room. He decided on a punt.
“Which means of course, that if they commit any horrible things whilst they wait, they are yours.”
The Devil’s head turned twice on its axis before coming to view the young man once more.
“Nice try. But. Whoever heard of anyone renouncing God on their deathbed? At the moment of truth even some of the most venal, violent, hateful characters face their mortality. They beg forgiveness and weep, as they are welcomed into the Church. You tell me of one single instance of a priest saying ‘You’re right, it’s a bucket of bollocks, I wish I’d been evil.”
He stroked his horns. The young man simply watched, aware that a word at this moment, were it the wrong one, would mean that trouserless service in Bundy’s could appear like a trip to Disneyland.
The Devil glared at the gibbering troupe of followers who had been with him for centuries, and sighed with frustration. They had no saving graces, but their evil was very traditional and they would never contribute creatively. He had more help, in reality, from later additions to his evil hordes, for whom just hurting people was not an end in itself. He looked at the young man before him, who somehow had been processed rapidly during a brief moment of lucidity in the Afternet.
“What’s your name?” The Devil stared at the young man.
“Slaven.”
“What did you do, Slaven?” he asked, “You know, to make you one of mine?”
“Oh well, the usual, I suppose.” The young man glanced nervously around. He looked as though he were at a job interview.
“Which is?”
“ Oh, started a religion. Slept with all the young women. Encouraged them all to drink anti-freeze to get to Heaven quicker.”
“That’s the usual?” Even to Satan this seemed a quite impressive resume. The young man smiled with a hint of satisfaction at the scale of his perfidy.
“ Okay. What would you do, if you were me, to make sure any there aren’t too many turncoats out there?”
Once again the young man realised that his answer would have a heavy influence on how he spent the next few centuries. Get it right, and maybe he could be a trusted adviser, which meant just the occasional imposition of terror and unimaginable pain; wrong answer, and the terror and pain would be both constant and interminable.
“I would suggest you use The Afternet. Terminals are popping up all over the place, everyone will be using them soon.”
“Oh yes, A-Bay. They’ll be swopping false teeth and selling each other their shoes. How does that help me?”
“Well, once the terminals are there, you have a way onto the system. You could create something that encourages people to, well, misbehave. You need a hacker.”
Satan had been beginning to think that maybe this new follower had something, but did a double take at his last words.
“A Haka? I’m going to corrupt millions through the judicious imposition of a South Sea Island dance?”
His face twisted into a snarl, and the serrated nails on the fingers begin to extend. The sweat on the young man’s face increased. He leaped in with both feet.
“No, sir. A Hacker. Someone who breaks into computer systems. Then that person could write the programme you need to get some real nastiness going.”
The snarl remained (in truth it rarely went away), but the nails slowly retracted to a manageable length.
“A hacker?” The Devil looked thoughtful, �
�Where would I find one of those?”
Six
Ron was in something of a Golden Era. The football brainwave had generated a whole new sense of purpose within the troupe of Visigoths. This was a good thing, in that there was nothing like boredom to increase the chance of them reverting to type, and cutting a bloody swathe through the teeming innocents in the Afterlife. His beloved wife, Ethel, had once more taken on the glow of adoration at his apparently unending cleverness. The glow turned up to a gleam when the Afternet terminals started to pop up all over the place and he was able to demonstrate his (actually limited) skills in that arena as well.
To be fair, the football concept had started off with a level of complexity he hadn’t anticipated. His Germanic friends had leapt to the assumption that the organ rather than the sphere was the active component, and had set about happily sharpening things in order to procure said foot. The conversation in which the misunderstanding was overcome brought back to Ron the fact that although he had spent years educating the Visigoths in many fields, so much still lay beyond their ken.
“Is there a particular size of foot we need, Ron?” Hansi asked. Hansi was rather on the slight side for a Visigoth, although with an entertaining and ever-evolving line in facial pustules.
“Big one, I reckon.” Said Guntrick, the leader of the company. “It’s all about size in football. Possibly.”
“What shall we do with the rest of the body?” asked Lucius. The young Roman seemed misplaced amongst the older, larger, more intrinsically violent members of Ron’s audience. He had been adopted by the Visigoths, however, having been decapitated by his compatriots who mistook him for some kind of Trojan Youth. As one of many persons present who had to carry one of his organs, in his case his head, his concern for the potential victim was understandable.
“We could slow roast it, perhaps with some herbs. Apple sauce, even. Tastes like pork, apparently.” Adwahl almost licked his lips as he spoke. There was a stunned silence. Ethel was made distinctly queasy at the brazen suggestion of cannibalism, and Ron, seeing her blanche, put a protective arm around her shoulder and glared at Adwahl. He assumed that the silence from the rest of the group was a similar expression of disgust. In fact they were largely trying to balance their suspicion of Adwahl’s fondness for cooking with the tempting prospect of pork, even if it wasn’t really pork. Hansi broke the silence.
“Would there be crackling?” That was enough.
“Woah, woah, woah.” Ron held out his arms to calm what was becoming an increasingly excited audience. “Football is not a sport based around the use of a dismembered foot.”
There was a little tittering and then Guntrick asked, “Don’t be silly Ron. Why would it be called football if it doesn’t involve a foot?”
“Because,” said Ron, stating what was to him the obvious, “it involves a ball.” Which was when the root cause of the problem became clear. After a few puzzled glances around him, Guntrick posed the question.
“What’s a ball?”
They had been together for so long now that Ron had forgotten how important it was not to assume knowledge, and to explain everything that was not literal. This was a lesson he had learned, not least, when teaching them to play Find The Lady (they did all come back after an hour or so, and the ladies were released), and when he first said ‘Hit me’ during a game of 5-card stud poker. The latter was not a mistake he would repeat.
Describe a ball to someone who has no concept of such a thing. Ron’s brilliant idea began to look a little less brilliant. Ron calmed the crowd with an elaborate mime, a couple of pointless similes- an orange, but bigger; the moon, but smaller. After rapid realisation that they had never seen an orange- short supply in 5th century Germany- and that the moon, to them, was flat, he took recourse to the ruse he had used so many times before, usually in the hope that they would forget where the whole thing began.
Road Trip.
“Let’s go and find one.” He said, and set off with the troupe following dutifully behind. In reality he was hoping much more for a distraction than a discovery. To Ron’s utter amazement, he got both.
It hadn’t been the best route march they had undertaken. In the early years of their nomadic existence Ron had easily been able to entertain this band of rampaging murderers with sing-alongs (they did an excellent three-part Blue Moon); I-Spy, and Twenty Questions (after 9 months they had only thought of sixteen). Now, they were distracted by the exciting quest for whatever a ball may be, and Ron was distracted by the knowledge that there was no reason whatsoever why there would happen to be such a thing in the Afterlife.
“Don’t worry, Ron.” Ethel linked her arm through his, “You’ll think of something, you always do.” He looked at the benign face of his partner, gazing ahead over an endless landscape, and blessed his luck once again at having the benefit of her unswerving belief.
It is reasonable to think that even Ethel’s confidence may have been wavering a touch (although, of course, it wasn’t) by the time they breasted yet another hill very much like the last one and saw a small crowd of people a few hundred yards ahead. They were milling around outside a small structure formed largely from some ragged canvas draped between two palm trees. A large piece of board nailed to one of the trees proclaimed the structure, rather grandiosely, ‘AFTERNET CAFÉ’.
“Ron!” Guntrick upped his pace to come alongside the couple. “A café! Maybe they’ll have tea!”
“They might, Guntrick, they might. But what’s an Afternet?”
It became apparent as they drew closer that the small crowd had two distinct groups. One was, basically, loitering. They chatted, wandered, and occasionally glanced towards the other group, who were somewhat more animated. The second group was clearly looking at something with intense interest, and when Ron joined the back of the group and managed to hoist himself onto the tips of his toes, he saw, to his amazement, that it was a computer screen. One of the crowd was working a keyboard, and the screen flicked between pictures of various items, first a bicycle, then a rather ragged hat, and then a jar of pickled onions. The Visigoths, who didn’t have to stand on their tiptoes, were agog. As one, they turned to Ron, who realised with a sinking feeling that this was going to take some explaining.
To an extent, Ron’s own hazy understanding of computing probably helped him to reach a description that did enough to stop the flood of questions. Told that it was a picture machine, the Visigoths peered into the shack to find the source of the content. Told that you could ‘talk’ to the device, they pushed others aside in order to yell incomprehensibly at the screen. Realising that in their enthusiasm to discover what this amazing thing may be, the Visigoths could quite possibly ignite a major incident in the afterlife, Ron managed to lure them away and explained what was happening, in the fashion he had used so many times during the years they had spent together. He didn’t see the irony of educating them in one of technology’s greatest feats by drawing in the dirt with a stick.
It was a lesson in Computing 101 that would have graced the classroom of any group of 8 year olds, particularly if they were being taught by one of their own number whilst waiting for the teacher to arrive. The Visigoths managed to grasp, however, that here was a thingy making pictures, which you could ask to find other pictures for you. There was, behind it, and out of sight, some kind of sorcery which meant that you could communicate with other picture machines elsewhere. Ron, vague enough on the ‘How’, steered well clear of the ‘Why’.
Not long previously, Ron and the Visigoths had bumped into Marcel, Geoffrey, Mary, and Justin in a drinking house run by Jane Austen (Nude Jelly Wrestling every Thursday), and the Afternet crew had felt obliged to appraise them of the fact that their eventual fate was in the hands of a machine. It was Guntrick who put two and two together.
“Do you think it’s part of that judgement machine? The thing those people told us about and which they said they were trying to fix?”
“Brilliant!” said Ron, who hadn’t thought of tha
t. “We haven’t seen these before, so they must have made it work. That means that we’ll soon be sent to wherever we were supposed to end up” He took Ethel’s hand and smiled, dreaming and hoping of an endless future eating Ye Olde Oak Ham as the rain thrummed on the roof of their eternal caravan. For Guntrick and the Visigoths the outlook was less rosy, and he hoped that the girl they had met remembered her promise to delay their judgement for as long as she could.
Miraculously, the line of souls waiting to access the screen seemed to diminish faster once it was joined at the rear by the massive, warlike, and unpleasantly aromatic presence of the Visigoths.
Adrael, who was the tallest of even this huge bunch, held Lucius’ head in the air to report on what those in front of them in the queue were doing. Naturally enough, most of them had met their end before the advent of computers, and Lucius was able to report on a whole lot of poking, thumping, and shouting at the device, much like any office anywhere in the modern world.
Arriving at the front of the line, they parted to allow Ron through to address the machine, and then crowded around him to watch.
The desktop screen was not overloaded with applications. It appeared to offer weather reports, A-Mail, which allowed you to send messages to others, Space Invaders (‘Later’ said Ron), and something called A-Bay.
The problem with A-Mail was that the contact list had billions of entries, but Ron eventually found his mum, and sent her a note hoping she was okay, that he had found the £100 hidden in the china teapot, and that she should wrap up warm because the weather report reckoned it was going to turn chilly. He didn’t consider the likelihood of his mother ever actually accessing one of the terminals scattered around the afterlife, but in any case felt better for the gesture.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 33
