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

by Peter Empringham

  The third, though, looked a distinct possibility.

  Jenkin Furvill had been a youth whose bitterness at his life had grown exponentially as his teen years progressed. Firstly he was bitter about living in Much Partington in the English County of Rutland, a county so lacking in presence that it existed and then it didn’t and then did again without anyone really noticing. Much Partington was the kind of place where people would put a note in the Post Office if they found a handkerchief in the street.

  Jenkin was bitter about the fact that even in this no-horse town his mother managed to find a succession of ‘uncles’ to make his life a misery, about the tedium of school, about his pocket money, about his short-sightedness, about Global Warming. Most of all he was bitter about having been christened Jenkin.

  According to the information screen on The Afternet, Jenkin’s response to his enduring ennui was not, like so many other youths, to smash up bus stops, spread litter, kick the canes away from old ladies, and masturbate a lot, but to break into the computer system of the United States of America Department of Homeland Security. And masturbate a lot.

  Now, Marcel was pleased to note, he was mooching around one of the small settlements in the afterworld, being grumpy and incommunicative, having been poisoned by one of his ‘uncles’, who also did for his mother. Marcel printed the information, and A-mailed Slaven, who responded immediately with an instruction to meet the next day. The Frenchman deleted the mails and sat for a moment in the quiet gloom of the Control Room. He had no idea why The Devil wanted Jenkin Furvill, but he knew it couldn’t be good. He also knew, somewhere in his mind, that it had to be something to do with The Afternet, and that could be bad news for all of them. But, needs must when the Devil drives, particularly when that is a not a metaphor, and if he has you, only slightly metaphorically, suspended over a vat of scalding tar.

  The door flew open and the lights burst on, almost blinding him.

  “Hey, Marcel,” Geoffrey was in ebullient mood, “what are you doing sitting here in the dark? Look what we’ve got!”

  Marcel blinked and looked to where Geoffrey was waving a stuffed purple Kraken.

  “It was Justin,” he said, sitting the huge soft toy on Marcel’s lap, “he was waiting on XIX for ages. It was so tense.”

  “He actually wanted to get a cruet set,” said Mary, “but we managed to persuade him to cough up his voucher for the greater good.”

  “You’ll regret it when you want to do some seasoning.” said Justin with an uncharacteristic joviality. It was clear to Marcel that they had all had a great time.

  “We’re a bit early,” said Geoffrey, “because Fortuna knocked over the table again and no-one could find half the balls.”

  The three laughed, and Marcel looked from them to the Kraken. “Thanks for this.” He said. “I appreciate you giving up your prize, Justin.”

  “No problem. I guess there are endless other opportunities. And in any case, I suppose we are all in this together, aren’t we?”

  Marcel wasn’t sure he liked this community version of Justin, and touched nervously the folded printout in his pocket. They were all in something, that was for sure; he just wasn’t sure what it was.

  Eight

  The Visigoths were feeling more fulfilled than they had for some time. They were built for labour, for warfare, for action, and although all of them had come to enjoy the endless learning that their situation had enabled, there was a part of them that yearned for honest toil. Battle and slaughter would have been preferable, but the toil bit was a decent fallback.

  Football under his arm, Ron had led them on a search for a suitable location for a pitch, and they had eventually found a splendid flat plain with mounds rising on either side, creating something of a natural amphitheatre. From the small copse of woodland on the brow of one of the hills, Guntrick and his men, supervised by Ron, felled several tall, strong silver birch trees. Ron and Ethel watched proudly as the Germans took it in turns to swing Guntrick’s double headed axe, their bare torsos wreathed with sweat. As each wielded the weapon in a massive arc, sending chips of wood flying into the air, the others chanted rhythmically in their ancient language.

  Ethel sat next to Adwahl as he sang, humming along with the tune. It all had a touch of romance. Sunlight filtering through the trees, a muscular warrior swinging the axe, the deep voices urging the worker on.

  “That’s lovely, Adwahl. What are you singing about?”

  “It’s a beheading song, Ethel. We sing it when we execute captured enemies.” He smiled a beatific smile and, swaying and singing softly, turned back to watch Adrael take another huge chunk out of the tree. Ethel laughed weakly and stopped humming.

  This being the afterworld, where entertainment was thin on the ground, the activity drew a considerable audience, glad of the opportunity to pass the time. Ron looked around the crowd, happily seated on the grass, cheering on the Visigoths, who in turn strutted manfully around, proudly displaying their strength and muscles. A shout and applause rose each time a tree fell, and whichever of Guntrick’s men struck the last blow would stand tall, waving the axe, and acknowledge the adulation.

  Eventually, they had six tree trunks, and set about trimming the branches from them with the axe and a bewildering collection of sharp tools they retrieved from within their clothing. Ron had wandered through the viewers asking if anyone knew anything about football, drawing blank looks from Elizabethan sailors, a conquistador or two, various Eskimos, and a witch doctor, amongst others. He did, however, manage to establish that a football goal should be about three times as wide as it was high.

  They used Adrael, the tallest of the troupe, as the template. He stood upright and held his arm straight up in the air, and they marked off the height, plus a bit, on a tree trunk held alongside him.

  “Four of those.” Said Ron.

  Three of the four were placed alongside the two longer trunks, again a bit added, and they were cut to size.

  The Visigoths carried the trunks down to the plain (singing again; Ethel didn’t ask what, assuming it was something about carrying prisoners to slaughter), and the crowd followed. It was like Hamelin Town.

  The longer trunks were trimmed at the ends and forced into clefts in the shorter; Franzel had cut some vines from the forest and the wood was lashed together. Ron was very impressed. When the first goal was hoisted, and driven into the holes they had prepared, the crowd went wild. People hugged each other as though they had just seen the construction of a hospital, a symbol of the strength and togetherness of the community, rather than a couple of trees taken from the ground, hacked about a bit and put back in. Here, though, and now, it felt like the completion of a project of true import.

  “What is it?” an Elizabethan sailor asked an Eskimo. As pointless an exchange as can be imagined.

  The crowd fell into line as Ron and the Visigoths paced out a hundred long steps from the first erection, a process which left Ron about fifteen metres behind his friends. They dug the holes and hoisted the second goal. The crowd went wild.

  Guntrick, his animal skin coat over his shoulder, torso dripping with sweat and covered with chips of birch and slivers of foliage, turned proudly to Ron.

  “There you go, Ron, we did it.” The Visigoths cheered, and so, for the want of anything better to do, did the watching throng.

  “What happens now, Ron?”

  Ron conjured up the memories of football matches he had seen, usually in fragment as he searched his TV for something else to watch, or in the corner of his vision as he walked his dog in the park. He placed the football on the ground at his feet.

  “Hansi, go and stand in the middle of that, er, the goal.” Hansi followed Ron’s gesture and parked himself between the lashed trees, looking puzzled.

  Ron took a couple of paces backwards, then ran to the ball and punted it with his toe. Hansi watched as what was for sure the first goal ever scored in the Afterlife dribbled past his feet.

  The Visigoths had worked for
twenty hours. Their arms ached from swinging the axe, trimming the branches. Their mouths were dry, their skin prickling from the scratches of undergrowth. They watched the ball bobble towards and then past Hansi. Guntrick looked at Ron. He feared unrest.

  “Bloody Hell, Ron, is that it?”

  The crowd was silent except for one young man. He was a seventeen year old Brazilian, willowy and olive skinned, stabbed for his (fake) Gucci watch in a Rio slum. As the ball rolled to a halt behind the goal and Guntrick addressed his worried words to Ron, the young man leapt to his feet and threw his arms in the air.

  “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooool!” he cried. “Ronaldo Goooool! Pele Gooool! Goooool Braaaaasil!”

  He was observed with some surprise by the Elizabethan sailors surrounding him.

  Ron looked at Guntrick.

  “I think we had better go and talk to him.” Said Ron.

  Jenkin Furvill was slouching around behind the queue at his local Afternet terminal, his face dispassionate, but his mind sneering at the ineptitude of those accessing the system.

  Jenkin was relatively tall for his age, with the sapling thin body of an adolescent, a body that made you think light could shine through it and a decent breeze waft it away. He had short hair which stood up like alfalfa on his scalp, and a pair of rimless glasses which every now and then he would push back onto his nose with an extended finger, whether they needed it or not.

  In the village of Much Partington, he had lived his life by rote. In the micro-life this had meant getting the bus to a school twenty miles away; sitting through lessons apparently uninterested; doing just enough to get pass grades; coming home and doing the minimum amount of homework; and rarely seeing friends because they were dispersed around the county, and his mother didn’t have a car. From the macro point of view the routine wasn’t much better. Christmas was carolling in the Square, then the cycle of Mayday celebrations with Morris Dancing, Summer Solstice with mock Druids, Harvest Festival with canned vegetables, Village Fete with ancient fairground rides, barn dance with hog roast, and then around all over again. Neither perspective engaged him and it didn’t take a great deal of ignoring from his mother for him to retreat into himself.

  It helped that Much Partington, in farming country, was populated by people who were happy with their own company, unless you count his ‘Uncles’, who were particularly happy with the company of his mother. No one really noticed the thin, spring-haired boy retreating increasingly into his bedroom, where his school IT studies took on a different turn. Whenever his mother or one of her visitors interrupted him, he was playing Football Manager, driving Grimsby Town upwards from the Blue Square Conference to European glory. When left to his own devices he was buggering up everyone else’s computing.

  His first virus was ‘ZIT’, and was spread on Bebo, with the result that all screensavers were changed to a close up of an exploding pustule. He moved from there to increasingly destructive work, which initially emailed everyone from the recipients’ computer with some code which made their own computers useless, to eventually trying to get into some of the most secure networks on earth. Jenkin wasn’t entirely clear what he would do when he got there, but at that stage the challenge was to breach them in the first place.

  At school he ignored most of what he was told, letting the input float over him except for the few moments when he had the slightest interest. This was never Shakespeare, occasionally physics, when it touched on particle acceleration, and IT, before he realised he knew more than the teacher did. He would sit on the bus home as it wound through the country lanes dropping off his fellow pupils, largely ignored and ignoring the noisy chaos, thinking of how to get past the firewall of MI5.

  Which he did, for six months planting disinformation about an imaginary Russian spy called Anna living in the USA and infiltrating inconsequential parts of the government. This stopped only when it turned out that there was a Russian spy called Anna living in the USA and so on. It also turned out that she was unmasked thanks to information the CIA gleaned from MI5.

  Jenkin had the look, demeanour, and home life of a child built from a ‘Target For Bullying’ kit. Skinny, bespectacled and with wilful hair, he attracted the attention of beefy kids from rural backgrounds who knew how to stick their arms up a cow’s backside, but somehow thought sneering was the apogee of personal relationships. What didn’t help was that for any of them within a ten mile radius of his home, an adult male relative would know Jenkin’s mother. He possibly got more pocket money from their fathers, if only to disappear for a while, than they did.

  The fact was, though, that despite the appearance of vulnerability, Jenkin had some serious spine, and would never cower from confrontation even though it often led to physical pain. Those who meted this out would invariably find themselves either locked out of their computers or doomed to watch the Disney Channel whatever they tried to view. This determination was why dead Jenkin, standing watching a sub-Saharan youth who died of malaria in 1820 try to understand how to sell his gold amulet on a computer, was not disconcerted or frightened by the appearance in front of him of a sharply dressed man with slicked back hair and extravagant sunglasses, and another thin man with a look of purpose, who said they needed to talk to him.

  He did do a double take at the third member of their party: Andras, a demon who, rather showily he thought, was sitting astride a snarling black wolf, waving a serious sword and peering at him with enormous eyes set in the head of an owl. As a handy by-product, the queue at The Afternet terminal cleared in seconds.

  “Who’s your friend?” Jenkin asked of the two humanoids.

  The one with the sunglasses turned his head briefly to look at the owl headed demon who appeared to be having a touch of trouble controlling the wolf, which had picked up a scent it quite fancied following.

  “That’s Andras. Believe it or not he commands 30 legions of spirits. We thought he might help us get some privacy.”

  Jenkin surveyed the surrounding area, which was deserted, although the odd head popped up from behind a rock every so often.

  “Seems to have worked.” He said. “What do you want?”

  Marcel adjusted his sunglasses. He was hoping against hope that of all the cameras in all the landscape of all the afterlife he hadn’t walked into one Geoffrey was watching.

  “We think you can help us out a touch. Let’s go somewhere private.”

  Jenkin looked around him. The wolf had cleared everyone within a hundred metres.

  “Here’s private.” He said. The second man, tall, with glasses much like his own and dressed in a blue suit, stepped towards him.

  “You’re Jenkin Furvill?” The boy nodded. “We have a proposition for you.”

  As the wolf drooled and the owl-headed demon expended all of its’ energy on trying to stop it from bolting, Marcel and Slaven explained the situation to Jenkin.

  That situation, they told him, was that he had been identified as someone who could help them out. They needed a way of ensuring that nasty characters remained nasty whilst they were waiting for their comeuppance, and they believed the terminals were the way to make sure it happened. There was no other way of achieving the spread of venality they desired. Granted, there were innumerable dodgy characters who saw the afterworld as an opportunity to behave even worse than they had during their lives, but equally, it was entirely possible that serial killers were even now sitting cross-legged next to flower children, wearing psychedelic headbands and singing Kumbaya.

  “You see,” said Slaven to the attentive youth, “we think you could help us to bring like-minded people together, and just make sure that they, well follow their instincts.” He watched Jenkin, who stared back impassively. After a few moments, the boy spoke.

  “If I understand you correctly, all of us,” he gestured to the empty surroundings, “ have already had a preliminary judgement as to which way we are going to go?” Slaven nodded.

  “So where am I?” Slaven looked at Marcel, who was looking furtive any
way, trying to avoid being caught on camera, but now shuffled from foot to foot in clear discomfort.

  “We don’t know, but you weren’t entirely a good boy, were you?”

  Jenkin was a little disappointed. It would have been nice to know what the future may hold.

  “So,” he said, slowly, thinking it through as he went along, “you are concerned that people who have been bad might do something good. In order to stop them, you want me, having been good, to do something bad. Is that correct?” Slaven had to admit that it was.

  “So what,” said Jenkin, “apart from snatching eternal misery from everlasting joy, is in it for me?”

  Rossini’s Coffee and Ice Cream Parlour was tucked away at the edge of a settlement on the shores of a large freshwater lake. The climate was almost entirely warm and balmy, but in a quirk of the huge expanse of the afterworld, a glacier was grinding slowly down to the water’s edge. With some ingenuity, Gioachino Rossini harvested ice to freeze his ice cream mix, and was doing a brisk business, with most of the tables both inside and out usually full. After a while people even stopped asking him to ‘give us a song’.

  Trade had been flourishing that day, but the arrival of the wolf and the two sinister guys with the youth had put paid to that. The stampede from the small building was rapid, and the sound of running feet was drowned only by the howling of the beast tethered outside. Marcel swept a collection of abandoned cups and ice cream glasses to the floor and they sat at a table where they could keep an eye on Andras’ ride. Slaven ordered a macchiato, Marcel passed, knowing it would taste awful to him anyway, Jenkin went large on the knickerbocker glory. There was a discussion as to whether the owl-headed demon could have an ice cream with an element of rodent. This was finally solved when the owner offered vanilla topped with a mouse he had killed in the kitchen that morning.