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

by Peter Empringham

  Somewhere in this mish-mash, Marcel had the feeling that there might be some meaning. He looked at Geoffrey, who smiled and wobbled the hand on his shoulder empathetically. The meaning almost certainly wasn’t in that face. Marchant was still standing way above him, and Marcel could see, disconcertingly, right up his nose.

  “What do you mean, Justin?” he asked, and after a brief pause, “In plain language please.”

  Justin looked down at the Frenchman on the floor, folded his arms.

  “Well, they’re after you, aren’t they? The Devil, Slaven. One just hates you, and one wants what you’ve got.” He looked briefly around the trashed Control Room, “Although I can’t say I can figure out why. You’ve got a choice, haven’t you? If you just let his happen, then they’ll do whatever it is they have to and you’ll be back to the pit. Otherwise, you do something about it, and then it could be Slaven impaled on poison darts.”

  The latter option had a certain appeal to Marcel, but in his state of misery he had no idea how he might make that happen. What was clear to him, though, was that he might as well try to find a way, because the worst thing that could happen to him was that the worst thing that could happen to him would happen. He reached his hand out to Justin, who pulled him to his feet. Geoffrey stood, and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “That’s it, Marcel. Get back on the bike.” Geoffrey punched a fist in the air.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Marcel.

  “I don’t know. I heard it on the TV. What’s a bike?”

  The Frenchman ushered Geoffrey to the TV screens, pointing out that Thunderbirds was about to start. The ancient loved it, although he thought the acting was a bit wooden.

  Mary was alone at the computer. Marcel walked slowly across to where she was sitting and stood just behind her, waiting for her to turn. She didn’t. He managed to overcome the urge to swipe her around the head, and instead lowered himself into the chair next to her. She stared at the screen and still did not turn to look at him. He realised that he would have to make the running.

  “Do you think I should find a way to get back at them?” he asked.

  Mary continued to stare at the screen, tapped some keys.

  “How could you?” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know. I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

  “No, I mean how could you give them the Key? How could you betray everyone? You must have known that they weren’t going to do anything good with it. How could you?”

  Marcel had a strange feeling that he had couldn’t identify. It might have been shame, but there was a whole area of emotion to which he had never been exposed, so it could just as easily have been wind. He was also having to cope with being unhappy that this woman was distressed, which was similarly a situation with which he was unfamiliar. He didn’t like this at all.

  “I think the main thing is to try to figure out how to get out of this mess, which,” he held up his hands, “I am prepared to admit I may have caused.”

  She looked at him as though she expected more. Nothing was forthcoming.

  Mary gave up and turned back to the computer. She pointed at the screen, betraying that she had already been thinking about how to resolve this situation.

  “He’s there. Slaven. He’s gone to the holding area, I don’t know why. My guess is he’s got someone helping him, now that he’s got the Key. Someone who can put together a programme like Fiends Reunited.”

  Marcel sprang to his feet and put on his jacket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to find out who’s doing this. Maybe if I can sort him or her out I can stop it.”

  “What does ‘sort him out’ mean?””

  “Whatever it takes.” He moved to the door, but Mary grabbed his arm.

  “I’ll come with you. You might need someone who understands what’s going on with the Afternet.”

  He hesitated but then nodded.

  “Geoffrey, Justin.” Said Mary, “Keep and eye on that Fiends Reunited, see what it’s up to. We’ll leave it on the master terminal.”

  Marcel hurried into the corridor outside and Mary followed.

  Neither of them had seen a crowd in the afterworld quite like the one at the football pitch. Mary had been to Devil’s Docks, which was full of itinerant footpads, thieves, and murderers, but this was quite different. Marcel had been to the holding areas many times, but what was remarkable about it, apart from the fact that everyone there was dead, had been the feeling of space. The place was actually infinite, despite the fact that it occupied no space whatsoever, and was generally characterised by small numbers of people mooching around and waiting. This was very large numbers of people mooching around and waiting.

  Marcel stopped Mary, worried that she would get lost in the crowd, and they looked around for Slaven. Needles and haystacks sprung to mind, even if a lot of the hay was as far from a thin man in a suit as you could get. Marcel peered across the pitch to the field opposite, and beyond the crowds picked out figures he recognised. The little man with the man-made fibre and the strange wheel in his chest, and his dumpy wife. They had been there when they had seen Slaven at the ice cream parlour. He nudged Mary and pointed.

  “How come they’re always around when something strange is going on?” he asked. She shrugged, and they set off towards the couple in the distance.

  Mary at one point had to stop Marcel (who felt he could be rediscovering his venal mojo) from stabbing a Visigoth when warned away from the pitch. That apart, the couple of hundred yards was as normal as any such journey can be, when it takes you through the lost souls of a few hundred years.

  When they arrived, the couple had stood to greet them. The man in particular seemed very pleased with himself. He nodded to them both.

  “What do you reckon?”

  Marcel pondered strangling him, but figured he may be needed, and that this was some kind of strange vernacular greeting. He nodded back.

  “What do you reckon?” he said.

  “Eh?” said Ron.

  Mary said hello to them both, breaking the ice somewhat, and gestured to the milling crowds all around.

  “What’s going on here then, Ron?”

  Ron puffed out his chest as though he had invented nuclear fusion.

  “Fantastic, isn’t it? We’re going to have a football tournament.” Mary looked around at the assortment of people from a range of ages and geographies, many of them damaged beyond recognition.

  “Good luck with that.” She said. She could feel Marcel getting impatient, and in his current mood that may have unpleasant consequences. “We were wondering if you’d seen someone. He was around when we saw you at the ice cream parlour.”

  “You probably mean Jenkin. Jenkin Furvill,” said Ethel, smiling, “lovely boy, though I wish he wouldn’t spend so much time on that computer.” None of this sounded like Slaven, from the use of the word ‘lovely’, to the bit about computers. Neither Mary nor Marcel had ever seen him near a computer.

  “No.” Marcel had an impatient tone. “We mean a tall, thin guy with sandy hair. Unpleasant. Lacking in social graces” he said unpleasantly and with little grace.

  “Oh, we know the one you mean. He keeps popping around, doesn’t he, love? Never got his name.”

  “Yes he does.” Ethel looked concerned. “I don’t know why he keeps coming to see Jenkin. He was here just a little while ago, but they’ve gone now.”

  Mary looked at Marcel, whose shoulders had slumped.

  “You say Jenkin spends a lot of time on a computer?” she asked.

  “Never off it. He designed the advert for our football tournament. Brilliant. He’s got a real talent.” Ron was excited. “Shall we go and have a look? I could show it to you.”

  “Oh, not now, thanks Ron.” Said Mary. “We really need to find this bloke Slaven. Did they say where they were going?”

  “No. Jenkin said he had something he needed to do, and that this, er- Slaven was helping him with i
t. Then they just wandered off over there.”

  Mary and Marcel looked in the direction Ron indicated, but there were simply too many people around for them to have a hope of spotting the pair in the throng.

  Ethel chimed in. “He said he needed that man to do something for him and that he would be gone for a while.”

  Mary thanked them, and Marcel managed a slight nod, and they left, to exhortations not to miss the upcoming feast of sport.

  “What do you think, Marcel, why does he need this kid, and what are they up to now?” They hurried through the milling crowds back towards the everywhere door. Marcel shook his head, deep in thought. Whatever it was, he knew that it was part of the plot to usurp him. With characteristic bravery, he apologised to a muscled man who barged into him and then pushed aside a slight young woman, who went flying to the ground.

  “Why do you do that?” asked Mary.

  He shrugged. “Just comes naturally.”

  Marchant and Geoffrey were seated in the centre of the Control Room, facing each other. The latter had a look on his face with which Marcel was utterly familiar; a concentrating look of deep interest and information processing. In reality it was only deep interest, with no more important mental activities taking place in any recognisable way.

  “Tracy Island doesn’t exist, Geoffrey. There isn’t a place where a high-tech complex vanishes underground when trouble threatens.” Justin was telling him.

  “Well, you wouldn’t know, would you, because you wouldn’t be able to see it.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be looking for it, because you would know it wasn’t there.”

  “You don’t know that if you don’t look for it. If it doesn’t exist, where are Thunderbird 1 and 2 kept?”

  Marcel recognised one of the circular arguments that had marked out whole swathes of the fifty years or so since TV arrived in Geoffrey’s world. He grasped Mary’s arm and pulled her silently past the pair, knowing that this could go on for hours, and quite happy to let it do so. She had suggested that they look up the boy on the Afternet and see if they could find a clue as to why Slaven was so interested in him.

  It didn’t take Thunderbird science to make the connection.

  “He’s a hacker.” Said Mary, staring at the screen full of information about young Jenkin Furvill. Marcel feigned surprise. He had taken enough flak from the giving away of the Key incident without admitting to undertaking the hunt for Furvill. In any case, he hadn’t immediately made the connection, which suggested that the length of the futile discussions might not always have been Geoffrey’s fault.

  “A hacker, what’s that?”

  “Someone who writes computer code to interfere with other people’s computers and networks. I’ll bet he’s the brains behind Fiends Reunited. But why would he do that?”

  “There must be something in it for him.” Said Marcel. “Where is he now?” Mary tabbed down the screen, peering at the information before her.

  “I can’t tell. He’s not out there, apparently. Can they do that? Take people out of the afterworld?”

  “They can,” said Marcel, “but they need a lot of authority. It’s like when we tried to get you back to life, we had to – what?” Mary was staring at him. “What, you think they might be going back? Why?” She shook her head but began to work the keyboard. She brought up the screen that showed both those who were currently down on the living earth, and those who had upcoming reservations.

  It was amazing how many Gods, Minor Deities, Handmaidens, imps, demons and assorted hangers-on were at present swanning around in life. Neither Mary nor Marcel knew who half of them were, but from Aachen to Zurich they were up to something. Mary was relieved to see that War was on a short break in Chechnya until she realised what that probably meant. There were no ‘re-visitors’ on the list; people who were just people.

  None, that is, apart from Slaven and Jenkin, and their names stood out. Everyone else had a description of their responsibility in the pantheon (agriculture, fire, travellers or whatever), and a note on the purpose of their visit (crop failure, drought, haunting), but these two stood unadorned.

  “We had to go to the committee when we wanted to go back.” Said Mary quizzically, “ how come they managed to get out so fast?”

  “It’s got to be coming from the top,” said Marcel, “in any case, we’re screwed. If the top man has authorised this, they aren’t going back to perform miraculous healing.” He was thinking out loud. “I need to get back and find out what they’re up to. It has to be part of Slaven’s plan to get rid of me.”

  Look at the queue, though!” said Mary, as Marcel sank into his seat. “We’ve got no chance of getting on the list any time soon.”

  They stared at the screen in despair, pondering the implications. It was at this moment that either the argument about the whereabouts of an island populated by puppets reached its’ conclusion, or more likely, Justin had simply had enough. He appeared behind them.

  “What’s up?” He asked. They told him.

  “Bad news Marcel, looks like the game’s up. Fiends Reunited will continue to grow and Slaven will get your boss’s brownie points by doing something horrible down there as well. Double whammy.” The precision of the summary didn’t make Marcel feel any better.

  There was silence, punctuated only by Geoffrey, in the background, occasionally belting out ‘Thunderbirds Are Go!’ or ‘F-A-B!’ as his mind staggered through whatever imaginary scenario it had captured.

  Finally Mary broke the silent contemplation.

  “We just have to go down there and find them.” She said, as though it were simple.

  “Obvious, but impossible.” Marcel addressed this to her but spoke it into space.

  “What if I could break into this booking system?”

  “Can you break into this booking system?” Marcel leaned forward, suddenly enthused.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve never really broken into things before. But if a fifteen year old kid can do it, why can’t I?”

  Fifteen

  In the real, living world, social networking exists largely to connect people who otherwise would never actually meet. Well, actually that’s not entirely true for anyone under twenty, for whom it is a way of contacting the person you’ve just said goodbye to and is a handy way of filling in the gap between text messages. For everyone else, though, it’s a catch-up medium. Businesses have been built upon the unrecognised desire of millions of people to keep in touch with others who haven’t crossed their minds for decades. Worldwide, folks are staring at pictures they would never recognise, of people they can’t remember, and rejoicing that they are able to tell each other which pub they’ve just been to.

  Fiends Reunited, the first social network on the Afternet, worked almost entirely in the reverse direction. Here were hosts of people who in their lifetimes had never met, and often did not know of each other’s existence, now supplied with a method of exchanging radical views about the suppression of others, and given the chance to come together. Finding your way around the afterworld isn’t easy, and tyrants aren’t known for asking for directions. Many would try, though, driven by the intriguing possibilities for meeting like-minded souls.

  The chosen place for the merde de la merde to bond was a bijou restaurant set halfway up a mountain called Pol’s Pot. The almost eponymous owner had spent a number of years since his demise being almost entirely pleasant, convincing himself that constant evil was a little bit exhausting and he could do with a career break. He was also more than a little concerned that any of the five million people for whose deaths he was responsible might happen by, hence his choice of location.

  The restaurant served mainly hearty stews boiled down from the mountain goats upon which Pot vented his desire for bloodletting, and as luck would have it, almost anyone over whom he ruled would have been far too weak to be able to make it to the elevated spot.

  Its isolation also made it a perfect spot for a casual get-together of Gold members of Fie
nds Reunited, and the website proudly displayed the date, time and location, along with a dire warning to those who didn’t qualify at all, to not even think of turning up. Lesser members were advised that they could by all means make the trip, but they would not be invited to the inner sanctum.

  The restaurateur was excited at the prospect both of hooking up with some people of whose achievements he had only read, and at the increased turnover for his business enterprise. The local population of mountain goats, breezily hopping around in the scree, was about to meet an unexpected reckoning.

  Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini had not had a particularly splendid post-death experience, although to be fair, his later days of life weren’t all sunshine and laughter either. He shared with many of his kind a bewilderment that those he had ruled with such beneficence could so quickly forget everything he had done for them, and for the first few years of his wandering around the afterworld he pondered the terrible way he had been treated by his own people. There was an element of good chance in not knowing that after his summary execution by partisans he had been hung upside down at a petrol station for the appraisal of passing Italians. By the time that occurred, his soul was long gone.

  He had tried to recreate the position of power he had adopted whilst alive, but found that the inhabitants of this environment were much less malleable than those he had called his compatriots when alive. Finally, after a number of years, he met a man who suggested he try EA.

  Evildoers Anonymous was exactly the kind of organisation Satan had become so afraid of. If the dead could rehabilitate themselves before judgement, he would have a lot of fires with no one to burn, and it would have galled him terribly to know that somewhere in this miasma, a movement was growing to provide Heaven with a whole raft of unexpected converts. Benito had bumped into a Canadian who happened to have a bottle of whisky, and they sat in the woods on a cool evening, a fire crackling in front of them, sipping from the bottle. The Canuck had buried six wives, two of them dead, although not from natural causes, and now, with infinity stretching before him, had begun to consider that maybe this wasn’t an entirely wholesome track record. Mussolini was well under the influence of the grain, exaggerating his part in planting the jackboot across Europe, when the Canadian had suggested that he needed to talk to someone about his history. The next day, he took him to a large barn as evening approached, where a number of people, generally hangdog and with slumped shoulders, slowly shuffled inside.