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

by Peter Empringham

  “I’m Mungo.” Said the long-haired man, stretching out a grubby hand.

  “Slaven.” Said Slaven, ignoring it. He neither cared nor asked why Mungo hadn’t bothered to introduce himself to Lisa and Paola, though even Mungo might not have revealed that they lived downstairs.

  Slaven walked into the room, which was very dark apart from pulsating lights, which looked as though they should be controlling traffic. A small group of men who looked just like Mungo were sitting cross-legged in the corner, the twins were eagerly checking out a small drinks table and someone dressed as Death was doing some kind of dance to ‘Monster Mash’.

  “I didn’t know it was fancy dress.” Said Slaven, as if it would have made a difference.

  “Him?” Mungo glanced at the Reaper. “He says they’re his work clothes.”

  Lisa, or perhaps Paola, skipped back and grabbed Slaven by the hand. She held a smoking joint in front of his face.

  “Try this Slevern! It’s fantastic!”

  “Thanks, I don’t smoke.” Paola, or maybe Lisa, followed close behind.

  “Drink!” she pressed a glass of something into his hand. “And cake!” He took the large slice of chocolate cake and bit into it. It tasted a bit off, but then what didn’t? The man in the black cowl was miming the solo from ‘All Right Now’ on a six-foot scythe. Twenty minutes later, when the cake took effect, Slaven was opposite the Reaper, thumbs tucked into his waistband, as both rocked back and forwards doing the Angel Rock to ‘Tiger Feet’.

  Mary had dumped her padded coat over the side of the sofa and made herself a cup of coffee from the generous supplies that had come with the suite and been untouched by its occupants. Jenkin watched suspiciously, keeping her in the lounge and away from his precious computer.

  She put her coffee down on the table and then rummaged in a leather bag, pulling out a brand new MacBook. He wished he had got Slaven to buy him one of those instead of the PC. He stood in the centre of the room, wondering what she was doing here, if she was really from the other side, and what she wanted with him.

  “Come and look at this.” She gestured him to the table where she had set down the Mac. He shuffled over and stood to one side of her.

  “Sit down Jenkin, I’m not going to bite you. I’m here to help.”

  Oh really, he thought. Why would I need any help? She looked up at him and after a moment gestured with her eyes to the seat beside her. After waiting what he felt was a long enough period to establish that he was doing it of his own accord, he sat down.

  He looked at the screen and instinctively towards his bedroom. What was on the screen was exactly the same as where he had stopped before pursuing the FA Cup. There was a sinking feeling in his stomach. He’d been hacked.

  “I didn’t know what you were up to for a long time.” She said. “You’re very good. I didn’t understand the financial stuff, to be honest, but as you got towards this bit, I finally picked it up.”

  He looked at her sullenly. “So.”

  “So, you’ve broken into the system of an investment bank and fixed its software so that it will bring in loads of trades that will incur losses. And these are nearly all on the account of your father, who will be ruined, and embarrassed as well, I guess. Which is what you are really trying to achieve.”

  “Still. So?”

  He looked at the woman, who took a sip of coffee and then sat back into the sofa. She wasn’t smiling now, and he wished he had set the programme running before she came, then it would be done. Instead, he could still faintly hear the crowd cheering from his bedroom, waiting for the kick-off to be triggered.

  “There’s one real drawback with what you’ve done, Jenkin. It’s quite a serious one. I don’t live here any more. I’m like you, I belong back there now. It doesn’t mean that I want everything here to go nuclear.”

  “I’m just going to get him, that’s all. He just needs to pay for what he did to us.” He stopped himself. He hadn’t articulated this to anyone, least of all Slaven. He didn’t need to now.

  She leaned forward. “But you aren’t just going to get him, Jenkin. If you run this virus, you’ll set off selling in systems all over the world. The virus will get into every investment bank Lion Marshall deals with, which is every investment bank. While they sleep, it will trigger trades below the buy price. The value of everything will spiral down. The banks will all go bust, countries will go bust. It will be a financial meltdown.”

  Jenkin had spent no time whatsoever thinking of the wider implications of his hacking. He was sixteen, or would have been if he were alive. Wider Implications could have been a band from Colorado for all he cared.

  He shrugged. “Banks and countries go bust.” He said. “So what?”

  Mary stood up. “Come over here, Jenkin.” She walked slowly to the window, and after a moment he reluctantly followed. If he could get this over with he could go back to his bedroom, go back to winning the FA Cup and then just go back.

  “Look down there. You see that family looking in the shop window? When you run your programme, their savings will be worthless. The mother and father’s pensions will collapse and they’ll have nothing. Businesses will go broke which will mean that the kids won’t be able to get jobs when they grow up. That shop there, the little one with the funky jewellery? That’s probably run by someone who invested their life savings in it, and now spends every hour God sends trying to sell enough to make a living. They won’t have any customers, because customers won’t have any money to spend. The banks won’t lend them any because their investments have gone south. They’ll close. Everyone who supplies them and makes things for them will find out that they can’t pay for their stuff, and no one else can either, so they’ll go down the pan. Those young kids there- what, six of them? They’ll never work because the financial system’s toxic and there is nowhere to go. They won’t get anything from the government because the government’s got nothing to give. What do they do? Turn to crime? Who’s got anything for them to steal?”

  “I just want to get to my dad. He left us. He should pay for that. My mum died because of him.”

  He watched as Mary pointed down to the street, the comings and goings, the bright shop lights under leaden skies. “Bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, isn’t it? Why make all of them, and millions more pay for it?”

  Jenkin turned from the window and walked back into the room. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was just supposed to come back and do what he needed to do, get the hell out, and go and watch some dead people play football. He didn’t need Mary heaping this guilt on him.

  “Okay,” he said, “you hacked my PC, you obviously know what you’re doing. How do I make this just get back to my dad?”

  “You can’t. What you’ve done will affect everyone. Everyone at Lion Marshall, everyone anywhere in banking, everyone down there. That’s just the way it is.”

  He paced around the room, the woman leaning on the wall by the window, watching him, arms folded. He could faintly hear the simulated football crowd from the bedroom singing You’ll Never Walk Alone for the umpteenth time. Shit, shit shit.

  “So what happens now?” he said, angrily, “you delete my programme, just stop it all from happening?”

  She unfolded her arms. “I can’t do that, Jenkin. Oh yeah, I can follow everything you do, but I can only watch, and try to figure out what it is you’re trying to do. It’s up to you. You just need to think, though. Slaven brought you here, and- and I never thought I’d hear myself saying this- he works for the Devil. So you need to figure out which side you’re on. Is it Slaven? Or is it someone like Ron, or Ethel? I don’t think they’re playing for the same side.”

  Jenkin slumped onto the sofa. This wasn’t fair. Why should he have to judge? This was supposed to be a simple act of revenge. Just make this man suffer, like he made them suffer, ruin his picture postcard world. He was almost in tears when he looked up at Mary, unable to think. She reached for her coat, packed the Mac into her bag.

 
“You’ve got a while to think, anyway Jenkin. Slaven won’t be back for a while, maybe lunchtime tomorrow.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, I had to fix it so that he would be out of the way so that I could see you and tell you what would really happen here. The people who are helping me to do that are a bit enthusiastic about their task, to tell the truth.”

  He watched her walk to the door, thought about the strange turns his consciousness had taken during the past few months. Strangely, death itself had turned out to be the least weird bit.

  “Have a think, Jenkin. We’ll all be going back soon. Just because all of these people here will be out of sight doesn’t mean what you might do to them will be out of mind.”

  After the door closed behind her, Jenkin threw himself onto the sofa, ignoring the lure of the disembodied voices from his bedroom urging him to get on with the game, and flicked on the TV. The pictures were just moving images, the voices just noise. He stared at the screen with a glazed look as, in the circularity of seasonal viewing, another channel revealed the struggle of George Bailey in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, pictured him opening the note from Clarence Odbody, and projected Zuzu filled with joy at her father’s presence.

  He wondered who Mary might be. How had she found him, what was she doing in this life? Perhaps she was an angel in a puffa coat? Outside an alarm bell rang insistently and somewhere perhaps an angel got its wings.

  Whether Mary had angelic qualities has to be open to doubt, since she had told something of a white lie. Through recording every keystroke Jenkin had made on his PC she had secured the access codes to the network at Lion Marshall, and if push came to shove, she could go in and abort his programme. It was a last resort she was hoping she didn’t have to take.

  When she sneaked back into the house in East Acton, Marcel was waiting for her outside the flat. She couldn’t afford to let Slaven see her, whatever state he may be in at this stage, but Marcel had not been prepared to miss the fun and was wearing a surprisingly becoming set of Victorian whiskers, thick lensed glasses, and a peroxide bleach job.

  “Hello Marcel.” She said. He seemed taken aback.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “It’s the way you walk. As if you’re expecting an assault from behind at any moment.” Some lifetime habits were harder to shake than others, it would appear. “He hasn’t spotted you, has he?”

  Marcel barked a laugh.

  “He’s not spotting anything. Come on in, we’ll have a peek.”

  The reek of dope was all pervading, and if the batteries hadn’t long since been removed from the smoke alarms, the place would have been vibrating. The door to Mungo’s room was ajar, and the traffic light colours leaked into the hallway on wreaths of smoke. Mary peeked carefully through the doorway.

  The twins, Slaven, and the Reaper, were seated on the floor in line astern, madly rowing to ‘Oops Upside Your Head’, and the host was slumped in the corner blearily looking on, an unfinished joint depositing its contents inexorably into his lap.

  “Mungo says he’s never seen anyone with so much capacity for dope cake as Slaven. I had to call for extra supplies of raw materials and mix some in his cocoa. It’s kicked in now, though.”

  “The twins are good value for a couple of hundred quid.” She said, and Marcel nodded approvingly. He was a great respecter of quality dissembling.

  The twins, far from being Spanish, were resting actors from Stoke-On-Trent who lived in the ground floor flat. The cash offer to play their part in this entrapment had meant they had missed their theatre company’s performance of ‘Socialist Aladdin’ at a local old people’s home, but they couldn’t resist either the money or the challenge. As true professionals, they had steered clear of the pot, not that there wasn’t enough around passively to make them fail most drugs tests, and in any case the free-flowing vodka had proved more difficult to resist. It was probably a good job Slaven was heading so quickly off the planet, because had he listened to them now he might have wondered where exactly in the North Midlands Valencia was situated.

  “I’d better go. I need to keep an eye on the youngster, see where his conscience gets him.” She turned from the door, almost jumping in surprise again at Marcel’s new look.

  “Why don’t you just fix it? I don’t know what makes you think he gives a toss.”

  “I’d like to think that he does, Marcel, much as I know you find it difficult to believe. Also, if I did it now, he’d know I didn’t trust him. When are we going back?”

  “Tomorrow night, I think. We’ll fix Slaven and then get him back to the hotel some time tomorrow.”

  Mary peeked back in through the door. Someone had set up a karaoke machine, and the Reaper had the mike.

  “Ladeez ‘n’ gen’lmen! I give you S-s-s-slaven! Shabba!” The cowled figure handed over the mike, and Slaven, legs collapsed but held vaguely upright by the twins, launched into something purporting to be ‘Losing My Religion’.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.” She said.

  It was shortly after 3am that she woke with a start from her slump in an armchair. She tried to shake herself fully awake, apparently driven from a dream featuring a rampaging black-clad figure by a group of carousers outside her window. They were wishing each other, loudly, a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. More important was the alarm from the Mac open on the table in front of her, set to blare should a youth somewhere across London begin work on his own computer.

  Mary blinked to clear her eyes, stood and stretched and sipped from a glass of water. Seated again she stared at the screen, and watched a remote operator begin to delete the invasive virus from the investment bank’s automated trading system. From time to time the work stopped, as though the person was having second thoughts, or considering other options, but then it would begin again. Line by line, the work of a week was being erased.

  She smiled and limped to the bed, her left leg twitching with the return of feeling, and slumped down, falling into an instant slumber. The boy had decided to do the right thing, and in her head as she fell away were the lines of instructions reversing into clear screen. What she didn’t see, because by then she was far away, now dreamless, was what he wrote when he had removed the doomsday programme.

  It was almost twenty four hours later that Marcel, Mary, and The Reaper wandered through the streets of Shepherd’s Bush, the bitter winter wind buffeting them and making a spectacular wing of the Reaper’s cape. It was the Sunday before Christmas and there was little of the late night revelry that had crashed and shouted through the previous evenings of their stay. It was if the city was drawing a breath before launching itself on a final Bacchanalian fiesta to celebrate the season of giving.

  Slaven had been delivered back to his hotel like a personification of the world’s revelry. Incoherent, bilious, and turning in an instant from gibbering jollity to glowering violence, he was dumped on the sofa in his hotel room. A few hours later, he was watched from a distance as he grumpily led Jenkin back to the gateway. Stopping only to retch at the sights and smells of the mounds of All You Can Eat platters, he shouldered questioners aside, and the couple were gone.

  Mary had insisted on a couple of hours to wander the shops, as much as anything just to drink in once more the earthly busy-ness, the ubiquitous churning of seasonal songs, the Salvation Army gamely singing to try to remind passers-by of the origins of the festival. Marcel had, curiously, said that was good, he had a couple of things he wanted to do as well, and then The Reaper had insisted on treating them to a meal and a few drinks, having handed to Marcel a large brown envelope which he said was the fruits of the twins’ labours the night before.

  “What’s the celebration?” asked Marcel, listlessly poking some Christmas pudding around a bowl, and sipping from a half pint of Jagermeister. It seemed a pointless question, given the number of people at adjacent tables in party hats or reindeer antlers.

  “I’ve been promoted.” Said the Reaper, “I’v
e been made a supervisor.”

  Mary stared at him. She wondered how many capable women might have been passed over so that the (male) spirit of death could be given this responsibility.

  “Really looking forward to it, actually. I’ve always wanted to lead people. You know, develop them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marcel slammed down his glass. “You develop people to the end of their lives. You lead them to the grave.”

  The unseeable face probably fell. Certainly the head dipped towards the table.

  “I think you’ll find that’s a bit of a stereotype, Marcel. You shouldn’t pigeonhole people.”

  Mary could feel Marcel getting twitchy. She had put it down to concern that Slaven was heading back to fulfil his aim to oust the Frenchman from the Control Room. She pre-empted any further undermining of the Reaper’s fragile self-confidence by saying that she was sure he would make a wonderful team leader, but that they had really better be going.

  It was a decent walk to the gateway, the lights in pubs and restaurants going, the traffic thinning. The Reaper, in a show of gallantry, was helping to carry some of Mary’s shopping. Their footsteps echoed on the floor of the small shopping centre, its jewellers, shoe shops, and cheque cashers now dark and their windows protected with metal grilles.

  It had nonetheless not occurred to them, rather stupidly, that they might not have free and unfettered access to the ladies lavatory at Zinga Zinga Pan Global Fusion Eaterie. The place was black, apart from the neon sign above the enormous plate glass window, which usually afforded everyone an unwanted view of families determinedly clogging their arteries.

  “I think it’s closed.” Said the Reaper, garnering a malevolent glance from Marcel. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”