“We’ll get onto your stuff, soon, Justin.” his father said cheerfully, “you won’t be needing all that Scalextric and radio-controlled aeroplanes when we’re knitting our own yoghurt.” That’s what you bloody think, he thought.
He began smuggling his possessions into the garage, hiding them under a tarpaulin behind the chest freezer. There was plenty of room in the double garage, as his father had given the Mercedes and the Jaguar to Help The Aged and bought a nasty second hand white van that smelled of turpentine. Every day he carried a few pieces in his rucksack, and after school took them to the market in town where he sold them to one of the many second hand stalls. There weren’t many dealing in toys, however, and he found a much more ready and lucrative market for his mother’s dresses, which he began to thin from the rails in her walk-in wardrobe. It was a mystery to him why someone would pay more for a thin and short sheath of fabric with a Dior label than for a working model of a Vulcan bomber with operational bomb doors, but it was at least an early immersion in the laws of supply and demand. Silver cutlery went well, too, and he figured they wouldn’t be needing that in their hovel unless they wanted to dig each seed hole with a grapefruit spoon.
The wad of money he accrued he hid in his increasingly denuded room. On the first day of the last week of term, he rolled it and secured it with a rubber band and stuffed it into the very bottom of his satchel. The satchel he had washed the previous night to remove the cake mix someone had kindly decided to donate to him during Home Ec.
‘Desperate’ Dan Morris was taken aback when Justin approached him in the minutes before the bell rang for lessons. Whilst Dan had always found Justin, at a barely recognisable level, an odious twerp, he had never really bothered to bully him because he at least guaranteed that one person would get lower marks in tests than Dan himself.
“What do you want, Marchant?” Dan said, sucking on a cigarette behind the bike sheds, “Lost your BMX?” Dan’s acolytes, Gripper Windsor and Ned, ‘just Ned’ Boscombe sniggered, even though, as with most things Dan said, this wasn’t funny. Justin had sold his BMX, anyway.
“I want to employ you. I want to take out a contract.”
“Employ? What are you on about? Got a paper round?”
Justin explained. He made an offer of money, which was a massive surprise to Dan, Gripper, and Ned, because they generally did what they did for simple pleasure. They asked for more money, as he knew they would, and he agreed to meet them somewhere in the middle because even their demands, coming from the place a twelve year old thought was riches beyond compare, would leave him with ample funds to make his escape, as soon as his voice broke, from the hell-hole his parents were taking him to.
There began a Kristallnacht of retribution spread over the days leading to the end of term that spread fear and dread throughout the group who had so recently hung onto Justin’s company. At least they had for as long as the sugar supplies were in place.
Heads were thrust into toilet bowls (repeatedly in a number of cases, as not all of them flushed adequately), Chinese burns administered willy-nilly, genitalia blacked with boot polish, chewing gum matted into hair. Exercise books were ripped to shreds, shoes thrown over hedges, ink tossed onto pristine white shirts. In each case, with some final indignity being inflicted on an erstwhile friend, Justin would saunter into the scene of the crime, as Dan and his disciples grunted and snickered at the torment. The victim, usually on the floor with his pants on his head, staring in fear through the legholes and inhaling the earthy aroma of teenage boy’s gusset, would see the figure approach, silhouetted against bright strip lighting.
“I wanted to thank you for being my friend.” The victim would feel something slap against his chest, and only when he heard the doors swing closed, take the time to feel for whatever had been left to mark the experience.
The Jelly Baby Crimes would become a school legend, talked of long after Justin had been shipped off to purgatory in Wales, whispered in the corridors. They were stored deep in the memory of Desperate Dan Morris when he became Under-Secretary for Culture in the Conservative Government; confessed to by Father Windsor, who would in time ask for forgiveness for crimes much more far-reaching; embellished by Ned ‘just Ned’ Boscombe when flirting with the local girls as he spun their waltzer cars whenever the fair came to town.
For Justin, they were formative. Friends only want you for what you can give them. Don’t rely on your family not to go crazy on you. Sheep are terrible company. And money. Money is what gets you what you need.
The Afternet
Part 3: Games Without Frontiers
Cover Design is by Hemp Enterprises, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hemp Global.
The Afternet Part 3: Games Without Frontiers.
Text copyright © 2015 Peter J Empringham
All rights reserved
One command, one joy, one desire
One curse, one weight, one measure
One King, one God, one law.
William Blake, The Book of Urizen
1
The End Times were imminent. In God’s Citadel, fires raged where swooping dragons piloted by the undead unleashed their breath. The walls of His last redoubt were crumbling around him. He unleashed the Seraphim on the advancing hordes: skeletal legions immune to pain, obedient to Satan even unto death. His six-winged followers swooped and soared amongst the serried ranks of attackers, their flight sending out waves of sound. One by one they flew too close, were plucked from the air, and disappeared in a turmoil of crunching flesh and bone. The Cherubim, their burning swords aloft, called from their Guardianship of Eden, hurled themselves headlong into the fray, but demons and imps surrounded them, their eyes red with bloodlust, and they too were lost.
He had one last chance, one more attempt to stop the onslaught, save the Universe for the good, stave off the day when Satan would sit on his throne and reign over Man. God bowed his head and wept. The carnage was almost absolute, his Christian Soldiers lay in blood-sodden heaps on the battlefield, their corpses shredded by the advancing armies of darkness. He could retreat, take what remained of his forces and re-group, let his prehistoric enemy take the throne, form a strategy, return, put asunder the forces of darkness and return Light to the world.
He knew though that his armies were too weak, that allowing Satan to reign supreme would only enhance his power, and His weakness. He had to make the stand, fight for that which he knew to be right. He had to give the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve their birthright; their birthright of hope, and love, peace in the arms of The Lord. He had to take this last gamble.
With tears in his eyes, his mouth set in grim regret, he sent forward his final assault, knowing that there would be carnage, that death and the stink of it would taint the soil and air of the whole world. That future generations would weep at the bloodshed wrought in His name. He let loose the Nephilim.
These giants, the offspring of the sons of gods and the daughters of men, loomed blackly into the battle. The forces of evil were advancing towards the very gates of paradise, and the Nephilim marched, unconcerned for their lives, into the raging moil of the conflict.
At first the advancing swarms of The Devil were repulsed, trampled underfoot, thrown bodily into the burning crevasses, but soon their sheer numbers began to take a toll. Brave Nephilim marched into the host, hacking about them, casting the blood-drenched attackers into the air and pinning them to the floor. They roared and bludgeoned, the smack of wood and steel upon decaying flesh filling the air, the crunching and crushing of bone all around. But the snarling battalions of evil still came. They curled their talons into Nephilim flesh, climbed even as others among them were struck down and flung away. They teemed, screaming all the while, they weighed down weaponed arms, plucked at eyes, thrust their bony stinking fingers into gaping mouths, until the giants pitched to the ground, where they were ripped to pieces by the onrushing, screaming hordes.
It was over. The flames of the Citadel were all around him, the smoke blac
k and choking. An archangel lay before him, motionless, the perfect virginal feathers of his wings stained with his own blood, his face turned to one side, mouth open in horror. He looked up and saw that the door to his chamber was shaking, some terrible force crashing against it. It cracked, plunged thunderously to the floor. At first there were blood-drenched skeletal figures shrieking hideously, but then they stopped as if obeying a silent instruction, then they swayed aside to admit the laughing figure of The Devil himself. Black of skin, with eyes blood red, horns upon his head and cloven hooves clattering upon the floor. The stench of death and gore and decay was upon him. He looked upon the face of God, and smiled.
“Bollocks!” God pressed the STOP button and glared at the screen, where the face of The Devil was frozen. He threw the game controller into the corner of the room.
“It’s ridiculous! I’ve lost four hundred times in a row. I can’t bloody win! It’s not realistic.”
A real Seraphim stood at his shoulder, staring at the screen with all the sympathy he could muster, given the unbearable itch in the lower part of his fifth wing.
“ It’s the very latest version your supreme majesty. Armageddon 15. It does take the data from all of the forces of good and evil to create the most realistic game it can. Perhaps you-dare I say it- made tactical mistakes?”
“Oh right! Look. Seraphim. That’s you lot. I’ve got three. Three! I’m sending out a couple of bloody Tiger Moths against MiGs. How come he gets all of these millions of forces?”
“You too have millions of followers, Lord”
“Oh yes, and a fat lot of use they are. Look, look. The Christian Soldiers. I deployed them against that pincer movement by the First Damned Corps of Babylon. What do they do? Bloody sing! Thousands of murderous infidels heading towards them and they’re kneeling down bleating ‘Praise My Soul The King Of Heaven’. Not exactly tanks, is it?”
“They sang beautifully, Lord. Their voices were lifted to the Heavens.”
“Their entrails were stamped into the ground. And the Navy! Since when has four-part harmony on ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’ been a useful deployment of sea power?”
The Seraphim looked away for a moment, searching for some whiff of encouragement. God beat him to it.
“Still. Only a game, eh? Thank Me it’s not really like that.”
“Actually,” the Seraphim averted his eyes for a moment, expecting some real wrath, “I think it probably is.”
It wasn’t long after this latest defeat at Armageddon 15 that He decided it would be a good idea to have a get together with some of the other gods to figure out how the Apocalypse should be handled. If the computer game was accurate, they were all in the shit. Worship and praise, adoration and obeisance were all lovely, of course, but ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam’ wouldn’t get you far when confronted by some slavering, heavily armed follower of the dark side. Somehow, over the ages, he appeared to have dropped the ball on this one.
It had all worked quite well at one time. Murderous racists trekked across the world in his name, crosses on their chests, and slaughtered, or were slaughtered by, murderous racists who believed in a different version of Him. As murderous racists, they were all of course sent to a Hell. Later, people locked themselves away from the world the better to praise him, exploited the local poor, bullied and abused each other, and in some cases carried out rapes and murder amongst their flocks, or destroyed the lives of young boys through sexual abuse. Some took children from their mothers and gave them away, forcing the mothers to live without knowledge of their children’s lives, often even as they were pressed into forced labour and made to believe in their abiding sinfulness. Followers proclaimed him Lord of all, then whipped and slaughtered people of a different colour or belief, enslaved them in his name, threw in a little more rape and a lot of systematic degradation. Inquisitors tortured anyone who spoke against him, stretching their flesh and bones and applying heat where heat should not go; enraged maniacs spat at and ostracized those who love each others of the same gender. Disciples in balaclavas murdered caring medical staff caring for expectant mothers whose lives would be ruined by bringing an unwanted child into the world. For good measure they hurled abuse and more spittle at the mothers too.
All of them, the slavers, the corrupt and sadistic monks and nuns, the Torquemadas of that world, the Caliphs, the Klan, the ones who killed and abused in the name of ‘Life’, would, if The Afternet ever got round to it, be judged and pointed to a Hell. These, in fact, would be in the van of the hordes marching up the hill to the real Citadel, and he would be left with the benign, the caring, the loving. It would be a desperately unequal fight.
He could have done without it, to be honest. He was the ultimate proof that the more time you have on your hands, the less you get round to doing. He’d been around, well, since the beginning of time but the seat was still loose in His downstairs toilet. He also really, really meant to get around to finishing Midnight’s Children. It couldn’t escape Him, though, that there was a fatal flaw in the logic that had suggested, since time immemorial, that good will triumph over evil, largely because since time immemorial evil had been getting all the people who were handy in a ruck. It was nice to think that love might conquer all, but He had noticed how little that did for Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic.
In the air, though, was a sense of the End Times, and He couldn’t let that just happen without a bit of party planning. The Afternet was merrily chuntering away, sending thousands to their ultimate fate, and although there were still millions taking up space in the holding zones, the fifteen years or so the system would take to catch up would pass, for a God, in the blink of an eye.
Free will had always been a risk, he supposed, and in reality may have slipped through due to a hint of laziness. He had considered the alternative; the onus on Him to make pretty much every decision forever, and took the view that it would really cramp his ability to take a holiday. In hindsight, considering the adulation given to the likes of Attila The Hun, Adolf Hitler, Royal Families throughout history, and Justin Bieber, a being with less self-confidence might have considered it something of a miscalculation.
Amongst the other unintended outcomes was a proliferation of religions, following all shapes and sizes of prophets and leaders, finding a way to believe in philosophies from the prosaic to the ludicrous. The commonality was that almost all proffered a vision of the Revelation, the Final Struggle. Also in common the faiths portrayed a period leading to the Apocalypse; one characterized by degeneracy, impiety, and violence. There would be a cheapening of human life, a rise in violence and inhumanity, the stink of decay. Looking around at the blue/green earth and its people in the twenty-first century, alarm bells began ringing. Time to rally the troops and see how this might be made to pan out a little better than Armageddon 15.
Satan, insofar as it is possible for a being whose soul contained a never-ending ferment of fury, felt remarkably relaxed. The Afternet was now consistently proving itself to be remarkably efficient at consigning the accursed to highly imaginative torments. He was, as a consequence, able to spend less time creating these environments himself, and monitoring the effectiveness of the ill-meaning but generally stupid lieutenants to whom he at times delegated responsibility. He had taken to spending a good deal of time travelling the living world incognito, and also sensed the End Times were approaching.
It surprised him how this turn of events had come about. In the past he had assumed that the downfall of human civilization would be catalysed by active, growing, Devil worship. He had watched the first fumblings in the 19th century, with surreptitious covens and rituals taking place and then taken a good deal of comfort at the more public identity during the in the mid-1900s. Exposure came about through the work of British occultist Aleister Crowley, in the unlikely location of Royal Leamington Spa, and Americans like Sloane, who founded the grandiosely titled Ophite Cultus Satanas in deepest Ohio and Anton LaVey’s Californian Church of Satan.
There w
as, he felt, a great deal about it to attract, particularly, men. The kit was popular, the black capes and cowls, the opportunity to grow thin and teased beards without being ridiculed. There was the opportunity to fondle naked women and sometimes even engage in coitus with them. There was less to attract the fairer sex, true, since their adherence tended to comprise co-operating with the fondling by men in ridiculous black outfits and beards that proclaimed a good deal too much self-love. This wasn’t looked upon by Satan as a particular drawback, since the world was a male hegemony in any case, and there were just about enough women to go round who, oddly, found this a thrill.
Further progress for the dark side was actually provided by an unlikely source, with the rise of the ‘Satanic’ rock groups in the seventies and onwards. Alice Cooper applied his eyeliner and played with a snake when really he wanted to be playing golf, and Black Sabbath were inspired to mine the occult seam by their bassist’s vision of a dark figure at the foot of his bed. But Satan hadn’t envisaged his cause being propounded in accents from the West Midlands, or by men called ‘Geezer’ and ‘Ozzie’. Their posturing was so patently ridiculous that for all their doom-laden lyricism, and the practiced outrage of tabloid newspapers, far from bringing about his ascent to the throne, it led instead to first ridicule and then yawns of boredom. It didn’t help that the followers of these poseurs were mainly young men who also suffered from a surfeit of self-love; usually physical, and usually alone.
What he hadn’t foreseen, and what now gave him great succour, was the overwhelming rise to dominance in the Western world of the venal and the self-serving. The Day Of The Banker was leading inexorably to a breakdown in the balance of society, such that despite the continuing growth in overall wealth there was a concomitant, stark, and rapid increase in inequality. The upshot was that the very few at the top had so much they no longer cared about the others, and the much larger numbers at the bottom had so little that they no longer cared about anything, and between them they could kick the shit out of the masses in the middle.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 62
