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

by Peter Empringham

  “What are the wheels for then, Ron?”

  Ron stroked his chin and thought for a moment. He’d never really bothered to question the presence of the wheel on the static caravan.

  “To keep them off the ground,” he said eventually, “thus averting the ingress of standing water.”

  They didn’t find any wheels, though. Wood they had plenty of, because the Committee for Welfare, a bunch of minor deities and the odd imp, none of whom had much to do, had at some point decided it would be to the benefit of those in limbo to have weather. Once that happened, it was only logical that they should be given the wherewithal to create shelter. There was a good deal of trouble brought about by the mass supply of saws and axes, most of which were still in circulation, but it quickly became safer to provide planks as well as trees.

  Wood had the advantage of being naturally occurring, insofar as any of this was natural; of course, aluminium is too, holding a position of pride in the periodic table, but it is arguably a smaller leap from tree trunk to plank than from bauxite to metal. It was actually the discovery of a plantation of sheet aluminium that brought Ron to waxing lyrical on the attractions of the caravan.

  The Committee had tried, insofar as they were bothered, to mimic the natural world from which the wandering souls arrived. There were streams and rivers, far-reaching plains, rolling fields of corn, rape, or cotton; vines and orchards. There were oceans, which, as those who took to them discovered, ended nowhere, mountains formed from whim, not volcano or glacier. And every now and then, when boredom had overwhelmed a God or a demon, sinkholes, man-eating plants, lakes made of shimmering paper, hills that flattened under your feet as you walked. In the west, not that there was a west, but west of most places, there was a monadnock constructed entirely of double-glazed replacement windows. If only they had found it, the populace could have benefitted from the use of a small forest of walk-in showers that abutted the hills at the edge of the Central Plain. Or, at least a plain, the Afterworld having no actual centre.

  It had been a particularly sunny day and all of a sudden the light was blinding as they emerged from dunes at the end of the beach, battling through spiny shrubs towering over their heads. They emerged on a down-slope looking out onto a field of silver glinting in the sun.

  “Is it the Last Day, Ron?” asked a Visigoth.

  “I don’t know Franzl. It’s bloody bright, that’s for sure. But it isn’t bright behind us, so it would have to be a very localised Armageddon.”

  The dipping of the sun behind the hills to their right revealed that what had struck their eyes was the reflected light from large sheets of aluminium standing up from the ground in serried ranks. They stretched for a couple of hundred metres. It was an extraordinary sight, as if some God had thrust them into the earth with a mighty hand in an attempt to win a heavenly version of the Turner prize with an avant-garde artwork. Which, coincidentally, was exactly what they were.

  “What does it mean, Narcissus?” the judges had asked.

  “It’s called Field of Beauty,” said Narcissus, flicking his slightly greasy fringe from his eyes, “it’s a statement that all reflections show the beauty of the subject.” He teased stray hairs into place as he preened in front of one of the shining sheets of metal.

  “Looks like a load of old tin to me.” said Nekhbet, the Egyptian Vulture God, who was head of the judging panel, before awarding the prize to the rotting carcass of a lion that wasn’t actually one of the entries.

  “Is the bright light gone?” asked Lucius, whose right hand was shielding the eyes in the head tucked under the left arm.

  “Yes, Lucius, you can look now.” The young boy did, lifting the detached head up to peek over the shoulders of his significantly larger comrades.

  “What is it?” he asked. No one answered, but Ron walked slowly forward and tapped the nearest sheet with his finger. The light still reflected off its upper right corner, as it did from all of the corners, ranks of tiny suns, their coronas shimmering in the late afternoon air.

  Ron turned and gestured to Ethel.

  “What does this remind you of?” he asked, rapping the sheet with his knuckles.

  She listened to the sharp ting of his bone against the metal, looked for a moment onto the air.

  “Do it again. Only twice.” The double noise made her cast a glance at Ron, who was smiling at his wife. “It makes me think of my birthday. Worthing. I thought you’d forgotten, but you’d gone onto town to buy me some flowers. I heard that noise and then a voice saying “Special delivery!” She turned and smiled at her husband, the large steering wheel in his chest now so familiar a sight that she had to work to think of him unencumbered. She could feel the hint of moisture building in her lower eyelids.

  “Exactly.” He said, turning and running his hand over the sheet of aluminium as if he were feeling the quarters of a thoroughbred horse. “Caravans.” he said. “It’s only a field of raw caravans!”

  No wheels, though. Instead they found a different way of raising their creations above the ground, courtesy of a quarry nearby that turned out to be full of fired red bricks. Not entirely like caravans to look at, either. They realised quickly that cutting and shaping the aluminium with any degree of precision using only a double-headed axe, the part of a sword not surrounded by buttock, and the various sharpened implements the rest of the crew had managed to fashion over the centuries was likely to be unachievable with any consistent results.

  Narcissus had been thorough, though, in his artwork, which of course is only to be expected, given the attention he paid to any reflective surfaces. His demands upon the handmaidens and acolytes who fluttered around him made Mariah Carey’s rider look like a blueprint for a rubbish heap. Cleanliness was next to his particular Godliness, every mirror had to be polished and kept dust-free. Every surface, floor and crevice kept free of detritus. Any of his robes with a hint of blemish was thrown away, soaps used once and discarded, the panoply of unguents and creams he used to maintain his perfection continually refreshed. He remained, even so, an unattractive sight, with leathery skin given to pustular invasions, short dumpy legs and a pronounced overbite, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and for the most part, that was Narcissus himself.

  His creation bore the hallmarks of his fixations, which in the living world would have been diagnosed as OCD; the aluminium sheets were absolutely regular, measured to the centimetre, each twice as long as wide. The kind of thing you can demand when you are either what the world would, with its puerile lack of discernment, characterise as a ‘star’, or ‘legend’. At least Narcissus actually was a legend.

  The regularity of the sheets did not assist Ron in creating the bug-like shapes characteristic of caravans, but did mean that each of his units could be made with eight sheets; two for the floor, two for the roof, and one for each side. The Visigoths, with relish, utilised the implements they had managed to accrue to hack a hole in each of the walls to allow the light and cold to get in, and the heat out, at least until their wanderings might find them some glass to create windows. Ron was not overly concerned about the haphazard nature of the openings, in that he was neither Narcissus, nor unaware that discomfort was a key component of enjoying the caravanning experience.

  They stood back from the first completed caravan, and looked upon the fruits of their labour. Guntrick and his men, of course, had no idea what on earth it was supposed to look like, and so waited for Ron and Ethel to give their opinion.

  The building stood proud of the turf on piles of bricks at each corner and in the centre where the two sheets making up the floor met. They all walked around it, admiring even the vaguely square holes in each side battered out by labouring warriors, the edges spiked and sharp.

  “Those windows, Ron. They look a bit dangerous?” said Ethel.

  “Good for security, dear.” he replied, “No-one in their right mind is going to try to get through one of those if they value their femoral artery.”

  The Visigoths watched th
e little man for signs of approval and were rewarded with a series of hmms and haahs, nods and smiles towards the wife who walked along with him, her arm through his. Having completed their circuit, the group gathered at the foot of a small rise and looked across the field, where the new building stood alone at the near edge.

  Ron grandly waved his extended arm across their view, indicating the field before them.

  “Just think of all this,” he said, with ill-disguised pride, “caravans. A caravan park for everyone.”

  “Chalets, really, dear.” said Ethel.

  “Sorry?”

  “They’re chalets, aren’t they? Not caravans.” She saw his look, sharp for him. Offered an olive branch. “Same principle, though, isn’t it?”

  “It is, Ethel. People from all over, er, this place, whatever it is, will come here for a well-earned break from their…stuff.”

  They all gazed at the new chalet, its sides gleaming, the razor-edged ‘windows’ dark holes in the walls.

  “Ron?” said Guntrick.

  “Yes, my dear old friend.”

  “How do you get in?”

  4

  For a bunch of supernatural beings habitually dispensing mercy or mayhem on a whim, the decision of the gods to replace the retiring St Peter with a system based entirely on logic could have been seen as a significant step into modernity.

  The Afternet, the gigantic computer that replaced him was always envisaged as working independently. The two guardians of its work, plucked from their own afterlives, one by God and the other by the Devil, were really only put in post to make sure that neither interfered with the process. That they at one point ended up rolling dice to see who should sentence the latest arrival was due to system overload. That overload was brought on by The Black Death, which ravaged humanity, and should really have been foreseen by any omnipotent being, but for some reason was not. Which just goes to show that God is no stranger to sleeping on the job.

  With the system now restored to its anticipated level of efficiency, posting a million a day to their individual Heavens or Hells, the Control Room of The Afternet had been subjected to a gradual but significant programme of enhancement. The Devil’s representative, Marcel, a 17th Century libertine with a record of several murders, instances of what could in any reasonable society be classified rape, and one which at any period of history would be stated as matricide, played no part in this upgrade. During his life he had paid, threatened, or blackmailed others to make sure that his environment was as fragrant and pleasing as possible.

  Geoffrey, who had somehow come to stand for God in this setup, came from the harshness of turnip farming in 7th century Cumbria. A visit to a contemporary Ideal Home Show when he was alive would have led to fantasies of wattle and daub walls, a rainproof reed roof, and a method of egress for the choking smoke billowing from the life-saving fire in the centre of his hut. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that his contribution to what had become a very pleasant working environment would have been minimal. In common with his contribution to most things, if the truth be told.

  When they were the only occupants, the Control Room was a space veering more to the functional than the aesthetic, and not even very far in that direction. It was a dump. The walls were lined with old-style VDUs, many monitoring the activity in the wasteland that the malfunction of The Afternet had created. Therein, billions of people wandered, their fate on hold until the system could be brought back online. Some had been there for half a millennium, and most very quickly just assumed that this was it. Whether you prayed or slayed, you just ended up in this place; immortal, but basically subject to lots of days pretty much like the one before.

  The rest of the screens were tuned to the TV output of the corporeal world. It cannot be any surprise that a man who died in 682 AD would find the stream of quiz shows, soap operas, dramas, movies, or sport a constant source of amazement. It is equally unsurprising that he had enduring difficulty in discerning which output was real and which fiction, a condition common amongst living viewers.

  Marcel showed less interest in the opiate of the masses. It was not filthy enough or violent enough, the behaviour not consistently venal enough. He balked at the lachrymose finales to American movies, felt reflux when confronted with Hugh Grant walking into a happy ending sunset, fulminated at the idiocy of the endless respect shown by those involved in team sports. He couldn’t, for the life of him, understand what might possibly be funny about the repetitive breaking of wind jokes, scrotal jokes, fat jokes, and bottom jokes of the modern American comedy. In fact, neither could Geoffrey, but then he thought they were documentaries.

  When they were just the two, their environment gave slovenliness a bad name. Geoffrey saw no difference from the conditions in which he had lived, and Marcel knew, bitterly, that he could be plucked out and thrown into a vat of lava at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t going to hoover with that hanging over him. There was paper everywhere. Memoranda from deities, sub-committees, councils, telling them what kind of behaviour was proscribed this week, what was the correct form of address for fauns, instruction in the levels of obeisance required in the presence of handmaidens. This latter was instruction Geoffrey certainly didn’t need, given his automatic snivelling obeisance when confronted with anyone he thought might be his better. Which was pretty well everyone.

  Junk mail. Even in the afterlife crimes against pizza were unrelenting. For a century, the system produced a daily printout of all processed souls sent to their eternities, until Geoffrey and Marcel pressed enough keys to make it stop. The columns of paper teetered in the corners of the room until there were no corners left and then just teetered wherever they happened to be thrown. Takeaway trays, partially scraped plates, used teabags, dust, fluff and dead skin gradually increased the altitude at which they worked. On one occasion, Hermes, visiting, failed to decelerate quickly enough and bricks piled on the floor around a hole in the wall which beneficially released some of the fetid air.

  Change was due to the arrival of Mary and Justin, twenty-first century creatures who had absorbed the modern teachings of cleanliness, hygiene, and a Spartan work environment. Now, the room was decorated in pastel shades (Mary) with hints of Bauhaus brutalism (Justin). The detritus was gone, deemed surplus to requirements. Pot plants flourished, regularly watered and fed with Baby Bio. Uneaten food went in the bin, causing the rat colony that had previously grown numerous, fat, and lazy, to up sticks and head for more fertile pastures.

  Geoffrey was watching Game of Thrones.

  “Why is that little boy doing that to that grown up woman?” he said. Mary glanced up, ready for the entry to a world of non sequiturs.

  “He’s not a little boy, Geoffrey. He’s a dwarf. You must have had dwarves when you were alive, surely?”

  “Grown up people who were little? We burned them. They were witches.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “They had everything bigger people had, only small. That’s magic, isn’t it?” Well, she thought, the magic of biology.

  “And magic is bad?”

  “Oh yes. Except if it’s David Copperfield. He made the pyramids disappear.”

  “What are the pyramids, Geoff?” asked Justin.

  Geoffrey looked away for a moment from the screen, stared at the man reading from sheets of paper.

  “Things.” he said.

  “So he made things disappear?”

  “Big things. They’re big things.”

  “How big?”

  Geoffrey placed his fingers on the screen, his face intense, trying to remember what it was he was trying to measure. At length, he turned back, his thumb and forefinger apart like a stretched beak.

  “That big.”

  “So he can make things that size disappear?” Geoffrey nodded, smiled with appreciation of the scale of Copperfield’s achievement.

  “See this, Geoff?” Justin held up a doughnut, and the ancient nodded.

  “My God, look at that!” Justin pointe
d to the corner of the room, and Geoffrey swivelled to see what had caused the excitement. Nothing there. He turned back, to see Justin holding both hands in the air, cheeks puffed and a thin grin on his face. No doughnut.

  “Amazing,” he said, “ how did you do that? You could be the new David Copperfield!” As if the world needed another one.

  “Mmmmph. Maphhgic or wiphcraft?” Justin mumbled, his cheeks working desperately.

  Geoffrey bowed in his seat, thinking hard. He looked up and glanced at Mary, who was smiling at him.

  “What, Mary? What do you know? Do you have the key to the secrets of this wizard?”

  Justin coughed with laughter and a part-masticated chunk of dough shot from his mouth and adhered to Geoffrey’s screen, obscuring, temporarily, the naked buttocks of an invading prince.

  “In a way, Geoff, yes. I think it’s kind of obvious.”

  Geoffrey detected the hint of a slur on his awareness, sniffed, and turned back to his TV programme.

  “All very well,” he muttered, smearing the moist gob of cake from his screen, “but what happened to the doughnut?”

  When the door was flung open and Marcel stormed into the room, cursing, neither Geoffrey nor Justin looked up from what they were doing, and Mary went so far as to look down at something she hadn’t been doing. Fits of pique lose their sting when oft-repeated, and Marcel was a diva, the Diana Ross of his age, or the modern age, or any of the ages in between. To be fair, the short fuse that in his lifetime would have been snuffed out with the insertion of a dagger into someone’s chest was now left smouldering, evidenced by things being thrown, fulminatory cursing, sometimes a thump to an inanimate object or Geoffrey, who after centuries saw it as sign of affection, much to Marcel’s frustration.