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

by Peter Empringham

  This time, the Frenchman loudly asserted that The Devil’s mother was a pustular whore, smashed the kettle on the wall scarred by previous kettle-smashings, and vowed that he was not having something or other and the world would pay for this insult. The flouncing and litany of wrongs drew no attention, the others carrying on blithely with pointless activities that had become habitual for a group aware that time stretches slowly when it is endless.

  For Justin, this was fine-tuning his latest Afternet app; for Mary a brief interest in the system’s processing of the crew of The Deathly Leek, a pirate ship captained by Black Barry of Cardiff, that had rampaged somewhat ineffectually in the Caribbean in the early 1700s. So ineffectually that the crew had in fact all perished, penniless, of starvation. Geoffrey whooped in amazement at whichever magic trick had secured David Copperfield a very attractive wife.

  Marcel stared at the pieces of shattered kettle on the floor and back to his oblivious companions.

  “This is it, you know! It’s all over!” He glared at the backs of the others. On the wall the Extinction Clock rolled over to 14 species gone missing during that day, the last breath having been drawn by the very last surviving Sugar’s Apprentice Beetle somewhere in a swamp in Malaysia. He wondered briefly if, were he to eviscerate Geoffrey, the clock would click to 15, and show ‘7th Century Cumbrian Turnip Farmer’.

  “Hmmm.” Said Mary.

  “Oh I know.” Justin agreed.

  The silence in the room as Marcel boiled grew heavy, until finally Mary yielded.

  “Ok Marcel, I’ll buy it. What’s all over, and why should I care?”

  “Me. I’m all over. I’m done, kaput. Time’s up, they say. All the work I’ve done cast to the winds.”

  “All the work?”

  “Well, all the time I’ve spent. I’ve risked my life over the years for this poxy system.”

  “How can you risk your life when you’re dead?” Justin asked, without looking up from his screen. Marcel kicked a piece of kettle into the wall.

  “Bloody semantics, Justin. Life style, then. I’ve risked my lifestyle.”

  Mary sighed, noted that the crew of The Deathly Leek had all been sent to a heaven, which must put them high on the scale of pathetic pirates, and looked back to Marcel.

  “Get on with it. What’s happened now?”

  “I’m not saying until everyone’s listening.” He pointed at the backs of Geoffrey and Justin, still turned implacably to him.

  “Justin, Geoffrey. Come on. Let’s get this over with.” Justin slowly swivelled to face into the room and feigned attention.

  “Will it take long?” asked Geoffrey, still peering at his screen.

  “Will what take long?” Marcel spluttered angrily, “This is my bloody future we’re talking about here. What does it matter how long it takes?”

  “Only Most Haunted is on in ten minutes. I love it when people communicate with the dead.”

  No one bothered to point out that this was all any of them ever did. Marcel bodily swung God’s representative to face him, ignoring the fact that Geoffrey seemed to have become inordinately fascinated by a lump of dough knitted to the fibres of his cardigan, a garment which had once been maroon, but in keeping with everything the old man wore had somehow become grey. Marcel was satisfied. He had known him for hundreds of years and was well aware that this was as close to full attention as he was likely to get.

  “You do know where I’ve been, don’t you?” They looked blankly at each other, shook heads.

  “I’ve just been for my Annual Performance Review, that’s where.”

  “I don’t remember you doing that before.” Geoffrey said absently, nibbling on a chunk of dough/wool mix.

  “I haven’t. Done it before I mean.”

  “Strictly speaking then,” said Justin, “it’s a Septuacentennial Performance Review.”

  Marcel took a pace towards him, fists clenching.

  “Ok, ok. Cut it out Justin. Or we’ll be here until the next review.” Mary used the tone she had come to think of as ‘Primary School Teacher’, one that calmed the legion of conflicts that arose over time. “Go on Marcel.”

  “Well. First The Devil couldn’t even be bothered to turn up, which I take as a personal slight.” Marcel took most things as a personal slight, given half a chance. “Then the giant bloody insect he sent to do the dirty for him told me that I have done such a good job that I have made myself redundant. That’s what I mean. It’s over.”

  “So you get to go on holiday or something?” asked Mary.

  “Oh yes. Permanently. On a beach, surrounded by semi-naked lovelies, drinking piña coladas. I don’t think.”

  “I don’t get it, Marcel. This sounds alright. Let’s face it, you’ve earned it, hundreds of years of selfless service. Well, service at any rate.” Geoffrey looked almost pleased for his colleague.

  “Irony, Geoffrey. Bitter irony for me. I never had a job until this one and then centuries later I finally do it well enough to be surplus to requirements. They’re sending me to whatever horrors and eternal torment they had in mind for me in the first place. I’m fucking doomed.”

  The others exchanged concerned glances. For once, the apparent seriousness of the situation appeared to match Marcel’s prima donna behaviour.

  “Just a minute, though, Marcel,” said Justin, “I thought the original idea was that you were put here to stop the forces of good meddling with the process. You know, making sure Geoffrey didn’t reprogram the Afternet or something.” Marcel and Justin looked blankly at Geoffrey, who was entranced by his own effort to free an aged wine gum from the pocket of his cargo shorts. “Okay,” he agreed, “that seems unlikely.”

  “If you think about it,” said Marcel, “the system goes through a million souls a day, The Devil gets plenty, doesn’t he? He probably has some bean counter keeping an eye on the averages, he can always step in if it starts to get suspicious. Let’s face it, I’m buggered this time. Or will be, probably.”

  Mary had been quiet, and when Marcel glanced at her she seemed to be brushing something from her eye. Her voice was tremulous when she spoke, as if she was suddenly feeling cold, although the room was, if anything, on the warm side.

  “When does this happen, Marcel?”

  “He gave me until the 15th.”

  “A month, bloody hell.”

  “Could have been worse. He asked me the date and I told him it was the first.”

  “And he fell for that?” Justin looked incredulous.

  “He was a seven foot bluebottle, Justin. He wasn’t holding a fucking calendar.”

  “So a month, then. We’ve got a month.” Mary sounded almost relieved.

  “We’ll need a plan.” Geoffrey was pulling a long hair from the liberated wine gum.

  “Oh, and you’ll be the man for that, I suppose?” Marcel sneered.

  “Well, I was born in a dark age, Marcel, I have no education you don’t get from watching Bewitched, Friends, and Dad’s Army. I’m ignorant, not stupid. And I haven’t put up with your insults, lying, foul temper and filthy behaviour for seven hundred years to have you taken away by a giant shit-eater. And yes, I do know that you’ve been cheating at Monopoly since 1562. You came back for me when Al Capone was setting me on fire, didn’t you?” Marcel glanced at Mary.

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Really?” Geoffrey popped the (relatively) clean wine gum into his mouth.

  “This is all very touching, guys,” said Justin, “but I’m just as concerned about what this means for the others here.”

  “You mean you” said Mary.

  “Well, I am one of the others. But you can’t blame me for thinking this is the thin end of the wedge.”

  What wedge?” asked Geoffrey, a query the others chose to ignore, aware that it could lead to a very long diversion from the matter at hand.

  “I agree,” said Marcel, spotting an opportunity to garner some support. “If they get rid of me, it can only be a matter of time
before the rest of you go.”

  “Actually,” Mary looked straight at his face, “if they get rid of you maybe it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us want to go”

  He hadn’t aged a moment from the first time she saw him. His face was narrow, but his lips were full; his hair was shoulder length, and a floppy fringe hung upon his forehead. He had a small scar on his left cheek, a nick, he said, from some couteau or other. The eyes, though. They were dark, bottomless, and he had the eyelashes of a young boy, soft and defined. Unsurprisingly, the face did not display any wear from persistent smiling. Justin was looking too, but he just thought he saw a spoilt French minor aristocratic fop. Same person, different perspective.

  “That’s all very moving, Mary,” said Justin, “but having seen some of the alternatives around here I think this place might be about as good as it gets. Much as we would miss Marcel, of course.”

  “I’d miss him.” Said Geoffrey.

  “I just said we all would.”

  “Yes, but I mean it. We need a plan. Or Thunderbirds.”

  They looked at him, trying to deduce whether he was making a joke. His fixed impression suggested that there was every chance he thought that some jerky puppets might well be the answer. Not that they would last long in the fires of Hell.

  Marcel stood and paced the room. He ran his fingers through his thick hair and balled his fists against his temples as though he could force in some brainwave to get him out of this fix. He should have seen it coming, really. Nothing he had done in his life qualified him for anything but everlasting torment. Even murdering his mother, a terrible, violent woman who had herself caused the deaths of a series of servants through enforced drudgery and utter neglect. That was an act of malice and hatred, not an attempt to make any world other than his own a better place.

  In a way, he probably should be grateful that he had spent centuries subjected only to the torture of Geoffrey, combined with anything he consumed tasting fouler than the excrement of something that ate only excrement, and an inability to gain any fulfilment from copulation. In the context of the sins he had enacted during his life, this was a slap on the wrists. Just because he had been lucky in that respect, however, didn’t mean he was prepared to accept anything remotely resembling his just desserts. And then there was Mary, but that was another matter and one he didn’t really wish to confront.

  “Right.” He said. “Let’s go and get pissed.”

  5

  It was never clear whether it was all part of God’s rich plan or just a flaw in the transition mechanisms, but significant numbers of deceased arrived in this hinterland with objects that could in no way be deemed to be part of their physical selves. It was as if the transporter on USS Enterprise had been unable to differentiate between the crew member screaming ‘Energise!” and the ravening alien beast that had been about to devour him or her. It would rather diminish the effectiveness of the device if he or she had arrived on the Transporter deck aboard the Enterprise accompanied by said ravening alien beast, now free to devour at will.

  The Afternet, perhaps in the interest of processing speed, appeared to simply hazard a guess at what might constitute the soul to be transported, with the result that there were many new arrivals who landed dazed and confused with the cause of their death. For those like Ron, with his steering wheel, Franzel and his anal sword, and Adrael with the spear protruding back and front, there could be an argument made that all had become conjoined with their burdens and that these were easy mistakes for the system to make. Those in the vicinity of new arrivals when they popped up were less likely to be forgiving of whomsoever wrote the code when the person in question arrived in the company of, say, a lion engaged in ripping him to shreds, or a gigantic python insouciantly having squeezed out the last breath.

  Again, apologists for the apparent approximate nature of the system could point out that at least these non-essential items are organic, but you have to figure that anything that would have been spotted and removed by the staff at airport security would seem to fall into the ‘bleeding obvious’ category. Worse, and this would have made the security people look really competent, the Afternet took a very casual approach to objects the newly dead may be carrying, sitting on, or sometimes just leaning against.

  This fact was a double-edged sword. Sometimes literally. Without such a laissez-faire approach, the Afterworld Cup would have been stillborn for lack of a football. Young bards would not have their guitars to strum as they crucified Blowin’ In The Wind under the adoring gaze of slender teenage girls. Justin Merchant’s brainchild, A-Bay, would never have got off the ground due to a lack of items to sell, and the operatives of the Afternet Control Room would never have earlier accrued the cash, ferried to the Afterworld in wallets, pockets, purses, codpieces and trouser turn-ups that enabled them to firstly fix the system and then to foil a dastardly plot to destroy it.

  Ron, secretly agreeing that his chalet park could possibly attract some adverse publicity when in the absence of a door the first jugular was severed by someone climbing in through a jagged window, had renewed cause to be grateful for the computer’s lack of precision. An advertisement on The Afternet, its terminals strewn far and wide around the vast Afterworld, offered a week’s free holiday to those providing the best means of engineering the required openings in the chalets in such a manner that guests would not be slicing off pieces of themselves every time they entered, or risking decapitation should they pop their heads out to invite a neighbour in for a cup of tea. The value of a week’s holiday for people who in the main did very little may have been questionable, but there was nothing people wouldn’t do to break up the boredom, even if that meant sitting in a tin box listening to rain thumping on the roof.

  He was besieged with offers, such that had he accepted them all, the chalets would have been full on a complimentary basis long after there were any customers left in the place. The range was bewildering, but he was quickly able to sift out those with agricultural machinery, piledrivers, and in one case a wrecking ball, and made offers to a couple of angle-grinder owners, two more who had heavy duty nibblers for hand cutting, and one oxy-acetylene torch. He was very pleased to accept an offer of two hundred metres of rubberised shower edging, refusing to allow himself to ponder what the owner may have been up to at the moment of his demise; a direction he also avoided for those who had popped their clogs in possession of respectively, four hundred hinges and their fixings, and several square metres of transparent thick plastic sheeting. As an afterthought, he told the bloke who asked whether he needed a decorator to pop along and he’d give him a try, so long as he brought his own materials.

  The oxy-acetylene torch’s tank ran dry after cutting four doors, which led to something of an argument as to whether this qualified the owner for the proffered free week, settled when he revealed that he was a children’s entertainer and would be happy to work in the yet to be constructed ‘Entertainment Complex’. Ron failed to query what kind of entertainment he was providing with the blowtorch at the moment of his death. Apart from that glitch, construction carried on apace.

  The Visigoths did the heavy lifting, bringing the sheets up to have the door and windows cut in them. The sharp edges of the orifices were lined with shower edging, the windows fitted with transparent plastic (its transparency had been somewhat overstated), then Guntrick and his company bashed the constituent parts together, a role they took to with an alacrity and joy rarely seen in builders in the living world. Their solution to problems had for centuries been to hit things hard until the problem was solved, and when it came to joining tin sheets without the benefit of welding equipment, this tactic came into its own.

  Ron, as ever, thoroughly enjoyed his assumed position at the top of the organisational pyramid. This, after an initial rush, comprised a good deal of walking around looking pensive, touching something and nodding appreciatively at the associated artisan, pointing, and drinking tea. Ethel’s contribution was probably more important, bandagi
ng and applying iodine, supplying encouragement, and particularly keeping a check on some of her husband’s more unrealistic flights of fancy.

  He rushed to her, beaming, with a large piece of paper on which he had sketched the design for a ‘water park’. Fountains showered water into the air in extensive wavy-edged pools at the foot of curled pipes and tubes. Down these, he explained, gleeful kiddies would slide in flumes of running water, their little faces alight with joy, their screams of delight rending the air as they plunged into the pool at the bottom.

  “Where will all that tubing come from, dear?”

  “We found this tin, didn’t we?”

  “Well, we did, love, but perhaps we should put the plan on hold until we happen upon a hole in the ground full of water park type tubing. We’ve got a lot to do anyway, haven’t we?”

  “Well, we can build the fountains, can’t we?”

  “I don’t think so Ron.” She adopted the voice used by a mother telling a child that the thing they really really wanted for Christmas probably wasn’t in Santa’s sack. “They need pumps, and all kinds of things, don’t they?

  Ron looked distraught. Ethel went on. “We should think about a pool, though, shouldn’t we? If we have enough plastic left to line it? Leave it to the end, when we know.” He brightened, pecked her on the cheek, and strode off towards where the Visigoths were enthusiastically bashing tin.

  “Lads!” He yelled, waving the sheet of paper, “I’ve decided not to go ahead with the water park. We’ll see if we can knock up a pool, at the end.” There were few tears amongst his friends, who had an antipathy to water that bordered on the obsessive.

  Ron and Ethel had spent many a happy week in holiday camps, and he had a very clear picture of what it was they were trying to create; it was a melange of everything he had loved in a host of places during his life. Ethel’s role was to guide him towards some kind of realism in his ambitions. Crazy Golf? Perhaps later. Go-Karting? Lovely idea Ron, but remember the wheel problem? Not to mention engines. Naturist Beach? Absolutely not! Funfair? Well, it’s that engine thing again, Ron, along with all of the constituent parts of a helter-skelter. Just the stalls then? Hook-A-Duck. Throw the ping-pong ball into the jar. Ethel agreed that when they were up and running they would get hold of whatever New Age travellers might be wandering the immensity of this place and see what they could set up.