AFTERWHERE

The reverend Sebastian Archibald Castilar paused at the beginning of his weekly sermon, surveying the scattering of people spread out in the pews before him. Attendance today was worse than last Sunday and that Sunday had been worse than the previous week.
Every week, a few more people dropped out, sometimes a family, and that was hard on Sebastian Archibald’s ministry. He tried hard to whip up some fervor in the flock, doing his best to expound the doctrines of the church, but nothing seemed to work these days. He tried humor and then sternness but the response was always distressingly similar. Polite smiles and a reluctance to part with their resources. Sebastian Archibald’s church needed those resources badly and in spite of his best efforts, he was falling behind.
A slow burn of a righteous anger began to build inside him as he thought of all these complacent souls, coddled by their technology and comfortable in their regulated lives, giving scant thought to the Afterwhere even as they blithely accessed it in their dreams. Sebastian Archibald thought often about the Afterwhere. In fact, he dwelt on it. His whole purpose for being was predicated on the notion of an unpredictable Afterwhere. Wasn’t that what he was there for? To guide these folks safely through the Afterwhere?
He monitored his implants and fine tuned the vocal enhancers for a more forceful delivery. Today needed to be different.
“Uncertainty awaits you, my friends,” he thundered, pounding the pulpit for emphasis. “Life is uncertainty. You’re here today and maybe gone tomorrow. What have you done for yourselves? With yourselves? What are you in the here and now? More importantly, what do you do in the Afterwhere? Do you dread going there? Do your visits fill you with terror and your days with dread as you anticipate your next inevitable visit? Do you know what’s out there waiting for you night after night?”
He wiped a spray of spittle from his chin and noted with satisfaction that his outburst had woken up at least some of the people in the pews. Tiny green pinpoints of light glittered like fireflies throughout the room as neural implants woke up and registered activity. He re-adjusted his vocal enhancers for more dramatic effect.
“I’ll tell you what’s out there, my friends,” he continued, pointing his finger for dramatic effect. “The devil’s out there, out in the Afterwhere, waiting for those of you who step in there unprepared. Are you prepared?”
Sebastian Archibald was in fine form now, the words rolling off his tongue like waves on a shelving beach. His sonorous voice, subtly enhanced, filled the sculpted hall and The New Electric Assembly of the Afterwhere Church reverberated with his message, making the ultraglass and titanium-steel structure vibrate with delicate sympathetic harmonies.
“He’s real my friends,” Sebastian Archibald continued, “And far more devious and terrible than the abstract constructs your data ports project in your minds. He’s been around a long time and he’s been fine tuning his approach all these years. The Afterwhere Devil lurks behind the portal to the Afterwhere my friends, and he wants to add your soul identity and your memory structures to his vast network. A network of integrated misery and terror that permeates all the interstices of the dark side of the Afterwhere.”
He paused again for dramatic effect. “Are your memories safe? Do you believe the cloned synaptic images in your data banks are safe? They’re all accessible via your Identikey codes, and that’s what he steals from you in the Afterwhere. Your codes. Your After-Identity. Your personality in the Afterwhere. Is it secured? Are you prepared?”
The sweat was rolling of Sebastian Archibald’s brow now, trickling past his ears and into his gleaming tyvek collar. He ignored it. He had their attention now. All of them. The artificially dimmed auditorium was awash in green pinpoints of light, winking and glowing as their owners accessed their implants, uploading recorded copy of his words to their databanks. He smiled. That’s what they needed. A good stir of their subconscious soup to shake them out of their data-safe programmed little worlds.
The Reverend Sebastian Archibald Castilar spoke for another forty-five minutes, each one of them more dire and dolorous than the previous. He stormed around the sanctuary gesticulating wildly, his ornate metal-fiber robes glittering as the strobes of the mood lighting caught them. The lighting operator seemed to have caught the fervor of the moment. She had three flash beams trained on the reverend at all times, making him appear to glow of his own accord. The fog machines rolled their heavy white clouds across the floor of the sanctuary and the reverend seemed to float about the room like a spectral apparition.
Just before his closing statements, the reverend linked his interface to the building systems and artificially darkened the ultraglass walls of the church, a signal to the lighting operator, who responded with a frenzy of strobe lighting simulating lightning strikes around the cunningly silhouetted figure of the reverend. For a few minutes there in the Church of the New Electric Assembly of the Afterwhere, it seemed as if the Afterwhere had indeed become the present.
“You are doomed, all of you. Doomed to an eternity of endless grinding repetition. Repetition of the most unbearable horrors your minds can envision. But all is not lost. I can help you. I can show you the way through the Afterwhere.”
He paused to let the idea sink in. The green fireflies flickered madly.
“Open your data ports to my uplink stream, my brothers and sisters. Do it now. Do it every day. Do it before you fall asleep and your dreams take you where you do not want to go.”
He raised his voice a few more decibels and lowered the pitch and the timbre, going for the payoff now.
“I have what you need. I will show you a safe road. A safe road through the Afterwhere.”
He stormed out through the mirrorblind curtains at the back of the sanctuary as his closing words echoed in an infinite loop through the church sound system, ten thousand watts of amplified reverberated exhortation that hung in the air long after he had departed, leaving the members pinned to their seats like butterflies on a display board.
That night, the reverend’s uplink stream pulsed as it had not in a very long time. The church servers frantically added more bandwidth as more and more people opened their data ports to his stream. The Unicredit counters monitoring his revenue stream blinked madly as his message downloaded across the data spectrum. The credits poured in faster than his mind could register, and the reverend felt a warm glow of happiness at his achievement, but he was already thinking ahead, knowing he needed to maintain the intensity to keep that credit flow active.
Boredom was the bane of this jaded world he lived in; every aspect of life and living regulated, controlled and monitored by robot processes to the point of mundane invisibility. The only escape for a largely process controlled population was through dreams, themselves monitored by robotic AI’s that randomized the outcomes of those visits so that no person visited the exact same scenario repeatedly. The Afterwhere was a logical construct to exercise the subconscious portions of the mind that could not be controlled by the robots, and lately, the Afterwhere had grown increasingly dark. The reverend’s church was a response to a growing emotional need.
Sebastian Archibald needed to keep the fears of his flock alive, their terror of the Afterwhere stoked, so that the New Electric Assembly of the Afterwhere Church continued to grow. And he along with it. As he pondered the problem he had an idea. He had posited a devil. They were terrified of that devil. So why not give him to them?
He would give them that very devil. The Afterwhere Devil, live and present via malware that would upload through their data ports and infect their implants subtly, making them receptive to his suggestions. His very own controllable Afterwhere Devil.
The Reverend Sebastian Archibald Castilar did not sleep that night, turning possibilities and outcomes over in his mind until he had crystallized what he wanted. Early next morning he placed a video comm call to an old friend of his who made robots for a living. His friend had done very well for himself, considering that most of the world was now run and regulated by robots of every shape, size, texture and capacity. The call was short and Sebastian Archibald was precise in his requirements.
Could his friend build him a robot interface to his exact specifications?
He could? Good!
Could he do it in a week? Two weeks? Great!
Could he tailor the robot personality to match the criteria he would specify? Excellent!
The price? What?
Well, never mind. There was going to be a lot more where that was coming from. Do it!
Minutes later, Sebastian Archibald had uploaded a hyper-security packet to his friend, with detailed instructions regarding the personality and capabilities of his new robot interface. The reverend was building himself a robot devil. An Afterwhere Devil, no less.
The next two weeks saw a feverish build up of intensity at the New Electric Assembly of the Afterwhere Church. Sebastian Archibald installed pheromone enhancers in the ceiling, subliminal message displays on the back wall of the sanctuary and upgraded the lights and sound before the next gathering. He posted prominent instructions at the entrance that all neural implants should have their firewalls lowered within the church and their receptors enabled.
The church was packed. Word had spread amongst the community that the reverend was onto something. He had a handle on the Afterwhere. He knew the pitfalls within that desolation and how to avoid them. People brought friends. Families brought other families. They sat mesmerized as the reverend expounded on his theme. This time he had visual backup. Giant displays behind him punctuated his words, picturing dismal dystopian futurescapes as Sebastian Archibald described the dangers of the Afterwhere. Subliminal messages pulsed invisibly in the background and the pheromone enhancers pumped the atmosphere full of disquiet and lurking terror as the images rolled on, bleaker by the moment.
At the end of the sermon, Sebastian Archibald was drenched in sweat and so was his audience. They sat slack-jawed in their seats as the reverend choreographed the finale of his performance like a circus ringmaster. The Unicredit input following the service far outstripped the previous week. The reverend’s net worth soared like a spaceship leaving orbit and his visage began popping up on the national buzz feeds, feeding the frenzy. He was a shark in a school of mackerel. He was the titan at the gates of the Afterwhere, the holder of a VIP access pass guaranteeing a good time to be had by all who could afford it. He was unstoppable.
The next week, the week before the devil arrived, he worked himself into a frenzy, foaming at the mouth as he frightened the wits out of those gathered in his church. There were so many people waiting to get in that he set up five services, spaced and hour and a half apart, all of them playing to capacity crowds. By evening the reverend was exhausted but edgy with anticipation. He dismissed his staff, telling them to take the next day off as a bonus for their work at the services and waited for the technicians who would install his dream device.
It was well into the early hours of the morning before the techs were done interfacing the new system with his servers. Sebastian Archibald could barely contain himself as he waited for them to leave. He sat in front of the interface terminal, brimming with anticipation. What devilry would he program for his first week’s rummaging inside his unsuspecting members memory data banks?
A small glittering dot appeared in the center of the display, resolving into a buckyball shaped figure that spun rapidly on the screen before him. The buckyball had many glittering rainbow-colored facets that flashed and winked mesmerizingly. Behind the interface, his data port came alive, servers humming urgently; data access monitors blinking rapidly in synchronization with the rotating buckyball.
The reverend was mildly irritated. He hadn’t activated the devil interface yet but the damn thing was obviously on. No matter, The technicians probably initialized the system before they left. Clearing his throat he stared directly at the buckyball and accessed the audio interface.
“Castilar. Log on and register vocal and retina print.”
The spinning buckyball flashed silver for a moment before turning prismatic again.
“Vocal and retina print confirmed. Welcome Sebastian.”
Something prickled in the back of the reverend’s mind, like an itch on the inside of his skull. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. When he opened his eyes, the sensation was gone.
Sebastian. The system had called him Sebastian, but he had not told it his name. No one called the reverend by his name. His was simple The Reverend. Sebastian Archibald Castilar guarded his personality with a fervor that matched his religious zeal.
The buckyball on the screen grew in size, some of the facets disappearing into dark openings like windows into an infinite depth. Inside those lattices sparks flashed into existence and died. The room lights dimmed and the unmistakable coppery odor of pheromone stimulants wafted into his nostrils. On the display he could see the reflected green LED of his own implant flare into activity.
A nameless dread assailed him as a suave voice bearing a hint of mingled mischief and malice echoed inside his head.
“Sebastian Archibald Castilar. Welcome to the Afterwhere. I’m your host, the Afterwhere Devil.”

 © Bryan Knower: September 2014