AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

the work ethic, Stephen.” Rybold turned and looked at him. Edwards wouldn’t look at him directly but stared at the gold “AV” pin on his lapel. Edwards looked up and they locked eyes.
    “All right. Against my better judgment, you can start the facility. But as soon as the units are in place, you take a week off. There’s no need to connect them. You know it won’t hurt if they’re left idle a while.”
    Edwards nodded. “Thank you. And you’re … a week in the mountains sounds like what I need.” His eyes darted to the window. “Clumsy oaf,” he said, as the worker banged another sphere onto the trailer.
    — & —
    Brian floated in deep sleep. He was just a speck in a black void. He was tired but happy, comforted in his dreams by the knowledge that he was in bed with his wife, Karen. A sharp movement disturbed his slumber but his mind converted it into Karen tossing in her sleep. Very quickly he returned to his happy assumptions.

A Quick Guide to the Afterlife
    In March 1997, firefighters found hanging from a rope the body of Dr. Antonia Simone, next to the prototype of what would become the AfterNet terminal. On the screen were the words, “What took you guys so long?”
    The discovery of the afterlife threw the world into chaos. Even though most religions believed in an afterlife, the reality of an afterlife where each person’s intellect or soul exists after death but is completely unable to communicate with the living or even the other dead shook those religions to their core. An afterlife without the reward of heaven or the consequence of hell fundamentally changed the world. Riots ensued, governments fell and the on again/off again India/Pakistan war went nuclear. People killed themselves in droves and the end of the second millennium seemed like the end of civilization.
    But civilization didn’t end as people slowly began to accept the reality that the living share the world with the dead and that the dead, of course, far outnumber the living. In September 2001, an organization called the AfterNet was created to develop the infrastructure that allowed the disembodied to interact with the living and with each other. Slowly the world learned the rules that govern the afterlife, which include:
    Souls exist. That is the unique energy of every creature survives death as a will-o’-the-wisp something, with an almost impossible to measure mass and charge and a volume roughly the size of a beach ball. Since souls do have a physical being, however insubstantial, they cannot pass through solid matter, but they are almost infinitely malleable. A disembodied soul, for instance, can be squashed paper thin, but it is not a pleasurable experience. The disembodied can move from place to place, although it takes practice and concentration, like a baby learning to walk. The faster or higher a disembodied person wishes to go, the more concentration is required.
    The disembodied are everywhere. Considering that every person who has ever died leaves behind a soul (and no one knows when in human evolution the soul evolved), the disembodied are everywhere. And as the soul is so insubstantial, any point on the planet can be occupied by an untold number of disembodied persons. It is also speculated that all forms of life have some form of energy that could be called a soul.
    The living are unaware of the disembodied. Despite ghost stories, there is no proof that the living are aware of the disembodied. The soul is so insubstantial it can only be recorded by the technology of an AfterNet terminal.
    The disembodied are unaware of each other. Until the discovery of the afterlife and the invention of the AfterNet terminal, each disembodied person believed he or she was alone. And being so insubstantial, they could not interact with the living, with the consequence that most disembodied who had died before the invention of the AfterNet terminal have gone insane.
    The disembodied cannot hear, taste, smell or feel. A disembodied soul is aware of the entire electromagnetic spectrum and is actually capable of 360-degree vision, but that is the only of the five senses available to them. Until the printed word, the only way the disembodied could learn about the world was by direct observation.
    The AfterNet allows the disembodied to communicate with the living and each other, but there are still many obstacles the disembodied face. For instance, it is not easy to manipulate the AfterNet field. The disembodied must imagine