AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

that Munroe had shut down her notebook. OK, she couldn’t have been calling from here. And the last time I checked, she was still in Japan, making life miserable for Dad.
    She went back to the kitchen after taking the computer with her. While the rice cooker rattled, she checked her email. She saw a message from Munroe, telling her that her mother had emailed him.
    Oh great, now I’ve dragged him into my circle of hell. She also looked at the last email her mother sent her and saw that it originated from the same Japanese mail server as before.
    Suddenly she felt weak and she realized she was sweating, probably from her illness but she knew part of it was her fear.
    I do love her, but she’s quite insane.
    The rice maker pinged and she got up and transferred the cooked rice to a pot and added water. She set that to boil. The rice quickly became a thick glop while she absentmindedly stirred it.
    I suppose I could bounce back her emails. Oh right, remember the time you changed your phone number? she asked herself.
    After a few more minutes, she got shoyu from the cupboard. Then she took an egg and the Ziplock of sour plums from the refrigerator. She added the egg to the pot, stirring it in. After the egg had cooked in the hot rice, she removed the pot from the heat and transferred the rice to a small Japanese bowl, her mother’s favorite. She poured the shoyu, sprinkled dried fish shavings from a small plastic package and added the plums. It was the same food her mother always made for her when she was a little girl and was sick, and it was also the last meal she had made for her mother before she died. It would make most Westerners gag but was good for little Japanese girls and sick dogs, too, her mother would always tell her.
    As usual, the food did the trick. The rice settled her stomach and the green tea quieted the caffeine withdrawal she was suffering. She put the dishes in the sink and went back to the bedroom and watched TV. That evening, she chatted with her mother.
    — & —
    He didn’t know how long he had been waiting for something to happen. Unable to feel a pulse or hear his own breathing, he didn’t have the cues to tell him how long he existed in the empty, dark void. He couldn’t even tell if he was restrained. He’d have to be able to detect his motion relative to something in order to tell, so he couldn’t tell if he was in a vast empty space or still in the box they used to trap him.
    He had tried to see something in the darkness, but his environment was as empty of visual light as it was of the larger spectrum of which he was capable of detecting.
    Maybe I finally am really, truly dead, he thought to himself. Maybe I transitioned from being disembodied to this. Oh, that’s stupid. Somebody forced me into this, and I don’t mean God.
    He thought again about the other people in the room when the walls started closing. Are they in here with me? If they were, he had no way of knowing.
    Suddenly light — visible bright daylight — hit him from every direction. He was suddenly outside in a park on a gorgeous summer day, which made no sense. It was December. And he was moving. Or more correctly, he was somehow being moved, against his will. He couldn’t fight against it. He couldn’t even feel that he could fight against it. He seemed to simply be flowing, like a leaf drifting in a stream.
    He watched as children played in the park and he moved toward them. A young woman, his age, with long brown hair, threw a Frisbee back to one of the children and then walked toward him. She had a smile on her face and she reached out a hand toward him, and he saw a hand clasp her hand. And he followed her and he realized she was holding his hand. He couldn’t feel her flesh, or his either, but he longed to feel it, to feel her warmth in his hand.
    And then the scene faded and he was back in the dark again. The sunlight, the woman, his hand, were gone, and he wanted them back.

Chapter 4
Defero per Mortuus
August 11, 2004
Encyclical of Pope John Paul II on developments involving communication with the dead.
To our Venerable Brethren
Health and the Apostolic Blessing!
The Holy Church has long taught that there is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who depart this life in God’s grace but are not entirely free of venial faults or have not fully paid for their transgressions. This has been clearly stated by the decree of the Council of Trent (Sess. XXV) and restated in the Lumen