AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

she’d be out of a job after the symphony announced that falling donations might make it impossible to continue the 2004-2005 season. Rudy Clarkfield, chairman of the symphony board:
CLARKFIELD: We felt the drop most in estate planning. Since the discovery we …
WERTHEIMER: The discovery of the afterlife?
CLARKFIELD: Yes, since then, people have reconsidered their estate plans.
WERTHEIMER: Estate plans. That’s where people have made wills and have promised to turn over their estate — stocks, bonds, property — upon their death?
CLARKFIELD: Yes, I’m not going to say it’s a major source of income, but we rely on it. And it may sound ghoulish, but we plan on it. But since 2001, we’ve had many people write the symphony out of their estate plans. And we certainly haven’t had anyone new say they want to include us.
WERTHEIMER: The symphony’s financial problems worsened after a disembodied man decided he wanted his estate, estimated to be worth $15 million, to revert to him instead of the symphony. A court has agreed to halt any disbursement from the estate until the case can be heard.
Of course, many other organizations rely on funds derived from estate plans, including this public radio station. That’s why we need your help …
    Munroe looked at the clock in the CID room. It was 8:15 a.m. He figured he’d been around the world twice since he’d started. He’d read newspaper stories about serial murders in Japan, Sweden and France; read the results of the test match between South Africa and England (not that he knew anything about cricket); looked up the M1911 .45-caliber ACP; found out that the Platte Valley Model Railroad Engineers met the first Friday of the month at Denver’s Union Station (open to the public the last Friday of the month); failed to find anything about the effects of a TASER on a disembodied person; checked the progress of the two Mars rovers; left some helpful (he hoped) comments at a support group for the recently dead; updated his blog with his two cents about the stalled bill to grant voting rights to the dead; registered with two news services so he’d get alerts about serial murders; checked his bank account; confirmed that his Amazon purchases were on track; and downloaded and watched Seven Samurai again.
    It definitely wasn’t like the early days of the AfterNet, when the only places he could go online were the public kiosks. He’d wait, sometimes for hours, until he could get online on those early terminals, which were abysmally slow, and then struggle to visualize a simple query in his mind.
    And now he was simultaneously juggling six open browser connections and was maintaining two chats. He could have handled more, but the department had lousy Internet access.
    And I’m the old fart who wouldn’t use a computer, he thought contritely. Now, I’m a surfing fool.
    He turned his attention back to one of the local Denver rooms, chatting mindlessly with a guy who claimed to be Ben Franklin. He was not doing a very good job of it while spouting endless Poor Richard sayings. He was also ignorant of Silence Dogood, which Munroe thought a nice irony. There was also a woman who said she died in 1971 of cervical cancer ( thank you, too much information ), another man who claimed to be Voltaire but who couldn’t understand Munroe’s high school French ( which is actually in his favor ) and a living woman who said she was bored in Capitol Hill and was sitting naked in her kitchen and would leave the door open for any disembodied men.
    Why do I bother with this? he thought. He was about to exit the chat when another person — beccathompson43 — joined.
beccathompson43: How yall doing?
    Everyone answered her back with a hello but Munroe apologized that he was just leaving.
beccathompson43: Please dont go. Im checking all the denver chat rooms. Have any of yuo talked to minerofLove recently? he said he sometimes visited this room
voltaire11: Loose ur boyfriend?
beccathompson43: Hes my son
voltaire11: Apologies, Madame. I spoke without thinking.
beccathompson43: its OK. I was supposed to meet him in Golden and haven’t found him.
jollycopper: Is your son disembodied?
beccathompson43: yes, he died two years ago and he decided to go on the europe vacation we promised him after graduation.
jollycopper: How much is he overdue?
beccathompson43: 4 days. Im worried.
jollycopper: Probably nothing to worry about. I’m a Denver cop. I can keep an eye out for him if you