C'est La Morte: a Short Story

These days they are calling our worker-clones "zombies" just because they are hard to kill and like to eat brains, but let me tell you, there were zombies here long before.

Our worker-clones emerged back in the 21^st century when people were having some trouble balancing their lives. The average person would allow themselves about 48 hours worth of tasks within a 24-hour period. It was a strange psychology evolved from competitive economic systems, participation in which no one realized was voluntary. It was fuelled with the oily black remains of prehistoric bodies and coffee that tasted like it was brewed in an ashtray.

There were plenty of empty houses, and plenty of young, hard-working zombies trying to afford to buy them. I'm talking about 16-hour work shifts, then skipping sleep to maybe go to school, for which one had to accumulate debt, all in hopes for social permission to just go ahead and live.

And they could have done that-- they could've just gone ahead and lived-- but then Duncan Donuts and Exxon Mobile merged with Dow Chemical and worker-clones became irresistibly inexpensive for consumers.

You see, we were the zombies first. These out-of-control clones are only reflections of the sleep-deprived work-a-holics we used to be, trying to cram more hours into the day. And now we're trapped underground while our worker-clones continue with the lives we were leading. They are just like us except that they don't have a choice-- and that they have an incredible hunger for non-cloned brains. Here we are in the dark with plenty of time to reflect on how nice that sunlight used to feel on our skin, though back then we barely noticed.

The French have a saying, "Il faut ajouter de la vie aux années, pas des années à la vie," which means, "One should add life to one's years, not years to one's life." I used to think this meant to do more, more, more faster, faster, faster. Now I see that life is not just something that you do, but something that you be. We may not have been eating brains, but we were starving for reality, for time to think. So here we are...