Feeling lazy so instead of an actual post, I'm just going to copy and paste my most recent story. Enjoy!
Every Silver Lining
The good news was that Project: Fluffy Kitten was a complete success. The bad news, however, was that the zombies quickly overran the earth.
The whole project was a direct result of President Roberts’ pre-election promise to cut the work week down to Monday through Wednesday. Nobody really expected him to live up to that promise but as his term neared an end his numbers were down and he figured if he could fulfill that promise he would be a shoe-in for re-election.
Now seeing as Roberts only had about a year to make his promise a reality, he put out word amongst some of the more talented members of the scientific community that he needed something that would allow companies to drastically reduce the amount of human labour they required. I was one of those scientists.
A week later we had a committee meeting to pitch our ideas. There were a wide array of proposals ranging from the reintroduction of slavery to severe limits being placed on how much companies could produce to altering the laws of physics in order to increase efficiency. In the end, the committee was deadlocked between my idea of building super intelligent cyborgs and Dr. E. Philman’s idea of re-animating the dead to provide free labour. Naturally I was in favour of my plan but in the end the president opted to go with Philman’s plan for two reasons. A) Philman’s plan was slightly cheaper than mine and B) Roberts said that my plan reminded him too much of “that there Matrix movie”.
So Philman got the job and the rest of us were assigned to assist him on the project (dubbed ‘Fluffy Kitten’). I wasn’t very happy about it as something seemed about off about Philman but I figured a pay check was a pay check. As you might have guessed, re-animating the dead is no easy task. There were a number of snags along the way. We had to figure out not only how to get the corpses moving again, but how to keep them powered up. Of particular difficulty was figuring out how to make the zombies do what we wanted them to do. If someone has been dead a while there’s not exactly a whole lot of brains left to work with. By the time we thought we had a good enough handle on the logistics to actually construct a zombie ray, it was already mid-October.
At this point Roberts was getting trounced in the polls so he was desperate to have this thing up and running in time for the November election. He told us to proceed with the full implementation of the ray immediately. Full implementation of the ray meant launching it into orbit and setting the ray to cover the entire country. Most of us on the team told him that it was too soon to do such a thing. We said we couldn’t be sure it would work the way it was supposed to and that we should start slow. Surprisingly enough, he seemed to actually be swayed by our words of caution but then Philman assured him that the process, despite being untested, was foolproof and that was good enough for Roberts.
A few days later the ray was launched into space and activated. Despite my reservations about the plan, it went off without a hitch. Within a few days of the firing, the zombies were toiling away at all of mankind’s most unpleasant jobs. There was a bit of protest at first about how the corpses were being violated but that quickly died out when everyone realized how much more free time they now had. Roberts handily won the election and, in a rare example of generosity, the United States government expanded use of the ray to allow all countries in the world to benefit from zombie labour. It looked like the beginning of a utopia for mankind.
Unfortunately, our dreams of a such a world were shattered a few months later. It turns out that Philman had been biding his time, waiting until zombies populated the entire planet before implementing a plan of his own. He designed a program which was supposed to hack into the zombie ray’s original programming and change it so that the zombies served his will. Philman was then going to use his zombie army to install himself as the leader of the world. Philman was a rather sloppy programmer however and a minor mistake meant that instead of the zombies trying to kill people when he told them to, they tried to kill people all the time.
When Philman made the programming changes, he also encrypted the system to keep everyone else out. He would have easily been able to correct his mistake; unfortunately he had a flair for the dramatic and was in an area with many zombies when the changes first became active. Thus, he became one of the first victims.
The widespread zombie presence meant that human civilization fell within days, with most of the humans being zombified. A few ‘lucky’ people, myself included, happened to be in isolated areas when the shit hit the fan so not quite everyone is dead.
There are seven outposts of humanity left that we know of. We’ve managed to establish a network thanks to some of the same technology that got us into this mess. There were twelve outposts originally, but that damned ray is still operating. If someone dies in their sleep, instant zombie problem. We’ve developed safeguards against it happening again, but realistically I’d say our days are numbered.
I’m creating this record in the hopes that someday it will be found by humans in a post-zombie era (that ray has to run out of juice sooner or later and your average zombie only has a lifespan of a decade or so) or, failing that, perhaps an alien intelligence curious about the remnants of our civilization. It'd be nice to be remembered.
It's still basically a first draft (with one or two minor changes) so it's definitely in need of some polish but I'm pretty happy with it. My original idea for the story (which I thought of during spring break) was a bit more elaborate but when I chose to do it for my creative writing class I had to work with a 1000 word limit. I think I may go back after the term is over and expand though. There are 3 or 4 different areas of the story where I would love to go into more detail (planning scene, testing phase, etc).
Defunct Word of the Day: Defunct
You hardly ever hear anyone use defunct anymore. I thought it could use the pimp. :P
