…right here on this blog.
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The Doclopedia #1,503
Alt. Zombies: Zombie Robots
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Okay, man, let’s just get one things straight, okay? They aren’t fucking zombies! Zombies are undead biological creatures, like all those fucking dogs and cats that appeared when my parents were in middle school 50 years ago. These robots are afflicted with a rogue strain of nanites that make them look and act strange and dangerous.
Yeah, okay, LIKE zombies. But they aren’t fucking real zombies!
And before you ask, no, nobody knows who created the nanites. We know it wasn’t Russia or China, because they got fucked worse than we did. Same goes for much of the rest of the world that depended upon bot labor. The best guess is that it was a home grown terrorist group working with a similar group in another country, most likely India.
Okay, okay. Anyway, the first ones to show up were a bunch of Klaran Robotics “A” models, mostly A/14s and A/15s. Strictly semi-autonomous worker bee types. Sweepers, grass trimmers, graffiti removers, stuff like that. The first 6 were in D.C., in a suburb. City worker saw these rusty dinged up bots wandering around, so he calls Bot Maintenance and they come pick them up. Probably figured a bunch of rich brats beat the crap out of them, because bot abuse is a thing.
Now, these guys take these bots to their repair facility, which has about 40 other bots, some of them K/30s and the like. Big fuckers, made to collect recycling and pave roads. The important thing here is that they also had three R/3s, fully autonomous, self programing, genius chip analysis bots used by the Departments of Defense, Agriculture and the Treasury. Expensive and highly necessary to all of those departments, as well as all the other departments of the government.
Within 48 hours, every bot in that place was infected and reprogrammed to seek out other bots to infect. They busted out and the rest is history.
It was the autonomous drones that did most of the infecting. They’d fly into a hanger and infect dozens of drones in just a few minutes. Hell, when they hit the main Homeland Security hanger, they infected 780 drones in 20 minutes. From there, bot infections just exploded exponentially.
Rumors that bots were injuring or killing humans or any other bioform were just sensationalist bullshit. Most people knew that because they could see that the bots were just going around touching other bots, then moving on. Most went out of their way to avoing bioforms.
The rest you know. After 4 days, much of the services in the country ground to a halt. No mail delivery, no garbage pickup, no recycling, most government agencies slowed way down, etc, etc. After a month, you could say that and sometimes worse for the rest of the world. Around the world, humans were going back to doing jobs no human had done in 20 years. It was a big step backward.
So now, 5 years on, the world is mostly bot free. The ones up on Luna and Mars never got infected, but down here, you’ll only find functioning bots in the sealed research centers where they are trying to create nanites that can fight the “zombie” nanites. Given that whoever created those is five years ahead of the game, I’m not holding out much hope.
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The Doclopedia #1,504
Alt. Zombies: Unzombies
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We were never actually dead, you know, not completely. There were portions of us that were still alive. Parts of our brain, for one thing. That’s what made us able to move around and sense the smell of human bodies and see. It’s also why head shots killed us for good.
We also had working stomachs, but they were very small and much more efficient at extracting nutrients. Our musculature was living, but was not very functional for much more than shambling around. We also had a few new organs, very small, that brought in oxygen in place of our lungs.
But yes, about 80 % of our bodies were in a slow state of decay. A very slow state, to be sure, and made slower if we could get some human flesh to eat. The fact that I have not rotted away after 40 years tells you just how slow our decay was.
Eventually, we killed the last humans we could get to, meaning everyone on all the continents and larger islands, except for the very far north and Antarctica. Way too cold there for us. We start freezing much sooner than warm blooded lifeforms do.
Humans on small remote islands were safe, because if we entered salt water, we started to decompose fast and no amount of human flesh would fix it. Of course, we had no intelligence, so using boats was out of the question.
Once the supply of human meat was gone, we just wandered around for a few decades. Amazingly, we were pretty good at not getting destroyed by things like falling off cliffs or getting burned in fires or any of the myriad other ways a zombie could be ended. Of course, the fact that animals steered clear of us helped a lot, too.
Sometimes we would wander about, but often we would just sit down in one place, sometimes for months. I’d tell you it was a boring existence, but I really don’t remember much. It’s a fog.
Then, a few years ago, some zombies began to look different. Less decomposed, more human. They moved with more purpose, and most of that purpose was to get far away from the rest of us. Oddly, none of these, let us call them “Unzombies”, triggered our desire to eat their flesh. I strongly suspect that after decades of no use, our sense of smell was gone.
More and more of these new beings appeared. We regarded them with some dim curiosity, but that was all. I remember that one day, the football stadium I had wandered into with maybe 500 other zombies, was looking nearly empty. There were fewer than 50 of us there. I also had the first tickle of awareness that I was feeling different. It was a week before I noticed that the open and rotting wounds on my arms were gone. A few days later, I knew that I must get away from the zombies.
I walked for several hours before I felt a new sensation. It was thirst. I knelt beside a stream and took my first drink of water in over four decades. A few hours after that, I felt hunger, so I ate some berries and some insects. I was getting more human by the hour. Three days later, I found a human camp. They welcomed me.
Now here I sit, fully human again, talking to you. I have few memories of my time as a zombie, and they are fading fast. I’m told that by the end of the month, I won’t remember anything about that time. As for memories from before that time, they are very few and far between. I seem to remember a house in a place with many other houses like it. Sometimes I get flashes of a woman, sometimes I get flashes of a large hairy dog. None of these have much meaning to me now, with one exception.
I’m pretty sure my name was Dan.
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