I know you visualise me shambling about and grunting "BRAINS!" I know because everybody thinks that way– the B-thriller stereotype. I wouldn't have behaved that way while alive, and see no reason why undeath should cause a complete loss of taste. Look at vampires, after all; you might not like what they stand for, but they've got style.
Inhuman patience and a lack of all emotions except for murderous rage are useful when commuting to work – they put you more on the level of the drivers around you, and they don't even have the excuse of undeadness. Undeath? At least, I don't think many of them do.
Would I eat your brains if I got the chance? Probably, yes. Periodic feeding frenzies where bone or belt-buckle have been attacked as enthusiastically as flesh have left my teeth in dreadful shape, jagged and broken, and soft tissue is much easier to absorb. I'd certainly eat the brains of the person who wrote this accounting program, but I suspect they wouldn't add up to more than a light snack.
I won't dress up in rags, either. I was already too old to appreciate the punk scene and, being comfortably dead, am not tempted to learn a new fashion consciousness. So I shower each morning as unthinkingly as before the change, and put on a shirt while hoping, insofar as 'hope' is an option for one of us, that I can get through the day without it getting blood-saturated and needing dry cleaning.
Actually, I don't think my direct superior in the office hierarchy has ever noticed I've died; the nerve damage that stops us from feeling pain (or pleasure, or anything else much) is as nothing beside the normal human ability to rationalise away, or simply not see any information which does not gibe with their accepted universe-image. I would like him to be there next time go through a crisis, but suspect narrative requirements will leave him ignorant to the end, when comes flaming torch and pitchfork time.
So, I shamble to work and, after a day's undeath of entering irrelevant figures into an incomprehensible Exel document, shamble back to the car to drive home. Driving unobservantly, with ill-controlled last-minute corrections, about like all the other drivers on the road.
Once a week I go to a disco, where my spastic, mindless movements draw so little attention that there could well be dozens of us in there. I know that, should the rage take me I'd attack others of my own kind as violently as unchanged humans, assuming there were any.
For that is, of course, the question – have we already? Is the Earth now inhabited by pain-free, mindless, ill-coördinated ex-humans, free of all desire except during an occasional fleshfest? From watching television or during my occasional supermarket trips I see no contradictory evidence. Would anyone even notice if the last battle had been, and gone, the last human transformed, and the last vestiges of human creativity devoured?
Inhuman patience and a lack of all emotions except for murderous rage are useful when commuting to work – they put you more on the level of the drivers around you, and they don't even have the excuse of undeadness. Undeath? At least, I don't think many of them do.
Would I eat your brains if I got the chance? Probably, yes. Periodic feeding frenzies where bone or belt-buckle have been attacked as enthusiastically as flesh have left my teeth in dreadful shape, jagged and broken, and soft tissue is much easier to absorb. I'd certainly eat the brains of the person who wrote this accounting program, but I suspect they wouldn't add up to more than a light snack.
I won't dress up in rags, either. I was already too old to appreciate the punk scene and, being comfortably dead, am not tempted to learn a new fashion consciousness. So I shower each morning as unthinkingly as before the change, and put on a shirt while hoping, insofar as 'hope' is an option for one of us, that I can get through the day without it getting blood-saturated and needing dry cleaning.
Actually, I don't think my direct superior in the office hierarchy has ever noticed I've died; the nerve damage that stops us from feeling pain (or pleasure, or anything else much) is as nothing beside the normal human ability to rationalise away, or simply not see any information which does not gibe with their accepted universe-image. I would like him to be there next time go through a crisis, but suspect narrative requirements will leave him ignorant to the end, when comes flaming torch and pitchfork time.
So, I shamble to work and, after a day's undeath of entering irrelevant figures into an incomprehensible Exel document, shamble back to the car to drive home. Driving unobservantly, with ill-controlled last-minute corrections, about like all the other drivers on the road.
Once a week I go to a disco, where my spastic, mindless movements draw so little attention that there could well be dozens of us in there. I know that, should the rage take me I'd attack others of my own kind as violently as unchanged humans, assuming there were any.
For that is, of course, the question – have we already? Is the Earth now inhabited by pain-free, mindless, ill-coördinated ex-humans, free of all desire except during an occasional fleshfest? From watching television or during my occasional supermarket trips I see no contradictory evidence. Would anyone even notice if the last battle had been, and gone, the last human transformed, and the last vestiges of human creativity devoured?
