Zombies

I saw in a dream the day the virus spread. It took over humanity so rapidly, and zombified most humans. Not the typical movie of a walking dead, but much the same and as scary. The virus infests a person's brain, confuses it and makes it want to socialise and come in contact with people. It transmits to other people through sneezing, kissing, open wounds and other bodily fluids.

An infected person has no control over his conscious decisions and is most of the times confused. An infected person seeks other people and feels lonely all the time. This way, the virus ensures that it can spread through the population. Loved ones are most susceptible, because they are more prone to come to each other and they usually cannot resist the urge to touch their beloved, even if they are infected. It was hard to see my loved ones get infected by the virus. How they all seemed lost in their thoughts, walking blindly around trying to find affection from others. It was even more painful to leave my wife when I realized she had become confused. 

All it took were three days for the virus to spread so rapidly. The virus itself is not lethal, for it does not impede normal bodily functions or destroys cells. However, it removes our conscious identity. An infected person is like a newborn trying to understand the world in which he has arrived. That person can still do normal tasks though. Infected people will still go to work, drive a car and cook. They usually do not even realize they have become infected. For when they lose their self-awareness they act like highly intelligent animals without a superior motif in life.

FutureLabs could not do much to fight the epidemic. They had made the virus themselves, but unintentionally. And the speed by which it spread and its subtlety (for no one really realized until day two what was really happening around the world) was unaccounted for. No cure was available. Those of us who managed to live the third day sought each other and tried to avoid the infected. But the infected craved for us. They drove to us and phoned us, cried for us to be with them, for them not to be lonely. And we had to try and explain to them, as in explaining to a newborn in a confused sleep-like state, the situation. Our efforts to make them realize their state was of course futile. We escaped, and we came here, to the house upon the hill in the woods. 

There are 30 of us here and we are ready to fight the infected. Whether we will have the courage to do whatever it takes to keep them away is our biggest struggle. How can we prevent them from approaching us when they do not consciously have control over their decisions? When they do not understand what it means to "stay back"?

Yet, here they come. From the window of the attic I could see around fifty cars driving towards the hill. They are coming for us. Their loneliness has overtook them, and now they seek conscious company. 

They drive into the open field in front of the house and out of their cars they come. They look around confused, as they normally do. They look at each other and at the sky and then at the house. They moan and say mumbled words between them. Then they walk towards the house crying for us. 

"Why do you leave us?", they cry, "Why are you hiding from your families? Are we not also humans?"

Some of us in the house shed tears. Those people outside were once like us, normal. Some of us even recognized their family members. And then, amongst them, I could see her. I could see my wife wondering about the cars outside looking at the sky, confused. I felt like a knife stab me in the heart. 

More of them came. There were now over a hundred zombified people walking around outside the house. 

We could not let them come close. A single breath from one of them would immediately infect us. One hug, one kiss, one tear from these zombies is all it took to come in contact with us, and destroy our consciousness. Human identity would be lost forever.

They knocked on the door. We looked at each other. One of us came out with a knife from the kitchen. We would have to defend ourselves. We had to kill these humans to survive. I went to the pantry and got a long pike the previous owners used for their garden. The door knocked again, and the zombies were now shouting at us for not letting them in. 

Suddenly, the door burst open. One of them had kicked it in. For a moment, the 30 of us looked at the door, and in the doorway a dozen men and women looked at us back with blank stares. I could see no soul lurking within them.

One of them took a step forward and said "Don't run from us please, all we want is to be with you". That is all he said before I saw a knife protruding out of his forehead. One of us had threw a knife at him, and hit him straight where he aimed. The remaining zombies looked at the dead body and showed no emotion whatsoever. 

They looked back at us and one of them said "Why did you have to kill him? Please let us in, we are lonely. All we want is to love you. All we want is to be with you."

They all started moving in. Our group hesitated. Then we all realized this was our last chance to live. To survive the infection and live to be humans. I charged a man and piked him on my stick. Blood gushed from his neck and he screeched with pain. Tears shed down my face. These were all human beings after all, even if they had lost their identities. 

We fought them off. There were hundreds of them now, coming in few by few in the house. I tried to look for her but I couldn't find her. I couldn't find my wife. Then she appeared in the doorway. I could see her beautiful brown hair tied in a ponytail and her eyes. They were once beautiful and she always smiled. But she was now sullen and appeared lost. 

I knew what I had to do. I knew I had to kill her. And I wanted to be the one to end her life and not someone else. I moved two steps forward.

The zombies suddenly turned, and walked away from the house. My wife immediately took a step outside and I lost her from my sight. All the zombies went back into their cars, and one by one they drove off away from the house on the hill. 

What had happened?

A few days now passed, and there were new reports being aired on the television. Something had killed the virus. Some said that the virus was not adapted to living in humans and so it died off naturally. The most saddening fact, however, was that the infected had remained confused. They were human husks, empty from inside, no emotions, no purpose in life. The government collected all of the zombies into "camps" for rehabilitation. There was said to be psychiatric help given at the camps, but what really happened in them was not very clear. I do not know where my wife is. I do not know if she still lives, but I will find her. I've heard rumours that some conscious people that I know had seen her drive off to the south. 

I'm driving there now, to one of the largest psychiatric camps in this country. I will find my wife, and do whatever it takes to be with her. I do not truly believe whoever she was is lost. I do not believe she has no soul. I still have hope. I still believe in her. This is my purpose now, to find her.

Not just to find her unconscious walking body, but to find her and all we shared together, our memories and our life again. That person I once loved still lurks on this world, and I'll do whatever it takes to go to it and reclaim it back. After all, what makes us humans? Isn't it to hope and love, and to give to those who have lost all they've got part of what we still have? 

How Is Science Our Legacy and Written Knowledge Our Purpose?

I would like you to think about your life and your purpose in it. What are you aiming to achieve here, living for a split second on the cosmic time scale? How will your life affect the lives of others and the planet on which you live? Are you even looking for a purpose?

We are born knowing nothing of this world. Over our first years we take in information about our surroundings and build our senses. In our youth we build our emotions and connections with others of our species. And over the first 20 years we learn about technology and history and how to communicate this, as our forefathers did with us, to the next generations.

Then, you start work. There are three kinds of work you can do in life. Firstly, you can be a slave to others. This is the kind of job where you follow a monotonous routine given to you by your employers. Your day consists of a ritualized regime serving the needs of your company. This is the least fulfilling of jobs.

Secondly, there is service. This work consists of taking your own decisions in providing a service to others. This can include work as an entrepreneur or a business man or a doctor diagnosing people. In a service job, your brain is used in solving problems that are immediate and at hand. This can be a fulfilling job if what you aim for is the satisfaction of the present.

Lastly, there is the work of written legacy. This is the most fulfilling of jobs and has the most impact on society. A job that deals with written legacy includes any work in which you come up with new and innovative ideas that may be passed down the generations to alter the lives of other people. This is usually done by passing on what you discover in written form. Our ancestors first began their written legacy by inventing language. Some time after this, mathematics was invented, which was later used to understand and write about physics. Chemistry was also a new form of written legacy describing the material world.

Every job that entails the discovery of something new that may affect society can be considered as legacy. A person that leaves part of his life's work in the collective legacy can feel as if he had purpose in life.

Science is an example of a work entailing written legacy. Science is a treasure trove of knowledge in which discoveries are written down and shared with society. This, however, does not make science the only meaningful field of work. Any type of work, from slave work to service, to low profile written legacy, can be promoted to a more fulfilling job.

A doctor providing service can come up with innovative ways to treat patients and leave a legacy behind. A person working in a factory may come up with an idea for a new product. What we leave behind when we die will be the product of our work's legacy. A slave's life may have little impact on our planet. To dream in leaving behind a legacy may give your purpose to live.

This, of course, does not mean that a slave worker may not have purpose. His purpose may be to serve as a slave in order to sustain his family. A person that is writing down a legacy, on the other hand, may not have a purpose still. However, it is far more likely for a person to find purpose in life if he realizes that what he does in a large part of this life is going to affect society.

For when a person dies, what he leaves behind are memories of his life that will slowly fade with the passing of time. But when a person leaves behind a legacy, his memory may be forgotten, but his legacy will ripple through the ages in our society for countless years to come.