Its 6am of an otherwise perfectly normal Monday. Richard was up early… sipping his coffee getting ready to start his day. He couldn’t digest the fact that his Sunday is long gone… which was more or less spent sulking over the inevitable arrival of the evil one i.e., the Monday.
His roommate is as usual in his room behind closed doors. Richard mostly haven’t seen that door open in a really long time. His roommate, Roger, works during the evening shift also on weekends. By the time either comes home, the other is either asleep or is at work. It was a bit strange, having heard some weird noise pretty late at night.
He had to look while as door creaked open. There was something strange about the Roger.. he wasn’t looking at anything… steps heavy and unstable. Arms reaching out for support on the walls and anything in range. Slowly he kept moving. Richard called out… “Hey Roger… you ok buddy?”. The moving figure came to a standstill… but only for a second. And he started moving again. Its been months since he has actually talked to Roger and now clearly something was off. Roger made his way to the bathroom as if he was being pulled towards it by some weak gravitational force. Richard’s eyes followed his roommate till the door was banged closed with a force that the Roger that he was seeing could possibly summon. He didn’t know what was happening.
He had to look while as door creaked open. There was something strange about the Roger.. he wasn’t looking at anything… steps heavy and unstable. Arms reaching out for support on the walls and anything in range. Slowly he kept moving. Richard called out… “Hey Roger… you ok buddy?”. The moving figure came to a standstill… but only for a second. And he started moving again. Its been months since he has actually talked to Roger and now clearly something was off. Roger made his way to the bathroom as if he was being pulled towards it by some weak gravitational force. Richard’s eyes followed his roommate till the door was banged closed with a force that the Roger that he was seeing could possibly summon. He didn’t know what was happening.
He wanted to run away to work and started planning his exit from the apartment they shared for well over 2 years. But something stopped him. After gathering all the courage, he decided to wait and see if there’s any truth to it or was he just bring ridiculous. and again.. the door creaked open. Slowly a figure stepped out of the room and mumbled something.. and that was when he heard it.. “Hey.. Richard.. Good Morning”. Down came the big castles of imagination that Richard was building in his mind. Mostly an aftermath of “Resident Evil” that he had watched yesterday combined with his friend waking up at an unusually early time of the day. Gulping down his ridiculous thoughts, he set forth to a brief conversation and then to his weekly routine.
One might think why this one is a story unlike the previous blogs. Of course this does presume the unlikely chance of the person having read more than one previous posts in the same blog. But make no mistake.. this aint a story either. Without further adieu, lets get into the topic of the day. How and why Roger became a zombie? and what cured him? I’m of the opinion, human brain works remotely similar to how computers works. Which possibly could have something to do with the fact that they were conceptualised and created by brains of the people. In my opinion, what makes a man/woman, a zombie is his limited functioning of the brain. Similar to how if an operating system does not load completely on the computer, maybe the CD drives and all may function but others like interacting with the user may not. Comparing a sleeping person to a computer on screensaver. When you wake up, you would ideally want the screensaver to be gone. But what if you get a blue screen? or it is just stuck? There you have your own personal zombuter. In the case of humans, of course these are not electronics but varying degrees of consciousness.’
There seems to be a ton of different kinds of zombies around. The ones that are addressed in the movies are the super negative variants of the phenomenon. Addressing the rest, i.e., counting only the not-so-super-negative scenarios, for example you have… Morning Zombies, Late night Zombies, Drunken Zombie, Drugged zombie, Meeting Zombies etc etc. The First two occur in nature without much of an external intervention. If one doesn’t get the sleep he needs, the computer that the brain is, sometimes is unable to load it back to the full consciousness level. The third one is pretty obvious. And if “Meeting Zombies…? Really? You couldn’t come up with anything else?” is your first reaction, let me explain. Have you ever been a part of a discussion where you have no clue what you are doing? With all the questions being fired at you from left and right and you got no clue as to what is the right answer? What does one do? You zone out… You zone out till either they decide to take you on or just leave you be. This is only one variant of the same. Another is after a heavy lunch.. again.. you zone out. Not because you don’t know what they are talking about. But because your consciousness tries to leave you and lets you take a good rest and digest the food like a anaconda who just swallowed a buffalo.
Now thats what i am talking about. Zombies are not a myth. There are indeed zombies among us. Some seem to be able to control the transition easily and others not so fast. If you intend to cure your zombie factor, there are various quick remedies… It could be splashing water in the face? (Remember those days in college where you were asked to wash your face and come back to the class room? No? alas.. must be just me then). Some take help of caffeine. A good Strong expresso helps your brain load most of the data which was previously not loaded. Must be the closest thing to a clean up utility that you get on your computer. More difficult solutions include regulating your sleeping patterns so that overtime your brain boots up, everything is done properly and you’re good to go from the word go. Interestingly, sleep brings in a time dynamic to the zombieness of a regular person. It follows an inverted bell curve. The less you sleep, the more the zombie factor in you.. and this is capped at about 8 hours after which its back to the situation where you sleep less.
Coming to the evil kind of non-reversible process commonly known as zombionization... In movies, you would have seen plenty of them. What makes them what they are i believe is if the connections to the brain that dealt with thinking & Pain is disconnected and instead wired into the motor & digestive functions. Maybe that is why they tend to crave food so much that they run behind anyone and anything and try to consume them. If he looks find with no bodily injuries, a cure might be as easy as pulling those wrongly connected plugs and re-connect to the right ones. Now, you wouldn’t want to do that with the ones who are injured already. When you reconnect it, it will be like you’re waking up a guy who passed out because of his Injuries and say.. “Hey, do you feel that now? the pain from all your injuries combined?”. You wouldn’t want to do that now would you? Those ones could be used to save some money at the otherwise super expensive Gun ranges.
That being said, lets show them what we are made of. Zombies are / were humans too. Lets be humane. Lets understand and help them out as much as possible.
