Death

by Hyun Choul Kim

against the law of nature.

  The life here is a nightmare. I don't know for how long I've been sleeping. Sometimes when I wake up, I remember things as I dreamed them, but most I don’t remember. Every time I wake up I think one or two zombies are gone and a different zombie had come in. I don't know how I work. One thing that I'm sure of is that we're no longer humans. I heard that humans put existence before essence. We're not humans according to this, because we put essence before existence.

  I need to wash up when I'm conscious. Like zombies, we don't wash. There is a faucet above my head. Nothing covers me. Who cares if someone sees me? No one will watch anyway, and even if someone does see me, would he remember what he saw? While I'm washing, one female zombie comes up to me. She's barely wearing anything, but she takes off all the clothes and opens up her legs to show me everything, and runs into me. She's probably ovulating. She would come to me even if I tried to kill her. I let her do whatever she needed to do. I was scared. Freud once said, 'women's genital area is not a thing that exists but an empty space needing something and a hole opened up towards men. That's why men are afraid of it. ’ I need to think when I'm conscious; whatever that is.

  Humans try to be perfect. Sometimes people let go of everything they ever wanted just to be perfect. However, we know that perfection is not good. There is something called the paradox of a vacuum cleaner. If vacuum cleaners could really make vacuum, would it be able to clean? The answer is 'no'. To make the space between a vacuum cleaner and the floor to be cleaned close to 'vacuum', all the dust will stay in the place and the cleaner would be difficult to move around. If vacuum cleaners become real vacuum, it would not suit its purpose. Vacuum cleaners shouldn't be a vacuum in order to clean. We all want perfection, but we all like the people who are not perfect. There's only one reason. Those people are more humane.

  Patients with stage 3 symptoms in the farm are confined separately according to their gender, but the zombies with stage 4 symptoms stay together in one place. This makes the male zombies get on female zombies, but the female zombies welcome them. This happened to the zombies who became grandalphas at young age. Ovulating female zombies sometimes approach to the male zombies that they like and rub their bodies against the male zombies and actively woo them. Then they kill male zombies when they're on their period.

  Some of the female zombies get pregnant. They stay with us if they can work, but they disappear one day. Nobody knows where they go.

  I stayed conscious for a long time today. I was me when I started working. It was a sowing work. I remembered sowing and planting with my children before. I'm breaking into tears. I hope my children are all fine. I fall asleep again.

  9Recovery

  I woke up with a tremendous amount of pain. One zombie was biting on my arm. The other zombies were standing around me in a circle, looking down on me. They were all drooling over me. One zombie was lifting up my clothes to bite my stomach. I tried so hard to get away, but I couldn't move my body. I tried every possible way to get out, but my body couldn’t move as if I was frozen, and the zombies were eating me. If this could be the only way to die.

  I'm completely covered in sweat. Where am I? Am I conscious? Or am I dreaming?

  I slowly look around, and I'm back in reality. I got kicked out of the farm 3 years ago, and I still dream every night. Well, I'm not sure if I'm still dreaming, or if that's the reality. I'm confused.

  It's been over 40 years since I had the last Shield injection, and I started to have strange symptoms in my body. I started to wake up from my sleep, my body started to age, and I couldn't do much work as I used to. The farm gave me 2 sets of clothes, 1 pair of shoes, a one-way domestic bus ticket to anywhere I wanted to go, and some money for one meal.

  “With the effort of grandalphas, we're back at the economic standard of early 2090s. Grandalphas gave us hard times, but they were also victims. They were our parents, siblings, friends, and classmates. We survived, but they had to give up their lives. The damage that came from grandalphas was only about the amount of the economic growth they made and then took away as they were isolated from our society. Now we need to thank them. They recovered all the damages they made with their blood and sweat." A man in a suit is giving a speech on TV. He's probably the president or someone like that.

  “We've been treating them worse than animals, but they’ve helped us rebuild our economy through the choices they made, and the things that we needed but didn't seem possible. Some of them live better lives now, but they're still doing the things that we don't want to do or think dangerous and avoid doing. Now they need to be respected as human beings and their human rights need to be secured. We need to return some of the fruits we have now. They were treated like animals until several years ago. They didn't even have food and shelter guaranteed, and they were either kicked our or left to die. We will pay the right amount of money for the people who are working now. We also need to provide some form of compensation for the people who couldn't die there but were kicked out." When I heard this man in a suit say the word people and human rights, I felt shivers coming down my spine. 'Now we're called humans, not zombies or grandalphas.'

  The man in the suit on TV is probably the president. I'm not sure if I could believe everything he is saying though. The scene changed and a person from the Ministry of Health and Welfare started to speak. "If we pay all the people who worked at the farm the absolute standard of living, then we'll be spending the money from other welfare policy. Therefore, this can only work out after securing the budget to pay their salary.”

  A reporter responds. "The number of grandalphas that approached 30 million continuously decreased, and currently there are about 2 million grandalphas working in the farm. About 3 hundred thousand people are estimated to be kicked out or escaped from the farm. Therefore about 2.3million people are the subjects who will be receiving the payments. Although we provide the absolute standard of living, this number is too big that we won't be able to execute this considering the national economy. This is what the opposition party thinks.”

  “I won't deny how much they tried to rebuild our economy, but as much as they helped us, our financial standing isn't exactly stable now. If we already look for where to spend money as we began to recover, we will soon go back to the hard times again. There are so many welfare policies starting out for the commoners. We need to be reasonable on making decisions especially when the issue is spending money." said the man in a suit. Is this the president? He seemed quite satisfied for delivering the message of what is needed to give anything to people like us, the grandalphas.

  I don't care whether they give me money or not. I'm just thankful that they see me as a human being now.

  I am now living in a small house with a small garden, farming up in the mountains. I have a battery-powered TV, broken bowls, pots, spoon and chopsticks, and nothing more. I farm in the day time, pick up firewood’s, herbs, and some greens for food. When there is nothing to eat, I will just starve. It's been several years since I saw a person. The Machiavelli intelligence hypothesis is as follows. 'the improvement in intelligence by the size of the brain is based on the demands of social world, not on the epidemic world.' If I live alone like this, would I have lower intelligence and won't even know that I'm dying?

  It's been snowing since morning. It's not the same warm snow that I used to see when I was little, but snow in the mountains is very beautiful. The snow seems to be warming up the weather a little bit. I won't be able to do anything today because of the snow. My wife's face haunts me. Where would she be? I need to think when I'm conscious.

  There was a time when I looked at death differently.

  We were born in 1D, as we define it. A different world would have existed before although we don't know about it. In 1D, things only moved forward or backward. We knew that there were sideways, but it was impossible to go sideways. When I meet someone like me, I could move forward only if that person moves forward, and if
they don’t move, I also have to stop. We need to stick together as if it's our destiny. This relationship with that existence always stays the same; one in the front, one in the back.

  In 1D, the existence "I" comes to death. I die in 1D, and then come to the world of 2D where I could also go sideways. Now I'm finally at the place that I dreamed of. However, I don't remember anything from the 1D world. Therefore I'm not grateful that I'm born into the 2D world, but I complain about the problems of 2D. I complain about not being able to go up in the 2D world. We are now able to live as far as we can; sideways from each other. If someone doesn't move forward, I can go sideways and go ahead of him.

  We die in 2D. Now I'm born into the 3D world that I'm currently living in. I finally conquered height. However, I don't remember anything from the 2D world. I can jump up and move forward without going sideways. However, our major movement patterns are the same as 2D. Height was conquered, but our bodies live in the 2D plane. Even though we get on the plane, we need to come down to the floor at some point. We live in the 3D world, but we can't go past time. If I die, I'd be able to move time freely. If souls live in the 4D world, and if