Our interview this chapter is with an Israeli spy although of course he can’t say that outright. From the sounds of it he’s really a guy in the intelligence agency rather than the person who actually goes out and does spy stuff. For obvious reasons, it’s the latter where secrecy is a big deal.

(Though come to think of it, considering the death toll even that shouldn’t matter by now. The reason to keep former spies a secret has more to do with protecting their contacts.)

But on to what the guy actually has to say.

Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness that’s just human nature.

Christ.

It’s not just that this is bullshit, it’s that the author’s own story shows it’s bullshit.

What was the backstory for last chapter’s character? Why, that his father heard something and believed it. Humans believe things other people say might happen in the future. It’s part of being human. It’s what separates us from inanimate objects, viruses and maybe some of the more primitive bacteria. The ability to get advance information from the environment is found in very nearly all life on Earth.

When a foundation of your book is that automatic responses in tadpoles are more intelligent than the human race, it’s hard to care about the fate of the shambling idiots you’ve arbitrarily claimed are not zombies.

But! Not everyone is like that. Israel is special, because Israel.

I guess what it really comes down to is the randomness of birth. I happened to be born into a group of people who live in constant fear of extinction. It’s part of our identity, part of our mind-set, and it has taught us through horrific trial and error to always be on our guard.

This sort of thing is more commonly found in the wild neocon, but you’ll see overlap with the more military fetish liberal. As here, this will usually end in the delusion that Israel is some sort of superstate whose perfect government is fighting a flawless battle against the evil empires that surround them, as opposed to just a highly militarized state with a lot of resources and somewhat less fanaticism than those around it.

But if you’re a fan of Israel, the mary sue state, this is the book for you.

They learn of the zombie thing because he gets complaints from Taiwan about a decryption program: Apparently it was failing to decode some e-mails from PRC sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible.
…I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself…it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berserker.

But only he’s bright enough to consider such brilliant insights as “hey, maybe they’re just talking in code” instead of the idea that the program is producing nonsense that just happens to look exactly like zombie fanfic.

No one seems to realize there’s perfectly good third options here. For example, what about a disease that caused brain death but left enough of the brainstem functioning that the body was still alive? I mean, people tend to think that brain damage either leaves you kind of messed up or puts you in a coma, which is missing that there’s lots of people that open their eyes again but never do anything more. The lights are on and there’s something still twitching inside, but it’s not them. It’s not even anything resembling them. So a disease that kill you and reanimates the body: massive brain damage, short coma, wake up with what’s left of you a biting zombie. The reason it sounds like the bodies are fully dead is translation differences and/or the initial reports being confused about exactly what’s happening.

He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn’t say anything at first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these golems weren’t made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient.

I don’t know where the don’t-say-the-z-word convention started, but everyone involved in it should be hanged.

Yes, the story of the golem is Jewish legend. Yes, this guy is Jewish. No, that doesn’t mean it’s any less FUCKING STUPID to have him act like that’s the one and only time nonliving things have moved in fiction.

Hell, original flavor zombies are already docile and obedient! If, because you’ve suffered enough brain damage it sounds like a good idea, you insist on writing your “realistic” fiction in an alternate world where there are no modern zombie stories, then you’d just go back to the older ones. So let’s try this again:

He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told
him some stories about zombies. You know about zombies, the old legends about witch doctors who dig up corpses for servants? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn’t say anything at first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these zombies weren’t made by anyone, nor were they docile and obedient.

There.

Other points of comparison include ghouls, the original term used in Night of the Living Dead to refer to what later becomes known as zombies and mythological term that more closely fits their actual behavior (ghouls in mythology are sometimes said to feed only on the dead, but just as often are opportunistic hunters. The man went on blathering about how these ghouls didn’t hide away in graveyards, nor did they only eat the dead.)

But anyway, so, he follows up on that, hears all sorts of stuff about what was going on in the hospital, then goes to tell his bosses that hey, zombie apocalypse.

Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper.

I have no idea what Israel’s official policy is. Whatever it is exactly, I’m confident it’s not what he’s outlining here, because what he’s outlining is only possible in Infinite Resource Fantasyland. A country that actually acted like this could be defeated by just throwing information at them and letting them chase ghosts until they ran out of people.

Also, do Israelis actually use Hitler for cheap points like this? I admit I don’t really follow the rhetoric here, but I thought they understood that there are Jewish people in more than just their one country at least.

But whatever. Israel, as part of its sueishness, only ever follows up on extremely unlikely things when it’s a good idea, so he has plenty of time to investigate the zombie thing without getting sidetracked by the Cthulhu Commission.

At first it wasn’t easy. With China out of the picture…the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gathering…I was left with very few sources of information.

Because no average person as any way of “sending” “information”. It’s solely the province of spy folk, so anything that upsets that cuts off communication entirely. Oh, if only there was some sort of “electronic mail” that would allow people to talk to others across the globe! Or some sort of “electric bulletin board” allowing someone to post a message for anyone else to read! If only.

After a while I started to uncover more useful data: cases of “rabies” similar to Cape Town…it wasn’t called African rabies until later.

The book will keep bringing up the rabies thing as if it’s one of the fuckups. It isn’t. Rabies is 90% of what you need to know to contain this. It travels by the same infection vectors as rabies, it makes people bite and transmit it like rabies, it’s deadly like rabies. Thinking it’s rabies is all you need to know to effectively quarantine the infected – if bite mark or crazy, then remove from the population. The zombie info about dead bodies and aiming for the head only matters after the infection becomes widespread. Before that, rounding up and restraining the corpses would work fine. And by rounding them up like it’s rabies, they’d have plenty of zombies on hand to experiment on and figure out what’s really happening.

I uncovered the psychological evaluations of some Canadian mountain troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I found the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about the murder of a heart surgeon.

You may recall that he’s referring to two previous events. From the sounds of it, this guy did the research for the main character. Also, what are the odds that people from those incidents would be left? Supposedly there’s some enormous death toll, you know?

I found incidents all over the world, all of them dismissed with “plausible” explanations.

Nope.

Bodies don’t just disappear. Even if we pretend that by chance every one of these zombies had their head blown off before anyone could get a good look at them, there’d still be an autopsy which would show that a)the body had died well prior to the headshot b) weird black goo c) whatever other changes happen to the body – we’ll be seeing they have a lot of bizarre traits.

And it’d only take one intact zombie head for scientists to study to know exactly what’s going on.

Anyway, he figures out that this means zombies, because sue sue sue sue sue sue sue sue. Can we get more sueishness?

I also made one very encouraging discovery: how to terminate their existence.

Yes, we can.

He can not only figure out that there’s zombies from a few confused tales about crazy cannibals, he can figure out their one weakness.

Okay, time to hear an attempt at realism.

We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn’t destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn’t it the only way to annihilate us as well?
You mean human beings?
[He nods.] Isn’t that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and “The Undead.” Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself.

Okay, the brain is just a brain. If it’s intact but no longer connected to anything, nothing happens. The brain is not biting people. The brain is not grabbing people. The brain is not walking, moaning, or anything else. The brain’s purpose is to send directions to the rest of the body so it does things. So, no, there’s more to this than just the brain. There’s also the rest of the body. You fucking moron.

This is without getting into the fact the zombies obviously lack most brain functions. Insects with grass seed brains are smarter than they are. Obviously 99.9% of the brain is no longer doing jack shit. Why would taking out, say, the clearly inactive frontal lobes help?

Then he goes to consult his friend, who by coincidence has just finished figuring out the exact same thing. So they write the first anti-zombie report thing, which no one listens to because REALISM.

There were fifteen other names on that report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journalists, even one UN observer who’d been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first outbreak hit Indonesia.

Somehow even the journalists can’t manage to get anyone listening to such a dry, boring subject as the dead walking the earth to kill the living.

He mentions the South African plan, which is what ended up being used, and that it wouldn’t have been necessary if people had listened. Israel the sue state is the only one who listened. Because not only was this report somehow missed, it was missed even with a country following it.

Because no one ever just whipped out a cellphone to take a video of a zombie. There will be all of one meaningful mention of the internet as useful for information transfer, and it’s going to be idiotic. The author lives in a world where important men making important decisions control all the information.