Death Disguised

The Problem

People get older. That's a fact. In the past people wanted to be able to do something, be a spaceman, be a doctor, be a builder, they wanted the ability to do something useful. They wanted to be able to make society better in whatever way they could and, ideally get some reward for it. They also wanted to progress in whatever sphere they had chosen to practice and learn their skills.

Things changed.

The media brainwashed most of the population to believe that the rich and privileged were the only ones that deserved a good life and rewards, and this group was getting smaller, more privileged and richer by the day.

Outside of this if you asked a young person what they wanted to be when they grew up, the answer would just be one word, "Famous". When pressed on the reason, they could never answer.

Skills and intelligence were being lost and those at the top were fine with that until they realised that one day there would be no one to run systems and improve on present ones because the ones who had always done this were dying and there were no replacements.

The top group had the money but they knew this would fall apart if they could not replace the skilled workers that they had allowed to effectively shuffle off this mortal coil.

Government policies had created a morally bland subclass without anything but the most basic intelligence, they could do basic work and vote how they were told but even reading was becoming a lost art.

Schools and universities had been closed down as unnecessary frivolities, but now people were needed to work the computers and write programs and they weren't going to be found among the plebian population.

The important businesses, banks and the stock exchange needed these talents. These were all that were left after the closure of all manufacturing and service industries, again, these did not matter to the elite.

The Solution

Some had spoken to some Eastern Europeans, Russians or Chinese and they had been given a possible answer to the county's manpower problems. Ironically no one had thought about restarting education, but again the people running the country were only qualified for their posts because their families had paid for their qualifications, they had never attended school or university in their lives, although records said otherwise.

The solution was simple but expensive, but they had the money so that was no problem. Again they would be paying about a hundred times what they had saved from closing down education in the country, but this was not an issue for them.

The people who died still had serviceable brains and could be reanimated with a special chip combined with nutritional drips. The jobs that needed filling were all desk-based, anything that required movement or transportation could be done using drones and robots.

The chipped bodies would do the jobs and nothing else. They would be at their desks twenty-four hours a day and no one would be any the wiser.

They did not need to be paid, they were not fully sentient.

So contracts were drawn up and the revived chipped bodies were soon doing what they had done before they died. The offices were silent barring the click of fingers on keyboards. A peripheral benefit was there was no wage bill, no unions, and no threats of strikes, and the system did enough to keep the elite in the fashion to which they were accustomed.

The chips did their job, the bodies did not think or move, and the system kept going.

What the elite had not factored in was the fact that the chips could be remotely changed or stopped at any time.

They had not considered this and were now completely at the mercy of their suppliers......