Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford Page A

can’t control the Burkers’ selection policies. That’s a matter for the law and their own Ethics Committees.”
    Stupid name, Burkers,” was his reply to that. “Where does it come from, anyway?” Evidently, no one had told him about Burke and Hare, the archetypal Resurrection Men.
    “It’s from Edmund Burke,” I told him, earnestly. “The man who wrote a classic essay on the aesthetics of the sublime. It’s because their work is essentially sublime and transcendent—a crucial enhancement of the human condition.”
    I didn’t mention Burke’s contention that the sublime always had an element of horror in it, even though I knew about it. It was because I’d done English Lit at university that I’d ended up in the Civil Service rather than some line of work that might qualify as “wealth-creating,” and that was still a slightly sore point with Dad, who’d rather I’d gone into business, and would probably have settled for Burking in a pinch.
    Except, of course, that I handed “ended up” in the Civil Service at all. I’d almost certainly have to change career, now that my application to rejoin the Great Bureaucratic Army had been rejected—or, as the letter from the OO had actually put it “held in suspension until a suitable appointment becomes available.” Nowadays, no one ever gets turned down; they merely get placed in a potentially-endless queue; it makes legal redress so much harder to obtain.
    “That’s ridiculous,” Dad said, perceptively—but at least he took the hint and dropped the discussion…and didn’t pick it up the following day, being prepared for once in his life actually to let the Sabbath function as a day of rest.
    On Monday, after rockmobility, I submitted meekly to my appointment to discuss my reconfigured career prospects with my employment counsellor, who visited the Center for that purpose. She was very sympathetic, of course; that was in her script. She was younger than me, so I knew that she wasn’t long out of training, and that the script would be fresh in her mind.
    “I can understand why you want to maintain career continuity, Mr. Rosewell,” she assured me, “but the fact is that the Ombudman’s Office isn’t really in a position to recruit just now. The government is attempting to revise the whole system of handling grievances, and while you might eventually be able to obtain an appointment in whatever administrative structure replaces the OO, that’s not likely to happen for some time. Even if you hadn’t had your…accident, it might have been high time to think about retraining.”
    “It wasn’t an accident,” I pointed out, mildly. “I was murdered. Cruelly slain while hurrying back to work after my lunch-break, in order to fulfil my duty to Crown and Country.”
    “Unfortunately,” she continued, unfazed, “the five years of experience you accumulated in the OO aren’t really sufficient to place you in a competitive situation, at a time when there are a great many displaced civil servants jockeying for a relatively limited number of new situations, and your educational qualifications are rather devoid of vocational components . Nothing very practical , or even mathematical .”
    “I did the scientific component of the bac,” I pointed out. “It’s compulsory.”
    “For which reason, everyone else of a similar age has done it too,” she countered. “Your scores are good, admittedly, but not that good, considering the intense competitiveness of the current employment environment. Given your literacy levels, it might be better to think in terms of something along the lines of web content provision.”
    “I thought all that sort of work had been subcontracted to India—which is, I guess, where the substitute for the Ombudsman’s Office is likely to end up.”
    “It is the sort of field in which competition is effectively global,” she admitted, with a slight and presumably-unscripted sigh.
    “It’s not as bad as all that,