Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford Page B

though,” I told her, blandly. “Think how much worse it would be if the Americans and Australians were functionally literate. As things stand, the British rank second only to the Dutch when it comes to competence in the English language, so if anyone can compete with the Indians, it’s us…though not, alas, on the cost of labor.”
    She didn’t formulate the ghost of a laugh. It wasn’t surprising—the joke about the Dutch was very old, and I’d been very careful to maintain the earnestness of my facial expression. Not that she would have noticed, given the lengths to which she was going in order to avoid eye contact. Pink obviously wasn’t her favourite color.
    “As it happens,” she told me, “there is a training program in web content provision for which I can sign you up. All home study, two months’ duration if you pass all the stages at the first attempt. There’s no guarantee of a job at the end of it, I’m afraid, but it will add an extra string to your bow.”
    I already knew that several of the regulars at the Center, including Stan Blake, had gone through half a dozen such home-study programs already, and now had enough strings to their bow to call it a guitar and play Smoke on the Water —but no actual job. I also knew that I had to accept the offer, because participation in the program offered a small increase in my dole, and the threat of a cut if I refused.
    “I’ll be happy to give it a try,” I assured her, knowing that there was a sequence of tick-boxes on her digipad where she had to pass judgment on my attitude. I’d had some fun with those tick-boxes in my time, and I’d cut it rather fine with the marginally flippant remarks I’d already made.
    “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll email all the forms, and you can start tomorrow. Will you be using the workstations here?”
    “No,” I said. “I’m one of the rare zombies who still has a home of sorts, in the bosom of his family.”
    Mercifully, she didn’t say: “Good luck with that.”
    As chance would have it, my “literacy skills” had already found a demand of sorts within the Center, where the workstations were in more-or-less continuous use, and not just for government-sponsored training schemes. At least three of the old guard, including Methuselah, were busy writing their autobiographies, and at least three of the intermediate generation were getting heavily into zombie rights e-forums. Once the rumor had got around that I was more reliable than mechanical spellcheckers and grammar-checkers, I’d been appointed the Center’s volunteer proofreader-in-chief.
    “I know it’s rather boring,” Methuselah told me, when I’d looked over his latest chapter later that afternoon, “but it’s an important project nevertheless. The afterliving are, after all, the only people properly qualified to write autobiographies—not only because their lives are complete but because their point of view is, if not absolutely objective, at least definitively external.” He really did talk like that—you can imagine how he wrote, and why he was in need of a proofreader. On the other hand, I could see distinct similarities between his writing style and my own…which, I suppose, only increased my value as an editorial adviser.
    “I can see your point,” I conceded.
    “Then again,” he said, “it might turn out to be an invaluable exercise from the personal point of view. Whether or not, and to what extent, I’m a different person now from the one I used to be, I’ll certainly become increasingly distanced from him as time goes by. If I don’t record my impressions of my living self now, in as much detail as I can, I might lose part or all of it. You should write your life story too, you know, even though you died so young…especially because you died so young. You don’t want to lose touch with the person you once were.”
    “If he was actually anyone at all,” I said. “He’d been a trifle lazy, I fear—he always