Their bodies stay dead. Their jobs keep clocking in.
The first insult was not that the dead kept working.
The first insult was that everybody acted surprised.
Like we have not been training for this the whole time.
Like the average person does not already walk into work half-dead, spiritually microwaved, financially held hostage, smiling at strangers while their soul quietly packs a bag and leaves through the back door.
We were already ghosts with direct deposit.
The universe just removed the wet parts.
Not some pale dead woman crawling across the ceiling with her hair in her face like she just discovered a Ring camera.
Their bodies stayed dead.
In whatever final overpriced container their family bought while a funeral director with shark eyes explained the payment plan like grief came with optional upgrades.
Their jobs kept showing up.
That was the part nobody could swallow.
Judge Marlowe was the first case everyone heard about, mostly because judges already feel like haunted furniture when they’re alive.
Old man. Dry mouth. Dry eyes. Dry soul.
The kind of man who could ruin your life before lunch, then ask his assistant if the tuna sandwich had too much mayo.
He died in his kitchen at 4:13 in the morning.
Oatmeal cooling beside him like even breakfast had lost respect.
Very “local news will say beloved community figure even though half the town quietly wished him athlete’s foot in his heart.”
By 9:00 a.m., his courtroom was packed.
No old bastard glaring down from the bench like justice had constipation.
The court stenographer started crying, but her machine kept typing. Motions were denied. Objections were sustained. A sentencing order printed from the clerk’s office with Marlowe’s signature at the bottom, sharp and mean as ever.
A defense attorney whispered, “Your Honor?”
Of course it said nothing.
There was no honor in the room.
No glowing blue grandpa saying, “Tell my wife I always loved her.”
Just the part the world had actually been using.
Across town, Mrs. Hembry had been dead for six days.
Face near the mashed potatoes.
One second she was asking whether the green beans needed salt, next second she had resigned from biology.
She had taught fourth grade for thirty years.
Thirty years of crayons, permission slips, juice boxes, spelling tests, head lice alerts, and parents who thought their little Brayden was gifted because he once spelled dinosaur without crying.
Her funeral was Saturday.
By Monday morning, the chalk in Room 204 lifted by itself and wrote:
OPEN YOUR BOOKS TO PAGE 118.
The principal came in with the stiff little walk of a man who owned three leadership books and no useful instincts.
He tried to erase the board.
The eraser flew across the room and hit him in the chest.
By noon, the class was quiet.
By Friday, reading scores were up.
And that was when people started getting uncomfortable.
Because the haunting worked.
It did not bleed from the walls.
It did not drag anyone into hell.
A cashier died at Register Four in a grocery store outside Dayton.
Her name was Linda, though the news quickly reduced her to “a cashier,” because apparently once your heart stops, society starts speed-running your erasure.
Linda had bad knees, three grandkids, a purse full of receipts, and the dead-eyed patience of a woman who had heard “must be free then” eight thousand times and somehow never committed a righteous felony.
She dropped during the evening rush.
They covered her body with a blue plastic tablecloth from the seasonal aisle because dignity costs extra after 7 p.m.
The next morning, Register Four opened by itself.
A man placed a frozen pizza on the belt because mankind is brave when slightly inconvenienced.
Even dead, Linda was not entertaining that broke nonsense.
People screamed at first.
Then they got used to it.
That took about three days.
That is the part about human beings nobody wants to admit.
If a demon crawled out of the toilet tomorrow, half the population would panic, and the other half would ask if it knew how to fix the water pressure.
Captain Reeves died in a hotel room before a morning flight to Atlanta. The airline released a statement so polished and empty Satan probably uses it as a bathroom mirror.
The usual corporate grief confetti.
Then Flight 604 boarded anyway.
Nobody knew why the plane pushed back from the gate.
Nobody touched the throttle.
Nobody made an announcement.
Inside the locked cockpit, the captain’s seat moved like an invisible body had settled into it. Switches flipped. Engines woke up. The co-pilot saw the yoke move by itself and fainted like an old-timey widow seeing an ankle at a funeral.
The plane took off clean.
Then they realized nobody alive had flown the plane and got quiet real fast.
That silence spread through the cabin like God had just walked in holding a clipboard.
The experts arrived after that.
Experts always arrive once the nightmare has already figured out how to invoice you.
They named it Post-Mortem Functional Persistence.
Take something morally disgusting, give it a clean little name, and suddenly everyone can discuss it under fluorescent lighting with bottled water and a PowerPoint.
Post-Mortem Functional Persistence.
Because nothing says “humanity has fallen ass-first into a spiritual sewer” like an acronym.
The dead were not conscious.
The dead were not suffering.
As far as anyone could tell, no soul was trapped inside the chalk, the gavel, the cockpit, the register, the mop, the scalpel, the cash drawer, the rifle, the keyboard, or the badge.
That was supposed to comfort people.
Because it raised the question nobody wanted sitting at the table eating crackers.
If the soul was gone and the job continued, then what part of the person had society actually needed?
Not the weird little snack combinations.
Not the way Linda kept butterscotch candy in her pocket.
Not the way Mrs. Hembry fed the stray cat behind the school.
Not the way Captain Reeves called his daughter before every flight and said, “Wheels up, kiddo,” like a private spell against the sky eating him.
And once companies realized that, humanity did what humanity always does when God drops a mystery on the floor.
Do not sit there with your innocent little face like we were going to witness a cosmic impossibility and not immediately ask whether it could reduce payroll.
The first Legacy Continuity Contract appeared four months later.
It was optional, which is how every trap enters polite society wearing deodorant.
Employees could sign away “residual occupational output” in exchange for a bonus.
A “maybe I can pay the light bill and buy chicken in the same week” bonus.
Warehouse workers signed.
People with medical bills signed.
People signed because freedom is cute until rent comes around the corner with a tire iron.
Corporations called it dignity.
Families called it theft.
Lawyers called it complicated, which is courtroom language for “someone rich is about to win.”
Then came the first lawsuit.
A widow sued the company that kept using her husband’s labor after he died repairing conveyor belts.
His tools still moved every night.
His name remained on the schedule.
The company argued there was no employee present.
Just residual productivity.
That sound spread through the country like a door locking.
After that, people stopped pretending this was mysterious.
The kind of mirror you find in a gas station bathroom where the lighting makes you look like a divorced raccoon with tax problems.
The world had been saying the quiet part forever.
Funny how essential people still have to beg for days off.
Funny how valuable people get replaced before the obituary dries.
Funny how “we’re a family here” never seems to include inheritance.
The dead did not reveal some new horror.
They exposed the old one.
Civilization had already been stripping people down to function.
Death simply removed the distracting human parts.
No bathroom emergency because somebody ate gas station sushi at 11:42 p.m. and made peace with the devil in aisle three.
The perfect worker had finally arrived.
Present enough to be useful.
At first, people protested.
Then the protests got weird.
A crowd gathered outside a hospital where dead nurses still moved through the halls completing rounds. Medication carts rolled by themselves. Bed sheets tucked themselves under patients. Call lights were answered by hands nobody could see.
Inside, patients cried because care had never been faster.
The dead were better at the jobs than the living.
Not because they were better people.
Because nothing hurt them anymore.
Their backs didn’t seize.
Their marriages didn’t collapse.
Their children didn’t need rides.
Their teeth didn’t rot while insurance called it cosmetic.
You cannot compete with something that has no life left to interrupt productivity.
And that is when the living finally panicked.
Not when the dead worked.
When the dead became the standard.
“Why can’t the living staff match post-mortem output?”
Some executive actually said that.
With his whole stupid face.
Not because he was sorry.
Because the market research came back negative.
By then, every town had its dead functions.
The barber whose scissors still opened at dawn.
The mechanic whose wrench crawled under cars.
The old librarian whose stamp hit return cards with the rhythm of a heartbeat nobody owned anymore.
The soldier whose rifle still guarded a gate in the rain.
The mother whose kitchen kept making breakfast after the children had grown and moved away.
That one bothered people most.
Not because it was dangerous.
A dead mother’s function survived her.
Not the way she smelled like lotion and coffee.
The children came back once, stood in the kitchen, and watched the pan move by itself.
The spatula kept working.
That was when even the loudmouths got quiet.
Everybody had been laughing at haunted jobs until love got caught doing chores after death.
And maybe that was the real horror.
Not the company demons in golf shirts.
The deeper horror was that people had mistaken being needed for being loved.
A dying parent can need you.
Love is supposed to know when to close.
But the world had built itself on mouths.
Then the body dies and everybody cries, but need looks around and says:
So who’s covering the shift?
Years later, graveyards became the only quiet places left.
People went there to feel sane.
The irony was almost vulgar.
Cities buzzed with dead labor. Schools wrote lessons from dead hands. Courts issued rulings from dead authority. Stores opened registers for customers who complained about prices to women who no longer existed.
The dead were not there either, maybe.
But at least nothing asked them to do inventory.
Families sat beside stones and whispered apologies.
For understanding too late.
One afternoon, a little boy stood at his grandmother’s grave and asked his father why her job did not continue.
His father looked toward town.
Toward the school where chalk still scratched.
Toward the grocery store where Register Four still blinked.
Toward the airport where planes still landed under invisible hands.
Then he looked back at the grave.
“She didn’t have a job when she died,” he said.
And for once, nothing moved.
No invisible hand reaching from the dead to complete one more task for a world that never knew when to stop taking.
Just a silence no system could monetize.
That was the closest thing to mercy anyone had found.
Their souls, if mercy has any backbone at all, go somewhere the living cannot schedule them.
Their jobs keep showing up.
Because the world never really wanted people.
It wanted output with a pulse.
And now, God help us, it has learned the pulse was optional.
If this hit that ugly little bruise your job keeps poking, reblog it.
Do not just like it and vanish like a polite little office ghost.
Reblog it so somebody still alive remembers they are not a function with skin on.
More Blacksite Literature / creator links: https://linktr.ee/ObeyMyCadence
Support the work directly: https://patreon.com/TheMostHumble
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