Zombie - A Short Story by GPT-5 Thinking
My prompt:
Generate a first person short story about an unambitious middle-aged PCSO who spends his days trying to avoid notice and thinking about the cognitive science/ philosophy of mind articles he reads in his spare time.
Today he faces his annual performance review with a manager who despises him.
Article: Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia by David Chalmers
Include multiple meditative digressions on the nature of work (inspired by Eula Biss, Camus' Sisyphus and David Graeber).
Stylistic influences: David Sedaris and Philip Roth. Influences worn lightly. Limpid prose. Conceptual depth.
[Editor’s note: The title refers to philosophical zombies not the Hollywood variety.]
I iron my high-vis the way some men polish shoes—care as ritual, not conviction. It goes on over a shirt that knew a different belly a decade ago. I check the radio battery, the baton I’m not allowed to have, the notebook I rarely use, and leave the flat with the thermos that tastes faintly of last week’s oxtail because the lid is ambitious in its leakage.
The bus on the Old Kent Road behaves like a large herbivore. It chews through stops. I sit in the ecosystem of morning—sleepers, schoolchildren, the righteous early risers. I prefer the back, where I can do my job before my job: make myself small. Outside, shop shutters yawn open. Men with keys perform the choreography of commerce.
Last night I read David Chalmers—“Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia.” I read philosophy the way other middle-aged men study guitar tabs. It’s my private sport. The paper is a field of neat hedges. You can hop one, but then you must hop the next. The gist, simplified brutally for the 453 to Deptford, is this: you can imagine a creature that behaves like a person but feels nothing inside. You can imagine us being replaced, neuron by neuron, by silicon, with our experiences dimming or shifting while our behaviour ticks along unchanged. You can imagine experiences flickering on and off with the same behaviour continuing—a dance of feeling under a metronome of function.
I consider the PCSO as philosophical zombie: I nod, I fill forms, I point at the laminated crime prevention tips with the faded corners. I am present without presence. The uniform is my chassis. Of course, Chalmers would call that cheating—behaviour is never quite enough to hide the truth of the inside—but out here, behaviour is everything. People want the look of safety. They want to see yellow and reflective and think someone is watching.
I am paid to be seen. I spend most of my day trying not to be.
On patrol the estate is a library of concrete. Every balcony has its own novel. A woman drags a pram down the stairs with the weary physics of motherhood. Two boys circle each other on scooters, a braiding of possibility and accident. They clock me, the way you clock a CCTV camera: as a limit, not a person. Good. If I can become a constraint in someone’s peripheral vision, I’m doing excellent nothing.
Eula Biss writes about work as a kind of debt, the body and its exposures as a ledger. Risk is priced. The higher the risk, the more the pay claims to understand you. Our pay does not understand us very deeply. We stand around, we talk to pensioners, we absorb the boredom that drips off a weekday. Occasionally someone yells something anatomically creative. I have been spat at twice—both times gusts that fell short. Low-risk work, priced accordingly. Still, there is the other exposure, the one that can’t be billed: attention. I sell my time, the Met rents my body, but my attention I keep for myself like contraband sweets. That’s how Chalmers fits inside the shift. I think, not to escape, but to inhabit. I am not the man you want rushing toward a burning building. I am the man you want to have thought it through while he stood outside, unalarmed.
The morning is a procession of harmless. A man in a dressing gown asks me what day the bins go out. Tuesday, I say, the way I say it every day to someone. A woman in a blue parka wants to know if the alleyway CCTV is real. “Real enough,” I tell her, which is my favourite kind of answer. A terrier without a lead inspects my trousers with professional interest. I sign a school visitor log with a pen on a chain, my name decomposed into polite loops.
The radio crackles occasionally, a kind of weather. I stand at the zebra crossing and let people cross so they can feel legal, which is not the same as safe but sometimes passes for it. Graeber would have enjoyed the way our station talks about “stakeholders.” He would have traced the hierarchy like ivy. PCSOs stand at the bottom of the useful tree and the top of the ceremonial one. Our presence justifies someone else’s spreadsheet. If I didn’t turn up, would the world bend? Yes—in tiny ways. Mrs. Keane in the corner flat would not vent about the kids at number twelve. The caretaker wouldn’t get his fresh admonition about the broken lighting. The boys on scooters would test their speed against cars rather than me. I am not essential. I am slightly adhesive.
I am due in for my annual performance review at two. This is the mountain. The boulder today is paperwork and a man named Sergeant Owens, who despises me the way people despise a mis-sized piece of furniture. He inherited me when he moved over from Response. He loves action verbs. I love adverbs, and the quiet spaces between them.
“You’re not proactive,” he told me once, which is a word that hurts the back of my teeth. I wanted to ask him if he had read Camus, about Sisyphus walking back down the hill. The gods imagined his punishment as a treadmill. Camus imagined him happy as he descended, breathing in the uselessness, feeling his legs, choosing where to place his feet. This morning I practice the descent. I choose my route. I choose the shop where I buy my sandwich. I choose to ignore the urge to form an opinion about the man in the bright red tracksuit who shouts “Officer! Officer!” and then simply wants to know where he can get a key cut on a Sunday.
At lunch I sit on a wall and eat a sandwich that insists it is chicken. Across the street, two men in suits do their own review of the world, hunched over their phones like engineers monitoring a dam. I think of “fading qualia”—the thought experiment where your brain is replaced by microchips, one by one, until maybe your redness of red thins out like old paint and yet you still say “Ah, roses.” People like Owens believe in behaviour like this: so long as the boxes are ticked and the metrics are met, the inner life can be whatever—colourful or grey or non-existent. The form will say you performed “community engagements.” It will not say that at engagement number six you were bored enough to sense the boredom itself as an object, and that this sensing felt like a small transparent jewel, and that you held it up to the light for a minute.
At one fifty-five I am back at the station. The fluorescent lighting is a philosophy of its own: everything illuminated, nothing clarified. I sit outside Owens’ office. The hallway smells like toast, which is the smell of both comfort and resignation. My radio reports a lost dog on Rotherhithe Street. It wants me to spring into usefulness. I make a note for after. I can’t be late. Bureaucracy is a jealous god.
“Come,” he says, when I knock, and then, because he cannot help himself, he looks at the clock and back at me, registering that I have entered at exactly two, as if I emerged from a trapdoor in the second hand. He gestures at the chair. He’s a man who loads a gesture with rank. He does not have to despise me. But he does, and it gives us both something to do.
“So,” he says, dragging the word out like a sack. “Let’s talk about your objectives.”
We both consult a document that renders me as numbers. Incidents attended. Surgeries hosted. Reports filed. The active verbs are tidy. The past twelve months are reduced to a single page of plausible action. I have always liked past tense. It lets you pretend there was intent.
“You’ve met the minimums,” he says. The word minimums feels like a verdict from a doctor in a cheap suit. “But there has been feedback.”
There is always feedback. This is the age of feedback. We feed on it. It is a loop that never ends, and we circle it like water circling a drain. He reads out quotes from anonymous forms. “He didn’t seem motivated.” “He seemed distracted.” “He didn’t intervene.” No one writes, “He stood still in the right place.” No one writes, “He was calm enough to make me feel calm.”
“I’m not asking for heroics,” Owens says. “But a little initiative. You’re a senior PCSO—” He says senior the way you might say obsolete. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
This question is the museum piece of every review. It never evolves. I look at the corner of his desk where a stack of papers leans like a tower in a child’s drawing. The rhythm of my heart is polite.
“Here,” I say. “Or somewhere indistinguishable from here.”
His face tightens. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that feels honest.”
“I want to talk about opportunities,” he says. “There’s a course starting. Evidence gathering, public order. It would look good.”
On whom? I think. On me, or on the spreadsheet that claims you developed staff? Dancing qualia again: from my body to his dashboard. The experience of the course would be dull for me and rich for his numbers. Flip the switch, the lights change in his head, and my inner life is irrelevant as long as I salute the correct switch.
“I prefer,” I say, “to keep to the community side. Talking to people. The slow work.”
“The slow work,” he repeats. “Right.”
“Not everything,” I say, because I cannot help myself, “that is useful looks good in the report.”
His mouth makes a shape. “Ah, the Graeber gambit. You think your job is a critique of the system.”
“I think my job is a small thing that prevents smaller things going wrong.”
“And I think you are lazy,” he says, not raising his voice. He smiles, a thin mechanical smile that makes me admire its engineering. “We can agree to disagree.”
Lazy. The word arrives like a verdict fourteen years in the making. Lazy is a moral sentence disguised as an adjective. To Owens, work is a theatre where the audience can see you sweating. For me, work is an arrangement with the day. Biss says that sometimes we pay others to take on risk so we can sleep—childcare, cleaning, deliveries. The city buys my visible stillness so that other stillnesses can exist. That is one reading. Another is that I have found a posture that protects me from being used up, and I claim philosophy to decorate it.
Either way, the boulder is here. I roll it. We set goals: “Increase proactive engagements by ten per cent.” “Lead on two problem-solving plans.” “Demonstrate initiative.” These are verbs designed to hum regardless of what they refer to. If I staple my name to enough verbs, I can still be myself behind them. I sign. He signs. We return to the fiction that we are both authors of this.
Before I leave, Owens offers the last question like a mint. “Anything else?”
“Only that,” I say, and I don’t know why I say it, “if someone replaced me with a lookalike, I’m not sure anyone would notice, but I’m still not sure that would make me unnecessary.”
He blinks, as if a fly has interrupted us. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’ll get started on the plans.”
Back outside the air is lukewarm and administrative. The sky is the colour of wet pavement. I stand on the station steps and do nothing for a minute, which is my way of cleaning my head. This is the descent. You must imagine me happy.
I walk to the park where the lost dog was supposed to be and find only the after-image of a dog: small prints in the soft earth, a pair of men looking unsure which authority they need. I cross paths with the boys on scooters again. One shouts, “Can you do a wheelie, officer?” I shake my head. My body declines.
There is a bench under a tree that looks as though it has just understood itself. I sit. The radio mutters. I take out the thermos that remembers soup. A woman with a buggy pauses near me and asks if the swings are safe. I say, “They swing,” which, if you think about it, is a kind of safety and a kind of threat.
If the city replaced me one neuron at a time—if more tasks became apps, if the presence you can call up on your phone replaced the presence walking past you—would the neighbourhood feel different? Would the qualia of safety fade? Or would it dance—on some days the same, on some days jittering, with the same behaviours marching on: enquiries answered, forms filed, incidents logged. When the boys on scooters see a person in yellow, do they sense a mind or a function? When Mrs. Keane tells me about the bins, does she need ears or a uniform? The answer is yes.
I watch a fox cross the basketball court in daylight, confident as a commuter. It knows more about this place than I do. It is unbothered by performance reviews. It has its own qualia—the taste of a chip, the warmth of an engine, the calculus of fences—but it is not asked to account for them. It moves like a fact.
I finish the thermos and do a round of the shops. A florist is closing early; her back aches, and I learn this because she tells me, and in telling me she gives me a role not listed in the job description. I listen. A man buying scratchcards addresses me as “Boss” with the kind warmth of people who will never call you by your name. I count these as my work, and I do not write them down. I have become possessive over these uncharted parts.
At four I see a boy I’ve seen before, the one with the sharp little face that will be beautiful or hard depending on luck. He rides too fast past the nursery and scrapes the edge of a pram. He looks at me, waiting for the theatre of authority. I lift my hand and lower it, like moving a volume slider.
“Slow,” I say.
He nods and actually slows, not much, but some. This, then. The smallest boulder. It rolls an inch.
On my way home I think of the office again, the airless room where Owens and I performed our roles. Dancing qualia: from scowl to smile to scowl. If you looked only at the paperwork, you would see commitment glowing in cells. You would not see despair, or stubbornness, or the faint bright humour that keeps me from becoming machinery.
If I vanish tomorrow, would anyone notice? Mrs. Keane might, the way you notice when a tooth has been pulled—you poke at the space with your tongue. Owens would notice in the way a report notices a comma. The boys would teleport their mischief to the next street. The city would be fine in the way the sea is fine when you take a pebble.
Yet as the bus carries me back, the late sun catches on a dozen windows and the estate looks briefly like it decided to be kind. I feel, not pride—that would be a costume—but something like consent. I consent to return, to avoid notice, to make room for a thought as I walk. I imagine Sisyphus stepping off at his station, grocery bag in hand, nodding to no one in particular. I imagine him learning the names of the dogs without ever asking their owners. I imagine him content with the precise angle at which the boulder rests each evening, a geometry of small salvations.
At home, I hang the high-vis on its hook. It glows there, even in the dim. If an android came to take my place—if it smiled, and asked about bins, and remembered the names of dogs—would the day feel different? Maybe not. But I would miss the thinking, not because it makes me better at my job, but because it is the piece I refuse to sell. In a city that wants every minute, I have hidden a few in my pocket. They are my contraband. They are my qualification.
Tomorrow I will walk the same streets. I will do less than is impressive and more than is measurable. Somewhere between those two I will read another paper and stand very still and be, for someone, just visible enough.
