Living Zombies / The Break Through

Living Zombies

Years ago I read Hans Jonas’s book, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. I found this book fascinating on multiple levels, but the thing that stuck with me most wasn’t even directly from Jonas’s writing. About a year before reading it, I’d read a study on quantum teleportation from Craig Venter. One of the major facets of that study was that teleportation worked, just not how we thought it did.

In summary, the quantum teleportation study essentially described a technologically advanced fax machine creating a copy in the new location, not the Star Trek–style instant transportation of the original matter.

With Jonas’s exploration of what separates humans from animals, and the existence of the soul, my mind started wandering into hypothetical scenarios testing the extremes of his philosophical theories. One of these thought experiments led me down a rabbit trail that ended somewhere unexpected: non-fictional zombies.

I started with the idea of the non-physical soul as the separator between human and animal — the moral divide. Without the soul, as Jonas defines it, animals operate on base survival instinct: the need to eat, shelter, reproduce. Humans, with their soul, add a layer of morality defining acceptable interactions and behaviors beyond those base needs.

So, following this quantum teleportation thought experiment through to its logical end: the fax-like copy of a person moved from one place to another is essentially creating a physical clone. But because of the nature of information itself, that process wouldn’t be able to recreate the non-physical soul. What you’d end up with are animalistic, instinct-driven, human-shaped beings, ignoring all morality entirely. Potential cannibalism, or more likely, predation on the weaker, morally-driven humans around them. Potential sexual assault, as they pursue these base desires without any moral architecture left to restrain them.

This is a far scarier zombie apocalypse than the one we get in the never-ending stream of movies, comics, TV shows, and books. These zombies aren’t dead. They look like you and me. They might even be domesticated in some cases, but the ones that aren’t may or may not be clothed, may or may not speak, grunt, or growl. They move as fast as we do, or faster. They’re intelligent. Genuinely unsettling, when you really sit with the implications of this.

I definitely recommend Jonas’s book. It has nothing to do with zombies, and neither does quantum teleportation; even a century and a half from now, when humans can finally actually teleport.

The Break Through

A novel in development — Science Fiction · Philosophical Horror · Thriller · Work in Progress

The essay above is where this started.

The Break Through is a long-form novelization of the thought experiment, a book being built carefully, from the world outward. The world and plot architecture are (mostly) in place. The characters are still being developed. The prose hasn’t been written yet in a form worth showing. What follows is enough to understand what this book is, and why I want to write it.

The premise

A research team at a CERN-affiliated startup achieves what nobody thought possible: practical quantum teleportation at consumer scale. The technology works. The physics is sound. The device is priced like a high-end smartphone, adopted globally within a year, and pointed at the stars within two. Humanity stands at what feels like its finest hour.

They missed something.

The device isn’t transporting people. It’s copying them (perfectly, down to every memory, every scar, every personality quirk) and destroying the original simultaneously. The copy doesn’t know it’s a copy. Neither does anyone else. Not at first.

What the copy is missing cannot be measured by any instrument they built.

The intellectual foundation

Hans Jonas’s The Phenomenon of Life argues that the soul is not a religious abstraction but a philosophical necessity (the non-physical element that elevates human behavior above base animal instinct). Remove it, and what remains is biologically identical to a person but behaviorally indistinguishable from an animal operating on survival imperatives: eat, shelter, reproduce, dominate.

Craig Venter’s work on digital-to-biological conversion established that matter can be encoded, transmitted, and reconstructed — but that the reconstructed object is a copy, not the original. The original is gone. The copy is real, but different.

The novel asks what happens when those two ideas collide at global scale. What does society look like when the people running it are physically indistinguishable from humans, but behaviorally operating without the moral architecture that defines human civilization?

Why This Zombie Story Is Different

The standard zombie narrative runs on a simple mechanic: infection, transformation, visible threat. You can tell the zombies from the humans. You run from (or kill) the ones that are clearly not human anymore.

The Break Through removes that mechanic entirely. These are not the walking dead. They are not rotting, shambling, or visibly wrong. They are your colleagues. Your spouse. Your elected officials. They remember everything about their lives. They can hold a conversation, drive a car, operate a weapons system. The ones with higher baseline intelligence can mimic morality well enough to pass — until they do not need to anymore.

The horror is not recognizing the monster. It is realizing, too late, that the monster has been indistinguishable from the person you thought you knew.

Tonal Architecture

What This Book Is Not

It is not a polemic about technology. The scientists who build the device are not villains. They do exactly what brilliant people are supposed to do: they solve an impossible problem, they test it rigorously, and they share it with the world. The tragedy is not that they were reckless. It is that the thing they failed to measure was not measurable by their tools or their hubris, it fell in a realm science purposely tries to ignore; religion and philosophy.

It is not a conventional zombie novel. The genre trappings are present — and deliberately so — but they serve a philosophical argument, not a survival-horror formula.

It is not an anti-technology argument. The device works. The question it raises is not whether humanity should build extraordinary things. It is whether the instruments we use to validate our creations are capable of measuring everything that matters.

Development Status