30 Days: Undeaditorial

Dear Editor:

With great interest, I read your special issue about biometric computer authentication (March, 2014). My firm has been looking for a viable biometrics solution for quite some time and several of the products you reviewed look promising.

However, we have one question that remains unanswered by any of the articles in this otherwise excellent issue: Do any of these products work for the undead?

You see, we take being an equal opportunity employer quite seriously. Hiring the undead keeps us in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and contributes to a diverse work environment. We also recognize that there are certain advantages to hiring people who have risen from the grave. For one thing, they seldom object to working the night shift. In fact, they prefer it. As long as the shift ends before sunrise, you can count on zombies to remain alert and productive way into the wee hours of the morning. They also tend not to require expensive health benefits or group life insurance.

But for these prized workers, traditional passwords don't do any good because people tend to forget them when their brains rot and leak out of their ears. Unfortunately, biometric authentication often brings its own set of problems.

It's hard to log in to the network with a fingerprint reader when your fingerprints have decayed and your finger tends to remain in the reader after you pull your hand away. Likewise, iris recognition devices are problematic when the eyes keep falling out of the head and dangle well below the beam from the reader. Face recognition? Forget it. As the face deteriorates, new patches of mold or the continual changing of the shape of a rotting face with its sagging skin and ever-more-deviating septum renders such systems useless.

Some of our employees have suggested that it might be useful to have a device that allows the employee to pull the bowels from his belly and run them through a scanner. This might help solve the problem, but it raises an obvious security issue: What's to stop somebody from pulling the guts out of a coworker and using them to gain access to a restricted system? DNA-based devices have similar security problems. We even tried odor-based biometrics, but quickly learned that this type of device overloads and fails when the workplace houses more than a small number of rotting corpses.

As you can see, current biometrics don't work for an organization like ours. In this economy, more and more people seem to be dying every day, and as they venture forth from their coffins to seek suitable employment, biometric authentication seems like the way to go.

If the research you did for your special issue provided insight into how to use biometrics for this under-appreciated segment of the workforce, we would love to hear about it.

Thank you,

Rip Morguenstern,
VP of Security
Liquid Putrefaction, Inc.

Writing, In Perspective

by Deren Hansen

As consuming as our cares about craft, promotion, and publishing in general are, every so often it is good to step back and put our problems in perspective. There are far too many people who are unable to join us in bemoaning the changes buffeting the culture of letters because they’re distracted by trifling annoyances like not starving,  succumbing to disease, or becoming a casualty.

Humans have always dreamed and told stories. That we have the time and the means to catch those dreams and render them in an enduring form, which has the potential to touch the lives of far more people than could ever fit around a campfire, is something our forbearers would find miraculous.

For much of our history only the rich and powerful were able to leave a durable legacy because palaces, temples, and monuments of stone were about your only options if you wanted future generations to know you were here. In time, books provided a more effective way to preserve your thoughts and feelings for those who would follow, but they were still the province of an elite sliver of society. Now billions of us can write for the ages.

Of course, nothing is ever certain. A host of calamities, from asteroids to zombies, could reduce us to fossilized traces. But in the grand scheme of things, we’re incredibly fortunate to have words to worry about, rejections to receive, and the perpetually perplexing publishing industry to enjoy.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.