They are everywhere. They are many. You see them in the street, on the train, and in waiting rooms. Smartphone in hand, eyes fixed downwards, they stumble along without acknowledging the world beyond the screen. They are mesmerised, fixated, spellbound. You are in their way, standing between them and their single-minded objective. They are utterly unaware of your existence; you alone can avoid danger.

Beware the iZombie.

I remember a time before the plague. A time of attentiveness to the world around you. A time when people talked over dinner, instead of constantly checking their phone for unimportant updates and messages. A time when people paid attention to their companion. A time when pedestrians looked where they were going. Alas, it seems that world is lost to us. How quickly our normality changes, as the majority of us evolve into a species of single-minded automatons. Now it is a rarity indeed to be without that small oblong that holds so many in its thrall.

I constantly speculate on one puzzling question: how does the iZombie manage to avoid danger? Every time I see an iZombie narrowly escape collision, I muse that it is surely only a matter of time before they meet their natural enemy, traffic, and end up a splattered heap of human debris. Probably the phone will be the only thing to survive intact. It lives!

Yet somehow the iZombie manages to avoid annihilation. Perhaps there is an app that warns the user of oncoming hazards (it would not surprise me in the least). Or maybe a vestigial portion of their brain still registers the presence of other objects, both mobile and fixed. However, they do pose a danger to the rest of humanity, small as the number of uninfected may be. No driver wants to have to hose the remains of an inattentive iZombie off their car.

So how does one escape this plague? Herein lies the problem. It’s easy enough to avoid direct contagion, but the iZombies are everywhere. Constant vigilance is required if you are to avoid the shambling hordes. Your only defence is to compensate for these poor blundering creatures and to never allow your attention to fail for a moment. Perhaps the remnants of unaffected humanity will develop an enhanced sense of awareness. Or perhaps we will relocate to a distant place where the iZombies never thrive for lack of a reliable connection. We must survive …