Clarification: I mean a person who has actually been dead for a while and suddenly they’re alive again
A few months ago, we had a question about what would happen if necromancy was possible and an undead was called as a court witness. I gave a rather fun-to-write, tongue-in-cheek answer, which might be germane to your question too. Here’s just a snippet:
So now we come back to zombies. Would a jury be able to set aside their shock, horror, and awe about a zombie in court that they could focus on being the finder of fact? If a zombie says they’re an eye-witness to a mugging, would their lack of actual eyeballs confuse the jury? Even more confusing would be a zombie that is testifying as an expert witness. Does their subject matter need to be recent? What if the case needs an expert on 17th Century Parisian fashion and the undead is from that era and worked in haute couture? Are there no fashion historians who could provide similar expert opinions?
I imagine some religious folks would kill them as an affront to their religion or conversely imprisoned in secret government lab for testing.
Either nobody would believe it, or it would be on every screen and headline for a week, before the next news cycle Swiss the attention away.
Life insurance companies would be changing their terms and conditions.
If they’ve been dead for a while then the body is going to be quite decayed so that unfortunate person would end up dying again immediately.
Unless you’re suggesting this thing that came to life is no longer human. So in that case decayed body/flesh, missing organs/bodyparts, etc. no longer prevent it from “life”. But I’d argue that isn’t a human coming back to life, more like a corpse transforming into something else.
Something that nobody seems to have touched upon is the fact that many dead people are embalmed.
If you suddenly came alive again after being embalmed, you’d suddenly become dead again.
Also, post-mortem examinations are not uncommon if the cause of death was not clear. Again this might lead to instant re-death.
Finally, if the cause of death /was/ clear (such as trauma), then again, that may likely result in instant re-death.
I swear to God Dave if you found the necronomicon again
Most of them are buried, so I’d say they die again.
Unless they are Uma Turman with her masochistic palm-fist strike training.
Or burned into ash.
Years and years of fucking with legal system of your country.
Not really. My country’s legal system, at least, foresees that someone may be mistakenly declared dead and so provides in the Todeserklärungsgesetz (§ 24):
(1)Wenn der für tot Erklärte persönlich vor Gericht erscheint und die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung verlangt, so hat das Gericht, falls die Identität des Antragstellers mit dem für tot Erklärten unzweifelhaft feststeht, ohne weiteres Verfahren die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung auszusprechen.
which translates to:
If the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court and demands the cancellation of the declaration of death, then the court has to, if there is no doubt as to the identity of the applicant with the person who has been declared dead, without further procedure declare the annulment of the declaration of death.
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
I actually know about this law from a book (I think) about amusing laws and court decisions. It certainly does sound funny to have a sentence start “if the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court”.
True. I can imagine a kafkaic scene with the reborn person talking to some official, telling them that they’re dead and they can’t be of any help, despite them standing right in front of them.
We have examples of people being misidentified as dead, who rise either at the hospital, mortuary, or after.
It is speculated this is one of reasons ‘wakes’ were established, just to make sure the loved one was well and truly dead before committing them to earth.
They would go “Who was elected?” and immediately return to their casket.
Realistically, Netflix documentary, lots of interviews, newspaper articles, sharing by facebook uncles. If that person is religious, either a following or a statement about seeing the light.
Get killed because that’s a zombie
If it happened frequently enough, the government would find a way to tax it.
So frequency equals taxes?
Let’s hope they never start counting all the times you jacked it.
Or took a step, or breath, or blinked.
It would no longer be the world-view destroying event that it would have have been 100 years ago. The moment someone came up with the idea of a matter-energy transporter, we had the idea of how someone could come back from the dead. Today we know exactly how it would be done - we just lack the technology.
