Zombie Upgrades

my bro and i were watching Dracula (love that movie...all the gothiness...plus vampires are shmexy) and he said that zombies woudnt be that tough to get around cos thy were slow. i then say yeah the romero style zombies wouldnt be. he then said yeah but the zombies that come out now are all fast and they are better, so yeah they would be hard to get around. the image then popped into my head of zombies as a consumer product, like a car or a computer, each generation becoming faster and faster. then the idea for a story element came into my head. imagine a future where (extremely poor, urban decay style future) people are paid large upfront amounts of cash and are then used basically as external hard drives, to keep hackers and such from coming into contact with company (business) secrets. the catch is that to do this, and to keep them from turning coat, the people have their entire brain wiped, becoming a human vegetable, a "zombie" so to speak, but not the flesh eating kind. they then have to be led around on like a leash or some such thing, being accessed by specific dna codes that are then fed back into the brain as passcodes to the information and such. maybe the original code is wiped and changed, resulting in the memory loss, and the original code is also the passcode that must be accepted before any such info can be taken from the person used as a hard drive.
i know it sounds kind of like something that dietz would come up with in one of his stories, but fuck him, i like the idea. anyone else? or maybe im just kinda fucked up in looking at people as bits of hardware for a technologically advanced future. maybe cyberpunkish. sound like a good idea?
z out