World Without Oil: Alternative Reality News, Week Nine
Up until this week, things were pretty calm around here in Conquest. People have been hunkering down and dealing with their own business, and trying to make the best out of it. Many people, like the Mennonites near the church at the four corners of Conquest, have been making do as they do most of the time. With their own farm animals, they’re well-fed, and even making a little extra money with eggs going for a higher price than normal (though no one feels that the extra 25 cents per dozen is price gouging).
On Thursday, however, things got really hot over on the other side of Cato – literally and figuratively. It doesn’t help that the weather is far above ordinary levels, making people short tempered. Worse than that is that the Republican clique that controls Cato politics has been caught hoarding gasoline.
The gas station on route 370 going toward Baldwinsville has been the site of some very long lines, and some shortages, with the manager telling everyone some days that they’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the next tanker shipment. Well, Wednesday night, a bunch of elected officials from Cato were caught going over to the station in the middle of the night, when the pumps are closed to everyone else, and filling up a tanker of their own. It seems that the owner of the gas station has been giving these officials preferential treatment.
Well, they denied it at first, but by Thursday afternoon, the explanation had changed. They said that the hoarding was for “official government purposes”. People didn’t buy it, and so a bunch of people walked on over to one of the officials’ barn, and found a huge number of containers, all full of gasoline. The crowd took what they could for themselves…
…until the Deputy Sheriff arrived and fired his gun into the air. Ten people are now being held prisoner, but many more escaped, and are on the lam. The Cayuga County Sheriff’s office has deputized more people, many from elected officials’ families, and given them guns, in the hunt for the fugitives. Most people won’t say which side they’re on.
This article is a part of the project World Without Oil. It describes fictional events in an alternative reality imagined collectively by project participants. In this alternative reality, the world faces an unexpected oil shortage. These events are not actually taking place. They are part of a collective fiction experiment.
tag: worldwithoutoil
This is an extreme example, but not an isolated one… fuel = power, and the power grab is on. More typical is the city council that unanimously allocates itself priority fuel “for the continued smooth operation of government.” Yeah, smooth all right.
The sheriff deputizing his cronies… that’s right out of a B Western… doesn’t he know it turns out badly for him in the final reel?
A better series is already out there, beginning with “Dies The Fire”, by S.M.Stirling. It depicts, on a fictional worlr where, suddenly, things that used to explode (dynamite, gunpowder, etc) no longer do…petroleum products no longer burn…electricity no longer exists…and how mankind goes from its current state to an almost medevial state of affairs, complete with chain-mail armor,swords, crossbows, longbows…well, you get the picture. I read the entire trilogy in four days…couldn’t put them down. A fascinating read, I highly recommend it.
There was fuel rationing during WWII, farmers were given priority for fuel, as producing food was seen as vital to the war effort.
Well, Mike, that sounds, um, interesting. The thing is that, unless the universe turned inside out, that context for collective fiction could never take place. The point of World Without Oil is that it could take place – although many of the things written about in the World Without Oil project are dramatic exaggerations.
i agree with the Green Man that many of the scenarios depicted in this fictional account of the long downward spiral when oil becomes scarce are “dramatic exaggerations.” One thing to note, however, is that real life, when times get “difficult”, often go way past dramatic when people’s survival is in the balance. The collapse of civilization as we know it is not out of the realm of possibility. It’ll get downright ugly before it’s all done.
Would one of these clowns be albert gore by any chance????