World Without Oil: Alternative Reality News, Week Ten

With gasoline prices high above six dollars now, a threatening kind of quiet has settled in around Cato. Here in Conquest, and up in Victory, we try our best to go into Cato as little as possible now. Hardly anyone is out on the streets there anymore, and everyone is quiet.

There have been more arrests by the new “deputies” over the last week, and not everyone is being held in the jail. A barn is serving as an extra facility for now. People have lost count at the number of arrests. Is it 30, 40 or 50? The mayor claims to have found a stash of stolen gasoline, and has taken the accused hoarders into custody, though there’s been no criminal charges. Shortly afterwards, the homes of some of the accused were burned to the ground in the middle of the night. No one knows who did it.

Many of the houses are empty, as people leave town to go to Syracuse, Rochester, or further, to stay with relatives elsewhere. The people wjp remain are mostly afraid to talk out in public, and don’t even want to be seen outside their houses, except if they have a specific, plausible task. So, communication is taking place through quick, “accidental” meetings. They say that the telephones are tapped by the mayor and his cronies. I wonder how they know if that’s true or not.

The word is that that car stopped on the pulloff on 370 headed toward Wolcott is checking the license plates of every car passing on the highway in that direction, and that there’s another checkpoint on every road in and out of town. People say that the mayor wants to know who is going out of town to buy gasoline. Not driving myself any more, I have no way to confirm that this is true. There are lots of strange rumors going around, after all.

The common understanding among those people who remain is to keep to yourself, and mind your own business. The hope is that those who don’t rock the boat won’t join those in the prisoners’ barn.

No one seems much interested in what’s happening on the national scale, or even outside our general area. People are just trying to live simply, as they can, and get through the crisis with their lives intact.

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.

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