Postcards from the End of the World

[Wingnut]

Introduction: This is the written aspect of my ongoing story about the world in the near future. Originally, we began this as Furnaces of War, but with all of the recent video games based on the subject (Frontlines: Fuel of War, Tom Clancy's EndWar, and so forth), I decided to take it in a slightly different direction.

This is more intended as a place for me to store my writing (as my company firewall prevents me from using blogs and networking sites - DeviantArt is blocked as PORN, ferchissakes!) than an actual RP. However, anyone is welcome to use this material as leverage to participate - but please remember, we're steering away from the giant robots and nano-powered cybernetic supersoldiers today.

This keeps up, I may even start including pretty illustrations for those of you who are just plain tired of reading brick after brick of text. :3

---::-::---

People are always shocked to find out I was born on September 11th, 2001. Then comes the usual comment, and I always see it coming.

"Oh, dear. That's a really unfortunate day to have a birthday."

Today, nobody remembers 9/11. Like the Titanic, or Vietnam, it only marks another milestone in the tragic comedy of errors that makes up the history of man. Something you would read about in a textbook decades later, cluck your tongue and shake your head at.

"How could we possibly have thought this would be for the best?"

It's easy to ask that question today. What was it that my father always said about hindsight? The sad truth of that tired old saying is that we understand now what happened, but at the same time we never see what is coming. History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes, right?

"Why did we not see this coming?"

We did. Climate change, peak oil, the Long Emergency, the Reconstruction debacle, the civil wars... Suzuki, Cawthorne, Kunstler.. they all knew what was coming. That's what we don't understand today - it was coming, and everyone knew it.

We all knew.

I could give you the lectures about "cognitive dissonance" and "mental static," and I could throw all the fancy clinical terms at you that I read out of a developmental psychology textbook. But to give you the summary from the back of that book - we didn't really give a fuck.

 

[Wingnut]

My name is James Mitchell; I guess it's my job to tell you how we ended up in this sorry situation today.

I was only four years old when it started. The first major sign of Peak Oil was in 2005, when an elephant field in Saudi Arabia started pumping seawater. The Saudis did everything they could to fix this - even with the suits from OPEC jumping up and down on their backs in a screaming fit.

The United States was depending on the Middle Eastern countries that formed the most of OPEC to act as a "swing producer." This is basically a fancy term meaning "If we're not getting enough go juice from our other sources, you need to take up the slack."

The esteemed government of the country to our south could only cover this up. Bush knew our country was addicted to the black stuff, and did not want rioting in the streets. So, all of this was brushed under the carpet.

When I was seven, my parents were constant upset over the climbing prices of gas. Being a kid at the time, my epic adventures only took me as far as the woods in our backyard.

I really didn't understand anything until my father sold both the cars and we started hoarding food and emergency supplies. At the time, I was nine.

The next year, the blackouts started. The power companies, unable to keep up with the demand for electricity, began rationing electricity and installing "smart meters." There were also huge incentives for anyone who could set up net-zero homes, and if your house was covered with solar panels or if you had a small farm of windmills in your apple orchard, you could bring in a decent monthly check from the power company.

Nobody in our town was that rich. With the advent of de-automobilization (more on that in a few minutes), nobody could commute the massive urban sprawl to flip burgers at the McDonald's at the north end of town. With the blackouts, even telecommuting wasn't an option.

With unemployment already out of control and getting worse by the day, nobody was spending or making money.

De-automobilization. Some call center agent came up with that word when I was six years ago. It's basically an extension of one of Kunstler's theories in his book, The Long Emergency.

Basically, it means that with the ongoing energy crisis, the millions upon millions of cars depending on oil would eventually become expensive, wheeled bricks. On what used to be a busy road, you can find hundreds of them, all stripped for the tools in their trunks, their tires, wheels, lights and electrical wire, mirrors, batteries, and any other parts that would be valuable.

Someone once told me that people used to break into cars to steal the stereo. I can't help but chuckle as I think about that. In most of these things, the stereo is the ONLY thing left behind.

 

[Wingnut]

No electricity, no transport, not even hot running water on demand. Compared to where we were at, things got pretty bad, pretty quick.

Without modern medicine, we're also seeing some of our good old friends again. Flu is the worst, with the shudders and the squirts, but tuberculosis is on the rise, as is dysentery. Certain other locales, like France and Spain, are also seeing breakouts of some new kind of plague. Well, or so I remember.

Not everything has been lost, though.

This journal you're reading is being kept on a private server I've been maintaining, which should still be connected to the network. The windmills I've built out of scrap metal and PVC should keep it alive, and even on still days, my old Honda diesel generator is going on hemp-based biodiesel that's being fermented in 25-gallon jugs at the back of my garage.

Even so, my modem doesn't show any traffic, and I can't pull up any useful web pages. Chrome simply can't find anything, and even Google is unresponsive to my queries.

I don't know how many people are reading this journal - I can only hope to hear from some of you, assuming that your e-mails make it through what's left of the Internet.

My family, about four strong, is surviving quite comfortably in a remote section of Canada, on the westward foothills near the Rocky Mountains. Not quite in Alberta, but not quite in British Columbia. Sometimes, we can see and hear military aid convoys and the EAC rolling through here, but those emergency shipments rarely make it through the mountains, especially over the winter - it's much easier for the United Nations to station a beachhead on Vancouver Island or California, and supply the western seaboard from there.

The lifestyle we live is very rustic. Aside from my computer, there is very little reminder of what my son affectionately refers to as "The Old World." A bicycle, maybe, some solar panels that he looted from abandoned homes, and of course, piles of salvage in a covered tent near the garage.

I use many hand tools, often ones I've made, to construct the things we need - hutches for the dozes of rabbits we grow for meat and manure, additional windmills, even the occasional building to house a workshop or a new garden.

The old crank radio only gets static. I don't think there is anyone broadcasting out there, but whenever I see signs of vehicles moving past, I take a scan and I can hear the screech of encrypted transmissions.

I have to go. It's very close to the end of spring, and we're running out of time to plant the new garden.

 

[Wingnut]

I can't believe they took away my journal again. Security liability my ass!

It was bad enough that I got the bug, and it was bad enough that they made me fly through it all. Have you ever tried balancing a 40year old utility helicopter while your helmet stills smells fresh from yesterdays puke?

Goddamm I'm going to have to start all over and just hide this one better this time. I wonder what they're going to tell me this time once they find it

they always do

For those of you reading this crap, I'm WO2 Martin Kelly. I used to be Northern Star Militia, operating just south of the BC-Yukon border until my wing was folded into the Civil Protection Agency. I'm writing this for the fourth time just so you know

the cpa is a pmc and one of the biggest in the world today. Blackwater may have started this gig, but compared to our operation those guys were boy scouts

fact, if you know your shit in any line of trade, you could live like a king on their payroll

Me? I'm a helicopter pilot. I fly a CH-53, a big ornery clunker with a mind of her own and tailpipes that'll spew the most toxic chemicals this side of the border. I'm told that it was refit years ago to run on dirty gas [bio-diesel ~T.], but obviously this shit is poison to a helicopter. I don't know how we keep er in the air

a good mechanic really is a wizard

Being a corp, the CPA is basically the only active group out there to whom digital money still has any worth. They sign contract, numbers flow to a offshore bank account, and we go on the march. Right about now, the bulk of the CPA's contracts go towards "protecting" major citys and their people.

Mostly, though, we play the bad cop role, riot police to keep the peasants scared and dependent on the companies bankrolling the efforts of the UN EAC. If the people are scared of the us, then they don't ask questions about the people payin us

I might have dropped out of high school, but it doesn't take a genius to figger that the companies couldn't care less about what happens to the country.

 

[Wingnut]

De-automobilization wasn't all a bad thing, to be honest. In fact, I happen to think we're all a lot better off now!

Even twenty-five years after peak oil, the trend continues. Thousands of abandoned cars means you can't go one mile down the road without finding a freshly abandoned car. Someone's vehicle gives up the ghost, and before you know it, they've left it in a ditch.

You can't even call anyone to tow it home half the time - rest of the time, you'd have to sell the bloody thing just to tow it to the junkyard.

You'd be surprised, though, how much value the parts in that car would have, though. I actually got e-mails yesterday from a few people who somehow found my site, and wanted to know how I was handling scrap metal in my projects.

Years ago, some off-road gearhead taught me how to hook up two or three batteries together with jumper cables and use the current to actually weld most joints together. Used to be you needed special sticks of metal for this, but I'm still able to do it with wire coat hangers - this is a handy trick when you consider the last hardware store in town shut down years ago.

I won't lie to you. Oxy-acetalyne and other cutting and welding torches are not really feasible, and the army would seize any adequate building supplies anyway.

But it's amazing how much you can do with three car batteries, a jumper cable, and a few sticks of steel wire, especially when you can trade your skills with the family next door for regular parcels from their bamboo crop.