Having readied the Power Armour and renamed Quincy to Dogmeat, I find myself almost prepared to take on any post-apocalyptic scenario. However the thing I cannot be prepared for is other people’s inability to act rationally. As a result, supermarkets and deliveries in rural towns are both empty and virtually non-existent. I’m already eyeing up the dead fly which is stuck between the blinds and the window in the conservatory. It should increase my HP by +1 at least.
For months, on the run up to recent events, I have been saying to anyone that would listen (which is not very many people I must say) that we should be hiding weapons caches in the countryside, ensuring that there are underground networks of vital supplies and intelligence and preparing to fight the rise of fascism which, it seemed was clearly on the rise. Yet here we are, teetering on the dangerous precipice of civil liberty like a foolish Instagrammer doing the planking meme on a rotten piece of wood over a pit of hungry alligators. Scary times.
I am already using the amazing skills I spent £30k on getting during the late noughties to analyse the media and, as suggested by my tutors, question everything, look beyond the articles and read between the lines. I have been playing a nice game of predict the future :—
- the end of cash (increase of contactless payment, enabling the state monitoring of your purchases)
- the introduction of state controlled diets (rationing because of supermarket panic buying, easier to control what you consume)
- the end of independent high street business (restaurants closing, people not buying stuff and the migration to online sales, again easier to monitor consumption)
- controlled gatherings of 5 or more (closure and monitoring of people irresponsibly gathering possibly to discuss insurrectionary and treasonous topics in places they cannot be monitored)
- the introduction of home monitoring devices (Google Home, Alexa, Siri etc)
- Sweeping changes in the law disguised as “emergency planning”
- Shut down of democracy on local level (elections and “non-essential” meetings cancelled)
Isn’t this the kind of state control akin to China, Iran and other places that we have been frowning on for the past half a century? Paranoia? Me being driven completely doolally because of isolation? Overreacting? I certainly hope so.
Meanwhile, I am going to go about my respectful business in a non-subversive way. I won’t be hiding caches of food, drugs, weapons or ammo in little boxes around the area, I certainly don’t have any bright yellow exclamation marks, nor do I have any quests for you to run for me. However, I do have to ask, Do you have a geiger counter?
