Cones

BY Abner Isom

[Editor’s note: This is just a short story, and maybe not a particularly good one. The important thing is that this is fiction, and not suggesting anyone actually do these things.]

She just wanted to see what would happen. Some day, she figured, they were going to do something horrible and over the top — drop a nuke on someone, or start mass arrests, or maybe just that the war would become intolerable to enough people that such an action would be supported. Then this could come in handy, this little technique, and if it were replicated all over the country, it would cost the system billions and billions of dollars each day.

For now, she just wanted to test her hypothesis.

The highway department’s facility was near the main post office. There was gravel and cinders and heavy equipment and a couple of large storage sheds; and there were caution signs and traffic cones. It was fenced in with a 12-foot chain-link fence (and double barbed wire outriggers atop). But she’d walked around the facility and discovered that there was no fence on the side facing into the woods. If there hadn’t been, she’d have purchased a bolt-cutter to snip-snip-snip a passageway through the fence itself. A good bolt-cutter will go through chain-link like a warm knife through the butter. If she’d had collaborators, she might have posted them with cell phones both ways up the road for early warning, but she went in this time on chutzpah and toted out the cones through the woods to a place alongside the road almost a quarter mile away; it took her two hours.

Her map reconnaissance had shown that there were five main arteries that led commuters into the city. She had timed the van drive from point to point in places along the arteries where she had good access from a parking point off the artery itself. She had “liberated” 20 traffic cones from the highway department; and five caution signs. At each point, she set out four cones when there was no one on the road. It was 2 AM when she started and 4:20 when she finished.

The cones were placed in a long diagonal that slowly shifted traffic to the right lane and partly onto the shoulder of the highway. If she’d have been operating with teams, the whole thing could have been done in 15 minutes, simultaneously. But she was just testing.

She then put each caution sign 200 meters or so in advance of the first cone, to get the drivers to slow down. She wasn’t interested in hurting anyone, just plugging up the roads at rush hour. If this worked, she thought, then imagine what would happen if this happened in ten big cities, or 20. What if 1,000 activists added their own bodies to the roadblocks and sealed the cities completely. The trick was having enough public support so that people gave a shit.

But she had to try it… just to see how it worked. So here she sat, at 7:30 AM now, in a parking lot with her coffee, overwatching the highway.

THE END
Interesting story

Posted by stan in Analysis