The good news was they had finally, in earnest, begun to wrestle with the scientific challenges of breaking our reliance on fossil fuel, for once and for all. Better news yet was that they did indeed work out a completely-renewable nearly-zero-emission substitute for oils and gasoline. Bad news is it turns out the perfect replacement for gas is human blood and the fresher the better. The Third and Fourth World Gasoline Wars had already killed eighty million, but this was somehow worse?
Referring to human beings without much money as ‘blood-bags’ (for example) started out as an insult on neo-fascist conspiracy-theory message boards but rather quickly evolved into ‘ironical’ use as a mainstream joke but eventually settled into the turn of phrase everyone used reflexively. This is how all hate speech develops, of course, going from niche slur to ‘funny joke’ to cultural ubiquity, but cars were so central to America’s infrastructure that it did so with breakneck speed.
A.M. radio commentators started referring to homeless shelters as ‘bloodbanks’. The drivers of unnecessarily-gigantic pick-up trucks started putting stickers of ‘vampire fangs’ over their front grills, just to brag about how much blood they were using to drive back and forth to their dental practices, never going off-road or moving construction equipment once, in the entire times they owned their vehicles. “A Third Great Depression?” they’d chuckle, “More blood-bags for gas!”
There was a little push-back, of course. But not in any way that actually stopped the murderous gears of commerce from turning, just ways to pretend that they were doing things slightly more humanely without fixing the problem. There were folks who called themselves ‘energy vegans’ who only got their gasoline from approved cloning facilities where brain-dead husks were used to generate fuels, but they were so much more expensive, only the upper-classes could afford it.
Everyone else had to admit to themselves that they were fueling the cars and home heating and ChatGPT pictures of dinosaurs surfing with the blood of homeless folk, hooked up to machines quite similar to dialysis devices, trading their life essences for barely-adequate room and board.
The good news is that the horror didn’t last forever? It was popular in the ‘developed’ world for about fifty years, with that tech lingering in the less-industrialized parts of Earth for some thirty or forty years more. The bad news is that the human race didn’t reject it for any moral or ethical reason, realizing blood-fuel was wrong and banning it as inhumane. No, the last straw for blood power was when an even-cheaper means of energy generation was invented, drawing electricity from water instead. It didn’t end because one person took a stand or how the human race finally grew consciences, it ended only because it was no longer profitable enough to the shareholders. Around that time the nations of the world all started arming up for the next global conflict: The Sixth World Water War. Us bald little monkeys never learn from goddamned anything, y’know.
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