CHAPTER 05 YEAR 36, MONTH 04 NARRATOR: FIREBIRD Wasteland Weekend? Spoiled motherfuckers. My life is not your theme park. Someone once said if you don't like people then you're not gonna sell any books. I guess we're gonna have to give these things away then. You fuckers with your anxiety and your depression. The impala overcomes its chronic fatigue syndrome as the cheetah approaches. I'm a goddamn impala every goddamn day. You don't know how good you have it. Airplanes. Skyscrapers. Clean water. Antibiotics. Poor people are fat instead of thin. No infant mortality. Cell phones. The motherfucking internet. Safety. Comfort. Convenience. You have it all and you think the world owes you more. Eat the rich? You mean let everyone else on earth eat the Americans? Inequality isn't the problem. Every place in the world has some people who are dirt poor. "Inequality" just means "in this place it's also possible to get rich." The question is how did they get rich? Honestly or dishonestly? I'm not saying all my money's honest. But most of it is. Honest money comes from someone spending their time and effort and creativity and ingenuity and persistence satisfying the needs of others and getting paid to do it. If someone gives you their money they are giving you a piece of their life. If you take money from someone you are taking a piece of their life. Where I come from we help poor people and sick people and old people but we do it cuz we want to not cuz we have to. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I didn't get a free education. I don't get free health care. We have teachers and doctors but you gotta pay them. Someone has to pay your teachers and doctors too. If someone else chooses to pay for your teachers and doctors that's very kind of them. If you make someone else pay for your teachers and doctors that's not very kind of you. I loved Tomorrowland. I just wished the people in it loved it as much as I did. I was pissed at John for fucking things up with Skelli. He's lucky she didn't hit him with a steel pipe. It had been a few months since Skelli had last seen me but a decade since I'd last seen her! I was worried I'd never see her again. Sure I'd been with other girls but you never forget the first girl who tries to murder you. Any girl can call you a sociopath but no one else put it quite as eloquently as Skelli did. One good thing that came from trading places with John was getting a chance to see them little pocket computers you all have in Tomorrowland. When I was there I got heaps of ideas for ways to improve my homemade computer. Mine still wasn't anywhere near as small as them pocket computers but it was way smaller than the one I'd built back in Straya. You could hook it up to a TV set and a typewriter and a walkie talkie and then not only would you have your own computer but you'd be on a network that didn't need any wires or central hubs or monthly subscriptions. Your computer would talk directly to the other computers around it. Every May there's a race out in Uranium Springs called The Cannibal Run. This one is a little different from the Cannonball Run. Everyone who participates gets a prize except the one who comes in last. Unless you consider being killed and eaten getting a prize in which case the person who comes in last gets a prize too. Yeah they cook and eat the loser. I'd never spent any time in Uranium Springs but aside from what happens if you lose The Cannibal Run it's supposed to be a real friendly town. Ever since The Swede had saved me with a radio announcement that lonely night I'd wanted to visit the place. Maybe I'd get a chance to thank him in person. The race itself was on the last day of the event. I know you're hoping I'm gonna be in that race. Yes the prizes were large amounts of cash. Yes I needed money to start building my computers. But no I was not gonna enter. I don't take stupid risks unless it's worth the reward. Sounded like a hell of a show though. I'll describe the loser's death in vivid detail if that's what you're into. I got to Uranium Springs and set up camp. Then I headed for the big radio tower and found the source of that voice I remembered so well. "You're The Swede and you've got what I need! Years ago I heard you on the radio and you helped me find my way across this godforsaken country. You saved me from some serious shit that night." "Glad to hear you say it" Swede said. "Someday I'll repay it" I promised. "You ever make it to The Gathering?" "I never miss it. I run the radio station there too." Then he vanished. Before my eyes he vanished. I was in the same place but it was different. It had happened again. John and I had traded places. I was now at another stupid party in the desert called Detonation. Well good. Maybe John would enter The Cannibal Run and die. Wait I don't know which one of us dies in that case so maybe not. Ok pay attention cuz I'm only gonna explain this once. The Gathering and Wasteland Weekend happen at the same place in California's Mojave Desert. In Epoxyclypse we call that place Damnation Valley. In Tomorrowland they call it California City. The Cannibal Run and Detonation happen at the same place in Arizona's Painted Desert. In Epoxyclypse we call that place Uranium Springs. In Tomorrowland they call it Holbrook. When me and John both attended these similar events in similar places we ended up hopping between timelines. We figured out that it wasn't the events or the places that were magic. The magic happened any time we crossed paths and momentarily occupied the same physical space in two different timelines. Also strictly speaking we don't believe in magic so really we prefer to think of it as some kind of science thing. Anyway now we'd made some sense of it. And being a pair of clever cunts we immediately started using this newfound superpower to our advantage. This time around we spent a few days in each others' worlds. I partied a while at Detonation and when I finally returned to Epoxyclypse I was delighted to discover that John had spent all of his time writing programs for my computer. John wasn't thinking up these programs himself. He was duplicating the work of companies that had been successful in his timeline. We were gonna invent the internet and on day one we were gonna be bigger than Microsoft and Apple and Facebook combined. Those are some real successful computer companies in Tomorrowland for those those of you who don't know. There would be some competition. The whole network would be free and you could build whatever you wanted on it. But we would be the only ones with a foolproof way of picking winners. Everyone else would have to use trial and error. We'd be Google and you'd be Ask Jeeves. Yeah you guessed it. The first one was successful and the second one wasn't. John built a social network called You Are Awaited that would let you stay in touch with old friends and make new ones too. But the social network was nothing compared to the other thing he did. He implemented a cryptocurrency and a mining program. The mining program let your computer print its own money. The computer created money out of nothing but electricity and maths. Everyone who bought one of my computers would have an instant revenue stream. The thing would pay for itself. I decided to call our new currency Firebucks. Firebucks are all just numbers stored on computers. But all the computers in the world have to agree on what those numbers are so no one can fuck the system up. John knew people would still wanna be able to carry their money around on them so he set it up so you could engrave some codes onto these special cards and you could use them as money too just like a goddamn Master Charge. I chose the motto we'd engrave on the cards: HARMONIA ABSQUE IMPERIO The best part was that my own personal computer had a massive head start on generating Firebucks. I was gonna have all the money in the world and you'd be super excited about pedaling your bike for an hour to power your generator long enough for your computer to make you twenty cents. Hell twenty cents is better than no fucking cents so fuck you. Yes I am making the world a better place no matter what you say. This would only work if I could get everyone to accept our new money. The only way I'd get everyone to accept it would be if everyone had some of it to spend. The only way everyone would have some of it to spend would be if everyone had one of my computers. My supplier had figured out a way to cram more transistors onto an integrated circuit so it was quite possible that the next version of my computer would be shrunk down smaller than an IBM PC. But them fancy integrated circuits were not gonna be cheap. I would need to build a heap of computers all at once or else no one would get any value out of them. There'd be no way to connect to the network if there was no network around to connect to. No one to trade Firebucks with. No one to fall in love with. I needed materials and tools and fuel. And heaps of money. And yeah I knew of a way to make some quick shrapnel. Having a chance to become the richest person on earth made the stupid risk worthwhile. All I had to do was make sure I didn't come in last. It's race day! Your hero is in jeopardy! Are you excited race fans? Are you excited to find out who wins and who dies? Good cuz I'm gonna tell you. One other person entered. One other person. So it was me or him. One of us would be rich and the other would be dead. I was up against a tall musclebound motherfucker in a blown Mustang. He'd won every race he'd ever entered. He was gorgeous and cocky. Everyone cheered when they introduced him. Then they introduced me and nobody cheered. Some people laughed. I was the underdog. The race began. He let me get ahead. He toyed with me. We had some kind of tortoise and hare dynamic. His cockiness got the better of him. I used my superior intellect to take advantage of his one weakness. Then I won and I got the money I needed to make my computers. We ate him for dinner and that motherfucker got what he deserved. Is that the story you wanted to hear? Cuz I could have told you that's what happened. There's not much point in telling you what really happened. There's no drama in competition or battle. At least not in the battle itself. Someone's gonna be more skilled. Or someone's gonna pull some kind of trick. Or someone's gonna get lucky. That's it. The drama lies in what's at stake. The drama lies in how much you care about the participants. Do you care about me? I don't give a shit about you. I've never met you. Writing is an asymmetrical relationship. I'm trying to make you like me without even bothering to get to know you. Sorry about that. I could just tell you I pulled the lever of a slot machine. If I told you I'd won we'd celebrate together. If I told you I'd lost it would build up tension and make it more intense when I eventually did win. We're gambling addicts every one. Sure if I lost this race I'd die. Or maybe I'd escape. That's still a very limited number of outcomes. The universe pulls the lever of some cosmic slot machine and someone comes out victorious. Boring as fuck. What makes for real drama is the boundless possibility of the human condition. Do people learn from their experiences? Do they make the world a better place? Do they improve the lives of others or leave a trail of suffering behind them? That kind of drama is still just the universe pulling the levers of slot machines but it's pulling a lot more of them at once. Free will is an illusion but life is a hell of a ride anyway. We like to see good people struggle and eventually succeed. We like to see bad people win a few battles but ultimately fail. So what do you think of me so far? Am I a good guy or a bad guy? Maybe don't answer that just yet cuz I'm gonna tell you what really happened. The other bloke who entered the race couldn't have been older than twenty. He was dressed in rags and his car was a piece of shit. I won the race. A woman carrying a baby ran out to try to stop them from killing him and eating him. She was wailing and flailing but the crowd held her back. She watched the proceedings helplessly. Still want me to describe his death in vivid detail? I'm not a good guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm whatever the situation requires. I tried to ignore the sound of her wailing. Eventually she quieted down as the smell of roasting flesh hit the air. I packed up my stuff. I tossed my big sack of prize money into the boot. I was about to close it when I saw the woman who'd lost her husband standing there pointing a revolver at me. She still had her baby in her arms. I closed the boot. She looked at me. I looked at her. She pulled the trigger again and again and again. Click click click click click click. No bullets. She threw the gun and screamed and came at me. I pushed her away and got the hell out of that place. Later it occurred to me that I should have named my computer after the bloke who got eaten. But I couldn't remember his name. When I'm gone I hereby give all of you permission to be unable to remember my name too. Forget me when you look at the night sky.