CHAPTER 06 YEAR 36, MONTH 08 NARRATOR: FIREBIRD The Gathering is the place we come to find thems we're looking for and thems we've lost. It don't matter if you're looking for love or a friend you haven't met yet or an enemy you haven't battled yet or someone you knew once long ago. Without phones or a reliable mail service we need a designated meeting place. That's The Gathering. Pretty much everyone in the world knew about The Gathering. There were lots of local gatherings too. But if the person you were looking for could have ended up anywhere in the world then your best hope was to look for them at the biggest gathering in the world. The Gathering in Damnation Valley California. They'd held a Gathering every year since Year Zero. Since I'd arrived in the USA I'd been going every year. John knew I'd be at this year's Gathering and I knew John would be at this year's Wasteland Weekend. We were fully expecting that we'd trade places at some point. In fact we were looking forward to it. Well at least I was. I think trading places stressed John out. Since The Cannibal Run I'd invested all of my money and time into hand building ten of my new smaller computers to sell at The Gathering. Yup they were even smaller than that IBM PC now. I wouldn't call them portable yet but I'd get there. I'd decided to call my computer the Firebuddy. It should've been easy to sell a box that makes money and friends. But the Firebuddy would only be truly useful to someone if lots of other people had them too. I was going to have to advertise. I decided to go see the cunt that ran The Gathering's newspaper. I pulled up in front of his office in my rumbling V8. The building had a big sign on it: WASTELAND COMMUNICATION CORPORATION The Gathering's radio station was in the same building as the newspaper office. I peeked in to look for The Swede but the door was locked and the equipment wasn't set up yet. The newsie cunt popped his head out of his office. "Nice jalopy!" he said. "Nice hat" I said. He had on a fedora that made him look like he'd just stepped off the set of Citizen Kane. I introduced myself. "Firebird." "Yes it is" he said. He was still ogling my car. "So am I. Who are you?" "Deadline." "How many eyeballs does your paper reach?" I asked. "Eight thousand" he said. I did the math. "That's over four thousand people." I tried to pitch the idea of him doing an article on the Firebuddy. I ended up making my first sale instead! Nine to go. He wasn't gonna write an article about it until he saw what the thing could do. He wasn't gonna see what the thing could do until I'd sold a heap of them and he'd be able to use it to communicate and connect with people. He said he'd be happy to sell me an ad. But I'd gone all in on building these fancy high tech machines and I couldn't afford an ad. I had nothing left to offer. Except. I was 100% sure the Firebuddy could change the world. The question was would other people realize it too? Was I willing to risk everything? The reward was worth the risk. No way I was gonna sell my car. But what I would do was bet my car. I told Deadline he could have my Firebird if he gave me an ad in every paper he published from now until forever. But if he ever wanted to publish a story about the Firebuddy he'd have to give me the car back first. Today I was small enough to need advertising. Tomorrow I'd be big enough to be news. We shook on it. I handed him the keys. He threw an old box of Twinkies into the deal. I hadn't had a Twinkie in decades. I chomped one down while scrawling out the ad copy: MAKE MONEY FIND LOVE TRUST THE ALGORITHM GET YOUR FIREBUDDY TODAY Deadline got a kick out of it. "Say buddy I can tell you're an idea man. I've got some ideas of my own see? Let me show you something." He took me through his tiny office and into an even tinier workshop behind it. There was a big mess of wires on the bench connecting a small vertically mounted square to a car's brake light sitting on the table. He flipped a switch and the brake light came on. He grabbed a flashlight and told me to close the door. When I closed the door the brake light went off. This was a windowless room. It was dark and I had no idea what was about to happen. He turned on the flashlight. The brake light came on again. I opened the door. "That's cool man." That night I slept under the stars on top of a pile of Firebuddies and dreamed of wealth beyond my... wildest dreams. I dunno. I'm not a writer. I'm just someone who's trying to tell you a bunch of stuff that happened. I only sold five Firebuddies. I was fucked. Or at least I was fucked until I figured out what to do with the other five. When John and I traded places I researched the social networking accounts of our five customers' doppelgangers to see if they had friends or spouses or whatever in Tomorrowland that they hadn't met in Epoxyclypse. When I came back to Epoxyclypse I compared their Tomorrowland friends lists to their Epoxyclypse online address books. For each of them I found someone in attendance at The Gathering who they'd never met before but who I was sure they'd like cuz they were already friends with them in Tomorrowland. I gave each of their future friends one of the remaining Firebuddies for free. That way when they signed up for You Are Awaited they'd be sure to meet people they liked even though the social network consisted of just ten people. Of course I made it look like there were more than ten people on there by adding a heap of fake users. Once everyone had signed up for You Are Awaited I ran the matches. What that supposedly meant was I ran the magic algorithm that connected people to their new friends they were supposed to meet at The Gathering. What that really meant was I manually inserted some rows into a database. Right now this was a labor intensive process that required timeline swapping but eventually I'd get around to writing that great algorithm. Hopefully before the You Are Awaited event that was scheduled to happen at the next Cannibal Run. Anyway the idea was everyone would go find each other during The Gathering and shake hands or fuck or whatever. The plan worked. They all got in touch and they all hit it off. I had five pairs of happy people that were shouting from the rooftops about the miraculous Firebuddy. "Trust The Algorithm" they said. I'd accidentally started a cult. People were throwing money at me. I frantically took orders and started putting together a gang of clever cunts that could mass produce the Firebuddy. I negotiated for the purchase of a building in the middle of nowhere to use as a factory. At that point if I'd had a door Deadline would have knocked it down to get an interview. He dropped off my car and gave me back the keys. He'd even washed the thing. The guy was a class act. The interview went off the rails when John and I accidentally swapped places again but that only served to generate more buzz. Everyone wanted to know more about the mad genius Firebird and his magical Firebuddy. I stopped in to pick up a copy of Deadline's paper with my interview in it. I was gonna take the piss out of him about the thousand miles he somehow managed to put on my car. But Deadline was gone. His door was open and his office was trashed. I found his crumpled hat on the floor and picked it up. The Swede saw me poking around and came out to talk to me. "Hey John what's going on? How'd it go?" "I'm Firebird. Or at least right now I am. We haven't spoken since The Cannibal Run." Swede probably thought I was crazy but he didn't seem to mind. "Firebird again? Ok then. Maybe you can help us. Deadline's gone. Probably dead." I looked around the newspaper office. There were pretend clues all over. The place had more red herrings than a fish market. An unpublished article about the sex practices of a local tribe. Drawings and notes connected nonsensically by strings on a bulletin board. A Twinkie on a chair. Swede explained that Deadline had been looking into election fraud and he'd been investigating a corrupt casino. He'd received several death threats. People don't threaten to do shit. They just do it. People don't get murdered with four thousand people standing around and nobody seeing nothing. It all sounded like a heap of bullshit to me. I figured Deadline was alive but I had no clue where to look for him. Ok I had clues but they were super shitty ones. None of it made any sense but I promised Swede I'd do what I could. Swede told me Deadline was last seen at the Cult Of Catmeat. The Cult Of Catmeat was a gang of idiots who worshipped a cat. A cat named Catmeat. Their leader was called Grotch. I was instructed that when it came time to use a pronoun for Grotch the one that was to be used was "it." Catmeat's pronoun was supposed to be the capitalized "He" but I'm gonna take my chances ignoring that one cuz I don't capitalize anything to do with god or government. I found Grotch and some of its followers in an abandoned christian church which was now looking more like a satanic one. I sat down in back and watched their antics. Grotch had on a three foot tall punk rock pope hat that was all black. The altar of the Cult Of Catmeat was covered in stuffed cats. I hoped they were all stuffed toys and not actual taxidermied cats but I didn't look that close. Catmeat himself was there lying in a cardboard box and paying no attention to his adoring minions. The cult members were lined up to receive their communion or baptism or whatever and Grotch was spitting blood or wine or something into each of their faces. When the bullshit was over I introduced myself to Grotch and told it I was looking for a cunt named Deadline. Grotch spoke slowly like it assumed I'd be hanging on its every word. "He interviewed several of us at The Gathering.... Being a good journalist he participated in our ceremony." "He let you spit on him." "Baptize him.... Then a man with a mohawk appeared and stabbed him.... But Deadline is one of us now.... So we threw the evil man out.... Catmeat healed Deadline with a divine bunt." "Uh huh. I hope you put a couple of stitches in him just to be sure. Did the asshole with the mohawk say anything?" "Yes.... He said... that he wanted his car back."