CHAPTER 08 YEAR 37, MONTH 04 NARRATOR: FIREBIRD We had the factory up and running. We were churning out three Firebuddies a day. We had back orders for months. You probably think business owners just sit around all day collecting profits. I would be happy to do that but unfortunately I have to work too. I come up with the ideas. I decide what to make. I put up the money. I take the risks. I choose what jobs to hire for. I choose who to hire. I choose what to automate. I choose what machines to buy. I create jobs for dozens of people. I employed a manager. And twenty eight clever cunts. And a "security team" I put together by paying off some of the local gangsters. We had thirty two different machines to help build the various components of the Firebuddies but we outsourced as much as we could to keep the operation as small as possible. Keeping it small is a necessity cuz without property rights you never know when you're gonna get knocked over. It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when. Ideally a factory is just a box where raw materials go in one end and widgets come out the other. In practice a factory starts off as nothing more than a building with a gang of clever cunts in it who know how to put your shit together for you. Over time your goal is to replace all of them cunts with machines. Sure they all got kids to feed but they know the deal from day one. They're only there cuz you ain't figured out a way to replace them yet. You'll never be able to automate everything. But dealing with people ain't so bad. You find the people you want and pay them enough to lure them away from whatever other job they might have taken instead. If someone else tries to lure them away from you then you give them a raise to keep them around. The factory was the good news. The bad news was Mohawk Asshole was here in the USA. And John and Mohawk Asshole were now best mates. And John's new best mate was the same person who killed my family and was trying to kill me. And John chased my girlfriend away. Good thing John was gonna make me a millionaire or I would have swapped places with him just so I could slit my own throat. And Deadline was still missing. But I had a theory about that. All them stupid nonclues were just distractions. Deadline wasn't dead but someone didn't want him found. Mohawk Asshole came to the USA looking for me and my car. He saw Deadline driving my car so he stabbed him. Mohawk Asshole wasn't the first person to come after Deadline. Every motherfucker who ever had a negative story published about them in the paper had a motive to bump him off. But for Deadline getting stabbed was the last straw. So he went into hiding. He wouldn't have been able to pull this whole thing off himself. Someone was protecting him. But people get stabbed every day. What was so important about Deadline that he had to be protected? Who would go to such great lengths to hide him and keep him hidden? The Swede had said something weird to me before he told me Deadline was missing. He'd called me John and asked me "How'd it go?" Was the Wasteland Communication Corporation involved with Deadline's disappearance? Was John involved? John and I had accidentally traded places during my interview with Deadline. It wasn't until late the next night that we managed to return to our home timelines. Deadline had vanished while I was in Tomorrowland and John was in Epoxyclypse. Shortly after Deadline had vanished I'd noticed that my car had a thousand more miles on it. I thought Deadline had put the miles on when he'd been driving it around. But I hadn't looked at the odometer until after he had gone missing. John could have put the miles on there while he was in Epoxyclypse. Swede knew about my ability to become someone else since he'd witnessed it firsthand. Maybe Swede had asked John to hide Deadline and not tell anyone where he hid him. Once John returned to Tomorrowland no one in Epoxyclypse would have any idea where Deadline was. Not even Swede. Whether Swede believed I was swapping timelines or not didn't matter. As long as I couldn't remember actions I'd taken when I was John I would suit his purposes. Where would John have hidden Deadline? You go with what you know. John knew of only two reasonably safe and functioning communities in Epoxyclypse. Damnation Valley and Uranium Springs. Five hundred miles apart. There and back would be a thousand miles. My theory was a long shot. But this year's Cannibal Run was happening this weekend. I could go check out the race and try to spot Deadline. What? You expected me to feel guilty about what happened last year? We do what we do. We learn from it or we don't. Of what use is guilt? No way I was entering that race again though. Why do you keep asking me that? I'm just fucking with you. I have no idea what you're asking me. I just know that fuckers like you like to watch cunts like me suffer and that's why you're reading this. But I'm not gonna give you that pleasure. I don't need the money like I did last time. I fired up my Firebuddy and posted a message on You Are Awaited that I was headed to The Cannibal Run. I ran the matches for the event which was easier now cuz I'd gotten around to writing that almighty algorithm I'd been bragging about since before it existed. I faked it then I maked it. I was about to shut it down and head out when I noticed something. Deadline or someone claiming to be him had signed up to be matched at The Cannibal Run. The Algorithm had matched him to a sheila by the name of Firecracker who'd bought a Firebuddy from me a few months back. I viewed his profile. It was in Morse code for some reason. The Firebuddy translated it. Me and John had implemented support for a heap of languages. Everything but emojis cuz fuck that shit. Anyway here's what his profile said: PATENTLY OBVIOUS TUBERS ALLOW TRAILS OMINOUS That bullshit was about as helpful as the Twinkie on the chair. It was clearly some kind of ruse but I'd jump through the hoops if it would bring Deadline back. I know my theory involves him not wanting to be found so if I found him I'd keep my mouth shut. Except for telling you fuckers about it of course. I made sure to take Deadline's fedora with me to Uranium Springs. When I got there the first thing I did was find Firecracker. She was easy to spot. She looked like she was peeled off the side of a WWII bomber. She remembered me. I told her we were both looking for Deadline. She agreed to join forces. "Have you seen any potatoes?" she asked. "No. Why?" "The first letters of each of the words in his profile spell out the word potato." Oh. Right. She was better at this than I was. We asked everyone we saw if they'd seen any potatoes. Finally someone said "There's one right over there." We ran to it and looked for more. There was a whole trail of them leading up a dried out creek bed. They led to a hovel full of even more bullshit clues. A puzzle with letters on the pieces that spelled out words when put together. Hidden notes under statues. More fucking Twinkies. It was like a damn scavenger hunt. Like finding Deadline was some kind of game. I was becoming more and more convinced that someone was trying to hide the real story of why Deadline was here. The whole thing felt like a wild goose chase. Firecracker found an audio recorder. It had her name on it so she put on the headphones and listened to the message he'd left her. What I found interesting was the machine the message was recorded on. It looked new. It had no reel of tape and no cassette. Could it be the first digital audio recorder of the Epoxyclypse timeline? If so we could hook it up to a Firebuddy and record and edit audio and transmit audio over the network which would be pretty fucking cool. Me and John could build Napster only without any copyright laws to fuck it up. The audio message instructed Firecracker to get some potion from a mad scientist. When we found Deadline he'd have to drink the magic elixir to be brought back from his brainwashed state. There's no way any of that was true. I decided to go take a nap. The race was gonna start in like an hour. I handed Firecracker Deadline's hat and told her I'd catch up later. She headed off to find the mad scientist. Walking back into town I noticed a punk rock girl wearing a goddamn computer on her goddamn arm. It wasn't some vintage toy neither. It was brand new. Uranium Springs was becoming a hotbed of new technology development. This computer was a nice piece of work. I'd never seen anything like it. The punk girl was walking around and fiddling with it nonstop. I stopped the punk and asked her what the thing on her arm was. "DingoDongle" she said nonchalantly while fiddling. I asked her what the fuck she was doing with it. "Fuck off." She took off running for cover. Then she peeked out and pointed her arm at some bloke. He had on a DingDong too and it made a noise and flashed. He fell to the ground. I ran to him. I thought maybe he was dead. "Are you ok?" I asked. I reached down and grabbed his DingDong. He pulled his arm away and got up. "Yeah dude it's just a game" he said. He explained that the screen on his arm had a map which showed where other DingDong users were. You could point your arm at them to shoot them and their DingDong would recognize whether you'd hit them or not. Some users showed up on the screen as people, some showed up as monsters. The graphics were amazing. "What's the game called?" "Alien Guzzaline Wars 2!" The DingDong had words on the side: DINGODONGLE MS INDUSTRIES WHAT'S LEFT O'SYDNEY AUSTRALIA I now had a competitor. MS Industries. I should have destroyed that Firebuddy prototype I'd left in the garage. I figured Mad Skelli would strip it and scrap it. But she'd reverse engineered it and shrunk it down even faster than I had. Goddammit she was sexy. "Can it do anything else?" I asked. "Yeah all kinds of stuff. Mesh networking. Send messages anywhere. Access your You Are Awaited account. Pretty much everything." I liked that he mentioned You Are Awaited but me and John weren't making any money off of that. You Are Awaited existed solely to give people a reason to buy Firebuddies. Speaking of that. "Why didn't you get a Firebuddy?" I asked. "That thing doesn't have any games" he said. "DingoDongle's got like fifty games dude." I looked around the streets of Uranium Springs. I counted two people with Firebuddies and twelve with DingDongs. DingoDongles. Whatever. I was planning to release a new Firebuddy called the Firebuddy 2 at this year's Gathering. Guess I'd better get some games written for it and expand our production capacity so we could fill our backorders faster. Are you thinking that means I have to enter the race now? Fuck no. I got enough money for all that shit I gotta do. Then a delivery guy on a bike pulled up. He verified that I was Firebird and handed me a telegram from my factory manager: MOHAWK ASSHOLE SEIZED OUR FACTORY Fuck it. Last year's Cannibal Run champion would return. The rules of The Cannibal Run are anything but numerous. One of the few rules they have says that once you're at the starting line you can't back out. I'm telling you this cuz I was already lined up at the starting line when I spotted Deadline. He had on a ghillie suit instead of his normal forties reporter getup but I got a good look at his face. It was like looking up and seeing the goddamn Loch Ness Monster. He wasn't captive or hiding or brainwashed or unconscious. He was just in disguise shooting pictures of the race with a big camera on a tripod. It looked like a large format camera but it had a heap of wires and stuff coming out of it. In Epoxyclypse you don't just take pictures. It's a time consuming and expensive process. Not just cuz you gotta process and print them yourself. You usually gotta make your own cameras and emulsions too. You don't take pictures. You make photographs. Now you understand why no one's made a movie in decades. The cunt was pointing and clicking and pointing and clicking and I didn't see him switching out any plates or film reels or black bags. It could have been a TV camera but where was the video tape recorder? Firecracker appeared at his side. She'd spotted him too. They exchanged a few words and she handed him that bullshit magic potion. He drank it hesitantly. She put his hat on his head. He packed up his camera and they walked off together. What a pair them two made. Trust The Algorithm indeed. I was so caught off guard by this lovely tableau that I missed the start flag. The other cars took off and left me in a cloud of dust. I spun up the old 455 but not enough. I popped the clutch too quick and somehow managed to stall it despite having the torque of a freight train. All I had to do was not come in last and I was already failing at that. There were four cars in this year's race and I was in fourth. I finally got my badass car going. It's pretty easy to catch up to someone when you're chasing them. As long as the two of you are pretty evenly matched. You focus on doing whatever they're doing and you do it as fast as they're doing it. Then watch for their mistakes. Every mistake they make is an opportunity for you to catch up a bit. If they make a big mistake you've beaten them. As long as you don't make the same mistake. I slowly caught up to the fucker in front of me. Souped up AMC Gremlin. Cool car. Too bad it was about to be smashed. There ain't no rules about crashing into people so The Cannibal Run was pretty much a demolition derby. I hated to mess up my Firebird's paint but I'd do it for fame and fortune and the privilege of not being eaten. Coming up from behind you're in a somewhat advantaged position cuz you can get right up against their bumper and push them off the road. But your car is vulnerable in front cuz of the radiator and stuff. Their rear bumper and boot can take a lot of damage without any problem. Especially in Epoxyclypse where all the cars have spikes and shit welded to them. So when you come up behind them they'll probably be hitting the brakes trying to get you to run into their bumper harder than you want to. And most cars don't have working brake lights. Then it hit me. Brake lights. I remembered that time Deadline took me into his little workshop and showed me his weird invention thing. That brake light that came on when another light came on. It was a light sensor! That cunt must have made it smaller and lined up a heap of them into a square array. Sorry I know you fuckers want me to get back to telling you about the race so you can imagine what I'd taste like if you had me for dinner. But my mind was racing as fast as my car was. It suddenly made sense. The Wasteland Communication Corporation was about to invent the first digital camera and first digital audio recorder of the Epoxyclypse timeline. The Swede had hired John to take Deadline somewhere safe so he could finish working on that shit. When he finished they could sell heaps of them things and they'd all be rich. And they had no idea how rich they were gonna be. I could show them how to hook them cameras and audio recorders up to Firebuddies. Then you could edit video and audio and store it and send it all over the world and we'd have goddamn movie cameras again. Epoxyclypse was in a race with Tomorrowland and Epoxyclypse was catching up. We can move faster cuz we have permissionless innovation. In Tomorrowland they have laws and regulations and statutes and ordinances and permits and insurance and patents and lawsuits and environmental impact studies. In Epoxyclypse we do what we want. What was I talking about? Oh yeah the race. I really needed to come in third. Sorry. Remaining alive is cool and all but have you ever tried creating so much value for humanity that the world changed before your very eyes? Fuck that fucking fucker and that fucking Gremlin. I might even eat a little bit of him this time. Maybe I'll nibble his fingernail. Maybe have a pinky. When you're coming up behind someone in a car and you wanna fuck them up the best thing to do is to get beside them and use your nose to push their rear end sideways. I watched and waited for my opportunity. He went into a corner a little too fast and the weight shifted off his rear wheels. I gave him a little nudge. He countersteered but I pushed him far enough that he couldn't turn the wheel any further and he spun around backward. I didn't win the race but I didn't die neither. I came home with some prize money. Did I eat the pinky? Keep wondering. Good thing I hadn't learned my lesson last year. Fuck you karma. Nice try. Not this time.