Diego and KC

KC knelt down next to Diego and looked over at the tangle of wires. "Everything running again Mr. DeZufingia?
   "Its pronounced... wait - that is how its pronounced."
   "I grew up in Southern California, learned Spanish by default."
   "Did you pick it up from the fine upstanding citizens or the others?"
   "First one, mostly the other."
   "Sounds like you might have had an interesting life before The Event occurred KC.
   "That I did. Though I consider myself a different person back then, I'm not inclined to talk about it on your radio show."
   "Five by five on that. Before we can decide on a government we need to figure out who we are.
   "You sound like a philosopher."
   "I share a last name with one, you have to pick some up. You read any?"
   "I know enough about philosophy to know the ones I disagree with, just not enough to use the words of the other ones to explain why."
   "Good answer."
   "You know who you are Diego?"
   "I for one, maintain that I am the same person I was before. But I also maintain that I was a good person before. My father was a vile man before, and I'm sure he has used current events to feed his depravity rather than use his power to help others."
   "You knew your old man, and how not to be him. That is something at least."
   "I take it you're an insufferable optimist KC?"
   "More, play it as it lays. I don't hold on to the past, and see the future as a pretty good time to be around. At the moment I'm on permanent vacation, traveling the old highways on a multi-fuel turbine powered motorcycle. If it weren't for the event, I'd probably have some wage slave work-a-day job and couldn't afford the insurance for a racing cycle."
   "It is a nice machine, but why turbine?"
   "It will burn just about anything, and runs at really high RPMs, which then gets into some sort of advanced gearbox which can give me amazing flat out speed, or torque to rival most four-by-fours. The one thing it can't do is conserve fuel though. Its supposed to have structural batteries, but aside from switching to a different parking space, those don't do much."
   "Yeah, I know. I lost enough to be pretty sure it was just psychological, but I swear electrics don't race as well as burners."
  "But any bike is better than a car - especially in the wastes. More efficient - unless its mine - quieter, less burden, easier to hide and fit in small spaces. If you have enough stuff to fill a truck, you're doing something wrong, at least in my book. If you need to stand and fight to protect everything rather than accept a loss when you should be running - dying from bad luck, or someone's better planning, OK, but greed? That is just unacceptable."
   "I'd make a toast to hubris, but we're a bit low, and there are no shot-glasses behind this panel. Well, there better not be, the fuse-box is in bad shape as it is."
   "I'll get out of your way then. A lot of people rely on you signals to understand this world we're living in. We should keep it going."