“For an economy built to last we must invest in what will fuel us for generations to come.”

~Cory Booker

“Wherever there is injustice, there is anger, and anger is like gasoline - if you spray it around and somebody lights a matchstick, you have an inferno. But anger inside an engine is powerful: it can drive us forward and can get us through dreadful moments and give us power.”

~Scilla Elworthy

“I am your redeemer. It is by my hand you will rise from the ashes of this world.”

~Immortan Joe

Max had killed thirty men on his way up the Citadel. He was weak, tiring, but he had long ago learned to push past mortal needs, simple things like hunger and thirst. He had taken wounds, but they hadn’t been so bad that they hadn’t clotted. His shoulder he had cauterized with the barrel of his sawed-off, just after he’d used the last of his shells. His nose was broken, maybe in two places, but that was only a minor issue when the day still held a chance for justice and revenge. He licked at his bloodied lip, then kicked in the door to Immortan Joe’s throne room. He leveled the shotgun right at the massive man, wishing that he had saved a shell.

“Guzzoline goes bad,” spoke Immortan Joe from his throne. He sat there, adorned with medals upon his chest and his mask pulled off to one side. Max had only heard him speaking at a shout before, a roaring, thunderous growling voice that commanded the War Boys and ruled the Citadel by the force of command the Immortan put behind it. Here, in the quietude of the Citadel, Immortan Joe spoke softly.

“What were you, before civilization slit its throat?” asked Immortan Joe.

Max didn’t answer. He started to move forward. He was battered and bruised, but still ready to fight. Pain was something to move past. Anger could strengthen the bones. Immortan Joe was huge, built like a tank in a world where every scrap of food was precious. He was old, in his sixties, but that hardly seemed to matter. Immortan Joe was well rested, waiting for the fight.

“I was a colonel in the army,” said Immortan Joe. “Logistics was my game, and I played it well. The Oil Wars, and the Water Wars after them, they made me a valued man, worth my weight in gold when gold had worth. I secured my country all it could ever need, all the sweet crude and all the precious water. But when that last fire was sparked, when the skies and ground alike turned sour, that was almost the end of order.” He stood from the throne and cracked his head to the side before nodding at the shotgun Max held. “You stopped firing that thing halfway up the stairs to see me. You’re dry as a bone.”

Max flipped the shotgun around, holding it by its barrel. The handle was hard metal, making for a half-decent club.

“Guzzoline goes bad in months,” said Immortan Joe. “With stabilizers, we can stretch it to a year, maybe a year and a half. If Gas Town shuts down, the chariots stop racing across these wide lands. The stockpiles will rot. Do you comprehend the feat of keeping an oil refinery running? A lead mine, a sulfur mine, a source of saltpeter, all to make up Bullet Town? The Wretched number forty thousand, road warrior, all of them kept from starvation and dehydration, all of them sustained. The War Boys are an army nine hundred strong.” His voice rose as he spoke.

Max looked Immortan Joe over for weak spots and found none.

“Civilization slit its own throat!” shouted Immortan Joe. “And I am the only one standing over the body, trying desperately to stitch closed the open veins, acting as blood bag, draining myself to give that poor creature LIFE!”

He moved forward, far faster than Max could have expected, and laid a powerful blow right on the renegade’s wounded shoulder. Max fell to the floor and grit his teeth before scrambling back up again.

“The waters will rise again,” said Immortan Joe. “The sourness of the lands will fade. The tumors that adorn the Wretched will not be passed on to the next generation, because the sickly babies will be dashed against the rocks, sent to Valhalla early so their brothers might live. It will be the work of ages, but civilization will stumble to its feet again one day, its chest stained with the blood that was spilled and its pulse weak, but undeniably a civilization alive. Everything I have done, every action I have taken, has been because I am a man of the future. The death and destruction that you leave in your wake marks you as a man of the past.”

Immortan Joe moved forward and Max moved towards him, trying to catch him off-guard with a strike to the knee. Immortan Joe caught the shotgun with one hand and snapped Max’s arm cleanly, then beat the wanderer to death.

The children had listened to the History Man in silence, but one child’s hand had shot up midway through. The History Man had given the child a glance, but only long enough to make sure that this wasn’t a request to go to the bathroom. When the story of Mad Max and Immortan Joe was finished, the History Man waited for one of the other children to raise their hands, so he could call on one of them instead, but no alternative options presented themselves.

“You have a question, puppling?” he asked the child. The History Man had been working at the museum for long enough to be able to peg the child’s age at about ten, one of the oldest in the mixed group that had been brought in.

“How old was Mad Max?” asked the child.

“Your name?” asked the History Man.

“Max,” said the child. He hesitated for a moment. “Maximum,” he admitted.

“Ah, so he’s not quite a namesake,” said the History Man with a false smile. “Well, Maximum, the historicity of Max Rockatansky is widely disputed. That means the historical truth is in question.”

“I know what historicity means,” said Maximum.

The History Man frowned. “To answer your question, the earliest known stories about Max Rockatansky occur sometime after the Oil Wars and before the Water Wars, which means that they would be somewhere in the mid 1990s by the old Gregory calendar. In that early story, Max’s wife and son are killed, though in some tellings it’s his wife and daughter. Based on some studies of people in the wayback days, that would probably mean that he was twenty years old.”

Maximum raised his hand again.

“Yes?” asked the History Man with a twitch of his lips.

“But then how old was Imperator Furiosa?” asked Maximum. “Because it seemed like a lot of the people in that story didn’t know anything about the wayback, but Max did somehow? Was Max really old then? And if Immortan Joe fought in the Oil Wars then why does he say guzzoline instead of gasoline?”

The History Man sighed. “I was just about to turn my wheels in that direction. There are lots of stories about Max, but if all of them were true then he lived a hundred and fifty years. The early stories might have been made up by people who came later on, or the later stories might have been made up while the early stories actually happened, or there might have been multiple people who took on the name because it made them fearsome.”

Maximum raised his hand again.

“To answer your other question,” the History Man continued on, not bothering to call on the boy, “Immortan Joe probably called it gasoline, given what we know about who he was and when he lived. We’ve recovered files from the Book Pits of ancient Mal Born that let us know he was real. But the story of Immortan Joe was written by people who came later, those who had a worse grasp on Engles than any young puppling has today. We leave those bits in though, because that’s one of the things that makes the stories of the Wretched Era so shiny and chrome.”

To the History Man’s dismay, the child’s hand had stayed up.

“Does anyone else have any questions?” asked the History Man. Thankfully, a small girl of about six years old raised her hand, and the History Man pointed at her, ignoring Maximum’s frantic waving.

“But what happened after?” she asked. “After Immortan Joe won?”

“The Citadel still stands today,” said the History Man. “There was a time when it was the only place with a steady supply of food and water for a thousand miles. Immortan Joe did eventually die, but he was reborn, and his War Boys flocked to his new body, one that was hardened against the sourness of the earth. Every generation has their Immortan, a man determined against all odds to keep things running, not an organic mechanic, but a mechanic of the civilization, fixing things when there’s a knock in the motor and cleaning it up so it doesn’t rust. The second incarnation of Immortan Joe said that.”

The History Man smiled as he said this, but Maximum was still waving his hand and this time there didn’t seem to be any other children willing to come to the rescue with an easy question.

“I heard Immortan Joe had sex slaves,” said Maximum, expelling the words from his mouth with the speed of a car backfiring.

“The --” The History Man paused as he realized he’d already used the word historicity. “If you’re jabbering about the Five Wives, they’re just stories people told, with nothing in the Book Pits of ancient Mal Born to back it up.”

“But if the Book Pits only --”

“Ah, Tender Erinyears, you’re back just in time,” said the History Man as he spotted the woman in white who had dropped her pupplings off for story time. “I’m sure there are other things the children want to see in the museum before their time is up.”

“I think they’re just thankful for the cold breath of the Northern Gods,” said Erinyears. She held her hand up to the air conditioning that thrummed through the building. “What a miraculous age we live in.” When she turned back to the History Man, there was a fetching smile on her face. “Was there anything else you wanted to leave the children with?”

She hadn’t been there for the intense grilling that Maximum had given the History Man, but the History Man thought he could see some empathy from her. Maximum still had his hand raised, naturally.

“The story I told you today was one about the inherent conflict that shapes us as people,” said the History Man. “Every story about Max Rockatansky is about humanity and redemption, specifically the rejection of both. Every story of Max ends with him walking back into the deserts, turning his back on those he’s made bonds with, becoming the raggedy man again. Max is, in a very wayback sense, the foil to Immortan Joe. The stories of the Immortan, in all his incarnations, are stories of rebuilding, of doing what is necessary to redeem a humanity that was all but lost. Immortan Joe sometimes does things that are no longer considered acceptable to modern society, but he only does these things because he is the mechanic of glory. Where every story about Max ends with death and an abandonment of his fellow man, every story of Immortan Joe ends with the world becoming better, each stitch tight, with the people around him better capable of weathering the storm.”

Maximum opened his mouth to respond, but Tender Erinyears clamped her hand firmly over his mouth. “Thank you History Man, that was a really shiny speech you gave. Come along children, while you were listening to that recounting I found the room with a model Interceptor.” She let her hand off Maximum’s mouth slowly, giving a him warning look and then shooting a sympathetic glance to the History Man.

“Mediocre,” Max muttered under his breath..