ACT I — THE THIRD SUN

The sun came up three times brighter that morning, and my father did not come down from the table.

I was fourteen, sitting at the kitchen with a plate of cold hash and a cup of coffee that belonged to a man who would never drink it again, watching the light through the window go from the normal yellow of a Los Angeles dawn to something else—something too bright, too white, too much. It was like looking through a magnifying glass at the world, and the world was burning.

My father was sitting at the table with a newspaper and a cup of coffee and a smile that said he had something good to tell me. He was thirty-two years old and he had just been promoted at the oil company and he was going to tell me about it and I was going to be proud of him and the sun would not come up three times brighter and he would not fold forward onto the linoleum with his face in his coffee and his coffee spreading across the newspaper like a dark Rorschach test that nobody could read.

I sat there for a long time. The sun went back to normal, but the brightness stayed in the room like an afterimage, burned into the walls and the ceiling and my father's face.

"Pop?" I said.

No answer.

I put my hand on his shoulder and felt the warmth leaving him, slow and steady, like a radiator winding down in an empty house. I pressed two fingers to his throat and found nothing where there should have been the strong, steady pulse of a man who ran five miles every morning and drank whiskey on Sundays and told me that a boy who could steal an automobile could also steal the world if he wanted to.

I stood up and walked out of the apartment and into a Los Angeles that was falling apart around me. Not dramatically. Not with screaming or running or fire. Just the quiet, methodical collapse of a city whose adults were dropping into chairs and onto floors and into streets like marionettes whose strings had been cut by someone who did not hate them but did not love them either.

The sun had taken them. All of them. Everyone over thirty. The oil executives and the shopkeepers and the cops and the whores and the preachers and the men who ran five miles every morning and the women who baked cakes on Sundays and the children who were twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty and twenty-nine, standing in the wreckage of their lives looking at the hands of their parents and wondering why they were still warm and theirs was not.

I walked the streets for three days. I learned what I needed to know: the sun had flared, a radiation pulse that had swept across the city like an invisible wave, and it had killed anything over thirty on contact. I saw it in the way the survivors looked at the sky—afraid, resentful, grateful that the beam had missed them, angry that it had not missed their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters.

I did not grieve. Not the way people are supposed to grieve. I grieved the way I grieved when I was eight and the social workers took my mother away and put me in a home and I learned that the world did not care about you and never had. I grieved by stealing cars and selling them and buying a room above a diner on Alameda Street and drinking coffee that tasted like engine oil.

I called myself Joker because nobody else did. Because laughter was the only thing that made the silence bearable, and if I was laughing, I did not have to hear the silence.

ACT II — THE PARADISE

Los Angeles became Paradise, which was the most ironic name for a place I can imagine, because Paradise was exactly what it pretended to be and exactly what it was not.

The children of Los Angeles took over the city with a combination of enthusiasm and incompetence that would have been funny if it were not so heartbreaking. They opened the banks and took out the money. They took over the garages and learned to drive the cars. They ran the diners and the movie theaters and the pawn shops with a reckless abandon that was the hallmark of someone who had never been told no and did not know how to hear it now.

I ran with a crew that called itself the Brights, because we were the ones who could still look at the sun without blinking. We stole cars, we stole radios, we stole whatever we wanted from wherever we wanted, and we sold it to anyone who had money and a conscience that was flexible enough to be purchased.

Lila Martinez ran with a crew on the other side of the city. She was thirteen, Latina, sharp-eyed and sharper-mouthed, and she could pick a pocket the way a priest picks a psalm—effortlessly and with a kind of grace that made you wonder if theft was her true religion. She and I had grown up in the same neighborhood, on a street that ran between the oil fields and the river, and we had been friends once, before the sun came up three times brighter and friendship became a luxury nobody could afford.

Now we were competitors. She wanted the same cars I wanted. She wanted the same territories. She wanted the same freedom I wanted, and she was good enough at what she did that she might have gotten it.

"We don't have to fight," she told me one evening, in the back room of a diner on Cesar Chavez, pouring two cups of coffee that cost five cents and tasted like pennies. "We could work together. There's enough for both of us."

"There's never enough," I said. "That's the first thing you learn in this town. There's never enough."

"That's the kind of thinking that makes this town what it is," she said. "A bunch of kids fighting over scraps like rats in a wall."

I looked at her. She was right, and she knew she was right, and that was the most dangerous thing about her. A person who knows they're right is harder to kill than a person who is just cruel.

"What do you want, Lila?" I asked.

"I want to stop running," she said. "I want to build something that doesn't fall apart when the sun comes up. Something that lasts."

I almost laughed. Almost. "Nothing lasts, Lila. Not in this town. Not in this world."

"Then why do you keep stealing cars?"

I didn't have an answer for that. So I drank my coffee and left her in the back room of the diner and went back to the streets, where the sun beat down on me like a judgment I had not earned but was expected to accept.

The Governor of Los Angeles was a boy named O'Brien who was fifteen and the son of a man who had owned half the city before the sun took him. O'Brien had inherited his father's territory and his father's ambition and his father's belief that other people existed primarily to be used. He ran the city from a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, surrounded by boys who wore his father's suits and carried his father's guns and called him Governor because they were afraid of him and also because he was, technically, the closest thing the city had to a ruler.

O'Brien did not steal cars. He conscripted them. He conscripted people too. Boys and girls who wandered his streets were taken into his service and given a choice: work for me or be thrown out. And being thrown out in Los Angeles meant the same thing as dying in a war zone—eventually, but not immediately, and with a kind of dignity that lasted until it did not.

I crossed him once. He did not forget.

ACT III — THE TRUTH

The truth came to me in a notebook.

It was a small black notebook, leather-bound, with the name "Dr. Voss" written on the inside cover in a hand that was precise and controlled and belonged to someone who understood the difference between a note and a scream. I found it in a desk drawer in a house in Hollywood Hills, a house that had belonged to a man named Voss who had been a scientist before the sun took him and who had left behind a house full of books and a notebook full of words that meant more than any speech I had ever heard.

I was十七 years old—no, I was fourteen, and I was breaking into houses because it was easier than breaking into hearts, and the notebook was easier to break into than most things.

I read the notebook by candlelight, sitting on the floor of a room that had once been Voss's study and was now just a room with a desk and a chair and a lot of paper scattered on the floor like the feathers of a bird that had been plucked alive.

The truth was this: the solar flare had not been natural. It had been caused by a machine—a machine built by a man named Voss, Dr. Emil Voss, who had been trying to harness solar radiation for energy. He had succeeded. He had built a machine that could channel the sun's energy into a focused beam, and he had aimed it at the earth, and he had set it to fire at a specific date and time, and on that date and time, the sun had come up three times brighter and everyone over thirty had died.

Not everyone. Not exactly. The machine had been designed to target cells that had divided a certain number of times—cells that had aged beyond a threshold. Thirty was the threshold. Voss had chosen thirty because he believed, in his cold, scientific way, that thirty was the age at which human beings became too fixed in their thinking, too set in their ways, too incapable of change to save themselves from the ecological collapse he was certain was coming.

He had tried to reset the board. He had tried to give the world a chance to start over with a generation that was young enough to change, to learn, to become something his old self could not imagine.

He had killed everyone over thirty. He had killed my father. He had killed millions of people. And he had done it with a machine and a notebook and a belief that he was right.

The last entry in the notebook was dated the day before the flare. It read: "If I am correct, the young will inherit a world they did not ask for and do not understand and must somehow make sense of. If I am wrong, they will destroy what remains. Either way, I will not be here to see it. Thirty was the threshold. I built the machine for thirty. I forgot to build one for myself. I am thirty-two. I will die with them. And the world will die with me. Perhaps this is justice. Perhaps this is mercy. Perhaps it is neither. Perhaps it is simply what happens when a man tries to play God and discovers, too late, that God does not keep a notebook."

I sat on the floor of the room and I read that entry three times and then I read it a fourth time and then I put the notebook down and I walked out of the house and I walked down the hill to the city and I sat on the steps of the city hall and I watched the children of Los Angeles run their little games and steal their little cars and drink their little drinks and pretend that they were building something when they were really just repeating every mistake their parents had ever made.

The truth was out. The truth was in a notebook in my pocket. And the truth was worthless.

Because what was the point of knowing that my father had been killed by a machine when the machine was gone and the man who built it was dead and the only thing left was me, sitting on the steps of city hall, watching a city of children play at being adults in a world that had ended and begun again in the space of a single morning?

ACT IV — THE NEON HELL

I sat on the Hollywood Hills that night and watched Los Angeles light up.

It was a beautiful city, in its way. The lights stretched from the ocean to the mountains, a river of electric gold flowing through the canyon of the basin, and the hills around it were dotted with the white houses of the rich, all of them empty now and all of them occupied by children who did not know how to maintain the swimming pools and did not care.

Below me, the city was a neon hell. Not because it was evil. Because it was alive. The movie theaters were open. The diners were open. The pawn shops were open. The bars were open. The children were drinking and dancing and stealing and fighting and loving and hating and living in the way that children live when they have been given the world and told, without being told, that they had to earn it.

Lila was down there somewhere. I knew she was. She was probably running a crew from the back of a stolen Cadillac, selling cars to anyone who had money and a conscience that was negotiable. She was probably right about everything she had ever told me, and I was probably right about everything I had ever told myself, and neither of us was right and neither of us was wrong and that was the only truth that mattered in a city built on lies.

I took the notebook out of my pocket and looked at it. The leather was warm from my body heat. The pages were worn at the edges from being opened and closed and opened and closed by hands that did not know what to do with the truth they held.

I could have burned it. I could have published it. I could have taken it to O'Brien and watched him burn the city down in a fit of rage, or I could have taken it to Lila and watched her do something I could not predict because Lila had always done things I could not predict.

Instead, I put the notebook back in my pocket and I stood up and I walked down the hill into the neon hell and I found a car that was not locked and I stole it and I drove it to the ocean and I parked it on the edge of the pier and I watched the waves crash against the pilings and I listened to the sound and I tried, for the first time since the sun had come up three times brighter, to feel something other than anger and grief and the cold, hard certainty that nothing mattered.

I could not feel anything.

And that, I realized, was the worst punishment of all. Not the death of the people you loved. Not the destruction of the world you knew. The absence of feeling in a world that demanded you feel something, anything, in response to the catastrophe that had reshaped everything.

The sun was gone. The moon was up, white and indifferent. The ocean was black and endless. And I was fourteen years old, alone on a pier in a city of children, carrying a notebook full of truth that meant nothing.

I started the car and drove back to the city, back to the neon hell, back to the life that was not a life but was the only one I had, and I knew, with a certainty that was not comfort and was not despair but was something in between, that I would keep driving. Not toward anything. Not away from anything. Just driving, because that was what you did when you had no destination and no reason to stop.

The neon lights flickered above me. The city hummed. Somewhere, a piano was being played badly. Somewhere else, a child was crying. Somewhere else still, a car was being stolen.

Los Angeles was alive. And I was alive. And that was the joke. That was the tragedy. That was the only thing left.

=== OTMES V2 OBJECTIVE CODES === [Objective Tensor Vector]: [10.5,9.5,6.5,8,7,0.2,0.8,0.6,0.4,8,0; 9.5,7; 0.2,0.8] [Murder-Destruction Ten Evaluation Model]: V=1.00, I=1.00, C=1.00, S=1.00, R=0.00, TI=88.1 [Direction Angle]: θ=225.0° [Tragic Level]: T1 [Style Category]: Hardboiled Noir — Absolute Nihilism [Similarity Anchors]: "The Big Sleep" (Raymond Chandler) — the futility of truth in a corrupt world; "American Psycho" (Bret Easton Ellis) — the banality of destruction and the emptiness of consumerism; "No Country for Old Men" (Cormac McCarthy) — inevitability and the meaninglessness of resistance === END ENCODINGS ===