The briefing room smelled of fear and counterfeit money.

Reporters clutched notebooks worth more than their salaries. A loaf of bread cost three thousand dollars. A cup of coffee, five. The President's suit cost more than most houses had six months ago.

Nobody mentioned the hyperinflation anymore. Bad for morale.

Davidson entered through his gilded door. Gold leaf peeling at the corners. Even the luxury was rotting. His smile had been surgically enhanced twice this year. Taxpayer funded. Emergency aesthetic measures.

"Good morning, my fellow Americans." The words tasted like sawdust in his mouth.

Twenty-seven different languages responded from the press corps. Mandarin. Arabic. Hindi. Swahili. The translators worked overtime. America belonged to everyone now. Everyone except Americans.

The first question came in broken English. Something about housing. The Occupation Authority had seized another neighborhood for refugee settlements. Twelve million new arrivals this month. The numbers kept climbing.

"Housing is abundant," Davidson lied. "America has room for everyone."

The homeless camps stretched from sea to shining sea. Tent cities where English was the minority language. Where former homeowners begged for scraps in their native tongue. Where democracy went to die quietly.

Sara sat in the third row. Forty-three years old. Gray streaking her black hair like surrender flags. Her notebook was real paper. Real ink. Ancient technology in a world of electric lies. The pen had belonged to her grandfather. A reporter when reporting still meant something.

She wrote nothing. There was nothing left to record. Only the performance. Only the theater of a dead republic.

"Next question."

A man in traditional robes asked about benefits. The Universal Subsistence Payment had been increased again. Worthless money for worthless people. The printing presses ran twenty-four hours a day. The bills were barely dry when they lost half their value.

"The economy is booming," Davidson said. His net worth had tripled this week. Stock options. Azura consulting fees. Memory wipe bonuses. The rewards for good behavior.

Sara stood. Her joints creaked. Too many years in uncomfortable chairs watching comfortable lies.

"Mr. President. You returned from Azura with a new plane. How much did it cost?"

The translator whispered to his neighbors. Azura. The name that must not be spoken. The word that ended careers. Ended lives. Ended everything.

"I'm not sure what you're referring to."

"The golden toilet seats. The champagne fountain. The massage chairs that cost more than a hospital."

Davidson's eye twitched. A small tell. A crack in the perfect facade. "Air Force One required upgrades."

"While children eat garbage."

"That's unfortunate."

"While veterans freeze in the streets you were conquered."

"America has never been stronger."

The press corps shifted. Foreign correspondents texting their handlers. This was better than television. Better than cinema. The death of a superpower in real time.

"Lobsang, Mr. President. Explain the genocide."

"I don't know what that is."

"The mountain nation. Population four million. Correction. Population zero as of last Tuesday."

Davidson looked to his press secretary. A nervous man whose family lived in an Azura protection facility. Insurance against awkward questions. Against inconvenient truths.

"Those are classified military operations."

"Military operations? You're bombing monks for ski slopes."

The room went dead quiet. Even the translators stopped working. Some truths were too dangerous to translate.

"Azura wants the sunrise views. The mountain peaks. They've been ethnic cleansing for tourism since your grandfather was in diapers."

"Security."

But Sara's voice cut through the chaos. Twenty years of watching. Twenty years of knowing. Twenty years of silence breaking like a fever.

"They have videos of you, Mr. President. With children. With animals. With things that would make Satan blush. That's how they own you. That's how they own everyone."

The guards moved like robots. Programmed responses. Predetermined outcomes. They had done this dance before. They would do it again.

"You don't remember because they fry your brain every six months. Install new programs. New perversions. New ways to hate your own country."

Davidson was already fleeing. His golden heels clicking on marble floors. The sound of empire in retreat. The sound of dignity dying.

"Lobsang had the most beautiful sunrises in the world," Sara shouted as hands grabbed her arms. "Ancient temples. Sacred sites. Azura wants them bulldozed for better sledding conditions. So you dropped nerve gas on kindergartens. Napalmed nursing homes. Carpet bombed cemeteries."

The briefing room emptied like a punctured lung. Reporters scattered to their handlers. Their masters. Their foreign paymasters who owned every word they wrote.

"The public knows," Sara called to empty chairs. "They know you're selling their children to cannibals. They know you're trading their daughters for casino chips. They just don't care because you give them enough fentanyl to forget."

Then silence. Perfect. Complete. The sound of truth dying alone.

Marcus owned a podcast studio in what had been Georgetown. Now it was Little Mogadishu. Or New Damascus. The neighborhood changed names weekly. The residents changed monthly. Only the poverty remained constant.

Sara was supposed to meet him at three. They would discuss her findings. The pattern she had exposed to a world that no longer cared about patterns. About documentation. About anything except the next fix. The next meal. The next day of managed decline.

She never arrived.

Marcus waited until midnight. Called her phone. The number had never existed. The name meant nothing. The person was a ghost. A fiction. A glitch in the system that had been corrected.

Her apartment building had been demolished. Her newspaper had never heard of her. Her press credentials were forgeries. Her twenty years of work had never happened. Memory was malleable. History was editable. Truth was whatever Azura said it was.

This was the new efficiency.

President Davidson woke in his golden bed with golden sheets. His memory was spotless. Clean. Profitable. He remembered only success. Victory. The growing balance in his Cayman Islands account.

His schedule showed a meeting with Azura's cultural attaché. Something about entertainment. About fun. About making sure the occupied territories stayed properly occupied. The details would be explained. They always were.

Lobsang burned through another dawn. The last dawn. Ancient prayers turned to screams turned to silence. Sacred temples crumbled like broken teeth on pavement. The mountains themselves seemed to weep but tears evaporated quickly in the thermonuclear heat.

Azura's tourism board released new brochures. "Sunrise Resort: Where Heaven Used to Be." Market tested. Focus grouped. Guaranteed to inspire wanderlust in the properly wealthy demographic.

The chairlift construction began immediately. No sense waiting for the radiation to clear. Customers expected authentic experiences. Authentic risk. Authentic genocide transformed into authentic entertainment.

Marcus sat in his studio. Empty. Quiet. Dead. He thought about Sara. About her grandfather's pen. About twenty years of work erased in twenty minutes. He thought about speaking. About remembering. About being human in an inhuman time.

But speaking meant disappearing. Remembering meant forgetting forever. Being human meant being dead.

He deleted her contact info. Her scheduled interview. Any record she had existed. Self-preservation disguised as wisdom. Cowardice dressed up as strategy.

The bombing had stopped. There was nothing left to bomb. Lobsang was a parking lot. A foundation. A future playground for the properly connected. For the appropriately wealthy. For the necessarily soulless.

President Davidson signed the final authorization. The last piece of paper. The final nail in the coffin of a nation that had once pretended to matter. His pen felt heavy. Golden. Profitable.

His approval ratings soared. Ninety-three percent. The highest in history. The dead couldn't vote against him. The disappeared couldn't register complaints. The genocided couldn't demand justice.

This was democracy. This was freedom. This was America.

The homeless camps celebrated with expired rations. With poisoned water. With the knowledge that tomorrow would be worse. That yesterday had been better. That today was all they had left.

The foreign correspondents filed their stories. Another victory for progress. Another success for international cooperation. Another beautiful sunrise over what had once been someone else's sacred ground.

Sara had never existed. Lobsang had never existed. Truth had never existed. Memory was a luxury. History was a commodity. Reality was whatever the highest bidder wanted it to be.

The mountains waited. Patient. Beautiful. Ready for development. Ready for tourists. Ready for the final insult of luxury built on bones.

Azura's stock price hit record highs.

President Davidson slept the sleep of the innocent. The sleep of the ignorant. The sleep of the profitably damned.

Tomorrow there would be new countries to destroy. New peoples to erase. New sunrises to purchase.

The American dream was dead.

Long live the American dream.