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prodigy of narrative. For his graduate project in college, he’d written an earnest 612-page novel reimagining Don Quixote as a shell-shocked war veteran on a road trip across America, and it had the distinction of being read nearly all the way through by his faculty advisor.
    Subsequently, Don Hoder was published by a small college press and nearly read by several critics, who pronounced Perry ‘promising’ and ‘a novelist under the age of thirty to watch’. Since these accolades did little to pay off his student loans, Perry had moved to Hollywood and, by twenty-eight, had become successful enough to acquire debt on a scale that made those loans look like microcredit.
    Now he was still in debt but devoid of prospects. Still, Perry Bunt clung even more tenaciously to the belief that he was destined for greatness, unequivocally certain that one day, against all odds, he would regain his confidence and become more successful than ever. This, Perry knew, was the Underdog Story, another of the seven story templates from which all Hollywood movies were constructed. But, again, that didn’t stop him from believing it.
    The strange thing about all of this was the fact that Perry Bunt was right : he was destined for greatness. Stranger still was the fact that the Earth’s survival depended on it.

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    THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST
    Perry made his way home to a shoddily built stucco apartment building above Ventura Boulevard named, with unintended hilarity, the Wellington Arms. Temporarily perched on the side of a steep hill overlooking a major earthquake fault, the crumbling Arms was one of many apartment complexes in the area that offered shelter to those who were either down on their luck or too young to know the difference.
    In the small studio apartment that served as kitchen, bedroom and study, Perry made himself a sandwich and turned on his laptop. The month before, he’d had what he once would have called a guaranteed sale (back when things sold at all), a Big Idea so commercial that no studio executive would be able to resist its shapely, crowd-pleasing contours. It was an action-thriller entitled The Last Day of School , the story of a team of teenaged terrorists who infiltrate the First Daughter’s high school to kidnap her. The only man who can stop them? The math teacher, a former Navy Seal, drummed out of the service years before by whom? The President himself.
    Perry had wanted to be an author, but the public preferred movies to books, so he’d become a screenwriter – just before the public gave up movies for watching videos of cats playing the piano. Yes, he’d succeeded in chasing his culture downhill, always a step behind. In The Last Day of School , however, Perry believed that he had found the biggest of all Big Ideas, a story that would not only turn out to be internet-proof but writer-proof as well. First of all, it had teens, oodles of teens, more teens than he could think up good names for. Teens had become very important to the movie business, since they seemed to be the only demographic with the inertia to escape the gravity of their small screens and actually transport themselves to a cinema. The Last Day of School would not only bring in the teens, but present them with better-looking versions of themselves screwing and killing each other. How could it fail?
    Tonight, however, Perry was having trouble mustering the self-delusional momentum that every obscure writer needs to overcome the fact that no one is interested in reading him. He had made the mistake of mentioning the idea for The Last Day of School to his agent, Dana Fulcher of Global Artistic Leadership Limited, and the pause as he waited for her response, which he recognized as the sound of someone looking on their call log for someone more important to talk to, had severely battered his confidence. Her delayed, obligatory ‘That’s fantastic, Perry, can’t wait to read it,’ did nothing to soften the blow of that deleterious