The Age of Jokers: A Future Unveiled
In the year 2087, the world had finally laughed itself to death.
The great towers of Neo-Gotham stretched like skeletal fingers into the perpetual twilight, their surfaces adorned not with corporate logos but with graffitied smiles that seemed to mock the very notion of progress. The old world's heroes had become footnotes in history books that no one bothered to read anymore. Batman was a children's bedtime story. Superman, a quaint mythology about impossible things like hope.
The Jokers ruled now—not through violence, though they were capable of it, but through something far more insidious: the complete dissolution of meaning itself.
They weren't the cackling madmen of ancient comic books. These were philosophers with purple hair, psychologists with permanent grins carved not into their flesh but into their souls. They had emerged from the ashes of the old society's collapse, when decades of surveillance, control, and forced compliance had finally broken the human spirit's last defense: the belief that anything mattered at all.
Dr. Helena Quinzel-7 (the numbers indicated generational succession in the philosophical lineage) stood atop the Ministry of Absurdity, watching the city's daily Chaos Hour unfold below. Citizens danced in the streets, performed impromptu theater, engaged in philosophical debates that spiraled into beautiful nonsense. It looked like madness to the few remaining traditionalists, but Helena knew better. This was liberation.
"You see," she whispered to her apprentice, Marcus, whose green hair caught the artificial sunset, "the old world tried to impose order through oppression. They built systems designed to crush the human spirit, to make us all identical cogs in their machine. They succeeded so thoroughly that people forgot how to be human at all."
Marcus nodded, his painted smile reflecting genuine understanding. Like all true Jokers, he had once been something else—a corporate lawyer, actually, until the day he realized that every contract he'd written, every deal he'd brokered, was just another bar in humanity's cage.
"The beauty of our revolution," Helena continued, "isn't that we destroyed their order. It's that we showed everyone the truth they'd been hiding from: that their order was already meaningless. We simply stopped pretending otherwise."
Below them, a former police officer was teaching children how to juggle with traffic cones while reciting Nietzsche. A group of ex-politicians had formed a street band that played songs about the futility of governance. It wasn't anarchy—it was something deeper. It was the recognition that when society becomes a joke, the only sane response is to become the punchline.
The Jokers weren't cruel, though they were often spiteful toward those who still clung to the old illusions. They were lonely, too, each one carrying the weight of seeing through society's elaborate pretense. But they wore their loneliness like a badge of honor, because it was proof of their authenticity in a world that had forgotten what that word meant.
"The old Joker was called a villain," Helena mused, "because he threatened their precious order. But we know the truth now. He was simply the first to wake up, the first to laugh at the cosmic joke of existence. We are his children, not in madness, but in clarity."
As the sun disappeared behind the city's impossible architecture, Helena felt the familiar stirring of tomorrow's mischief. Not violence—violence was too easy, too crude for minds like theirs. Tomorrow would bring new performances, new ways to hold up mirrors to reality until everyone could see the joke for themselves.
In the distance, the sound of genuine laughter echoed through the streets—not the forced chuckles of the old world's social obligations, but the wild, free sound of humans who had finally remembered how to be wonderfully, terrifyingly alive.
NEAL LLOYD
