Who comes to Vegas stays in Vegas. Nobody moves to a place where daytime blackouts come with death counts if they have anywhere else to go. None of the old people you watch over do; somebody once told you they used to go to Florida, but that's a place for people who want to play three-sided chicken with hurricane and plague. You are a Vegas native, born back when casinos still made money. Now you make yours by bidding for health data feeds from watches (your father's creaky voice, endlessly whining about odds) and being paid, not much, to remove corpses before they liquify in the heat that baptized their souls away (your mother's smooth rake as she cleared the roulette table). It's a risky life. It's a monotonous one. It pays for your half-burned solar panels and the bribes to cops to ignore them. It doesn't pay enough to get through the Big Blackout everybody has at least one bet on. The only meaningful notification you get is when somebody dies alone. In a good month you've closed the eyes of two dozen dead bodies. In a bad month you pay somebody to cut a wire. You'd like to take off your watch for good but that's the difficult kind of illegal.
Like your parents, like the city, you go to sleep when the sun rises.
(Originally posted on my blog.)