Yedua's Reverie in Cortex

"Hey, Xena, did you see this?"

"What?"

"I'll show you."

Fremont was a bit of a dork. He was the kind of person who had absolutely no trouble telling someone that they looked bad today, but could never actually say the words "I love you." He was also the kind of person who always showed off his stupidly expensive phone to *everyone.*

"Here it is," he said. "See? Look at this."

He had found something on an app called 'Google,' and I don't know if that's supposed to be pronouced 'gol-oh' or if it's supposed to sound like 'googol,' but the point is that it was a search engine. And he had just opened a web page. He tapped his way through several bits of text and then handed me his phone so I could read it. It was some sort of history article about this place called North America, which was apparently once a country. The main event described in the article was something called the Civil War, which had apparently been fought between 1861 and 1865 and had cost a great many lives. It also cost a great deal of money, which was apparently put into bullets, cannons, and other things needed to kill people, which would have been very expensive if they hadn't used them to kill people with later. That made sense; if you didn't use your money to buy food or clothing or whatever else people might need to live after all, you'd end up having to give all your goods away for free when you died, which seemed like a waste of money.

"So anyway," Fremont said as he took his phone back from me, "they *were* patriots."

"Patriots?" I asked him. "Is that like prostitutes?"

"No...well...sorta? I guess? People are patriotic about lots of things!"

I nodded and decided not to ask anymore questions about the word patriot*, because I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have known how to answer those either. But it's not like I'd ever seen any prostitutes anyway; there were no such things in our floating city of Cortex. You might get some food or clothes or whatever else from a trader passing through town if you happened to catch him while he was here - they only came by every few weeks - but there were no women selling sex here. Not because we were better than North Americans; quite the opposite, actually! We're much worse than North America! There are no prostitutes in North America because it's *illegal* for them to sell sex! If a woman wants money for having sex with someone, she has to do it under false pretenses! She has to pretend she loves him or something! That's *idiotic.*

A lot of things seem idiotic when you've lived in Cortex all your life, though. Like drinking water from streams instead of carrying it from one end of town to the other in heavy barrels; what kind of an idiot doesn't prefer airships? Or wearing clothing made by using machines instead of weaving fabric by hand? Or even just going up and down stairs instead of using elevators? Everything seems idiotic in comparison with life in Cortex when you're on the ground floor looking up at us floating above you, but that's only because everyone here is smart enough not to be living on the ground floor! Sure, walking up and down stairs all day long is tiring work, but what good does letting yourself float high above everyone else do if all that does is make you feel superior? When I feel too tired to walk around on my own two feet, I take one of our airships down and sail around for a day or two until I feel like getting back into shape again! If I'm feeling especially tired after being out on the ship for three days, I'll let myself crash land near someplace where there are people who can help me fix my airship and carry it back home again! When everyone else sees how helpful we are they get jealous and want their own airship too! They want their own Cortex! Then they go tell their friends how much fun they had visiting us and one day they come visit too! And before long there are more visitors than there are people living up here in our wonderful floating city! Before long there are so many visitors wanting to live here that we have start turning them away! We have to build higher walls around our beautiful city just so we can keep all these ugly people out! And then we wonder why we have a problem with being too crowded and decide we need another war with North America so we can steal their land from them!

If only those idiots would stop making war with each other and start making war on us instead we could solve that problem for good!