2

"What a hulk," comments the young woman in her wise 22-year-old maturity, chewing noisily on vegan gum, and casting a sleepy, painted-eyelid gaze over the shielding. The North Star is behind the yellow security railing, in a stone frame carved to look like a king's throne. Saltwater pipes replace the running of the already dry spring. Spotlights set into the rock help admire the 20-meter-high machine. "I'll be damned if this old thing could really fly"

"Tracy, the vocabulary," her mother scolds him while blinking rapidly, indicating with that gesture to her neural hardware to take pictures of everything she thinks she'll be able to talk about in cyberspace.

"It's not even the real thing. The guide said it's a copy"

"Your father and brother like them"

Tracy watches the men of the house. The father carries the little worm on his arm. The child listens with a stupid grin to stories of (In the father's exact words) when men were men. Scanning the child, the tousled blue-tinted hair, the plastic visor, and the mini-Chester action shaker in his hand, it's obvious he's a fan.

Tracy rolls her eyes and snorts. She turns her jaded face to the touch screen next to the platform railing, where it is possible to look up data from the exhibit. By default the screen shows the following summary of the scene:

Princess Nadjela, in complete solitude, descended into the crevice and ended up finding the North Star. Chester opened the cabin and introduced himself. It is said that when their gazes met, they fell eternally in love.

"Cursi," Tracy murmurs, not to say that she sees the princess as a tremendous asshole, going out of her way for the first handsome guy she finds in a hole.

Next to her, her mother is silent. The woman's countenance is somewhat troubled after imagining what would happen if, at her tender fifteen years, she had met the Lancastrian. The neural hardware helps her to recreate the fantasy, which evolves from pink to fiery inside the narrow cabin of the armored car. Altered, she asks the system to save the experience to repeat it later in the intimacy of the flying house.