"This thing doesn't look futuristic at all!"
Conner stood beside Lin Qi with a wineglass in hand, gazing at the enormous screen. "It looks just like that broken lawn mower at my mother's house. By the way, have you ever met my mother?"
Lin Qi took a small sip of wine. "Unfortunately, I haven't."
"Then you've definitely never seen that lawn mower either. It was the nightmare of my entire childhood."
"Once, while we were mowing the lawn, we accidentally ran over a rabbit. Those old-fashioned reel mowers would suck everything inside and chop it to pieces."
"I volunteered to take over the job because I wanted to prove myself. She would give me a little more freedom if I did."
"Then..." Conner made an exploding gesture. "Blood and minced meat splattered all over my face. I ran home crying and screaming, and I never touched that damned lawn mower again. I wouldn't touch any others, either."
It was easy to imagine how traumatic that would have been for a teenager.
Lin Qi could roughly picture what that old-fashioned lawn mower looked like. It probably resembled a giant toaster—clumsy, with a design that carried a certain period aesthetic. It might even have been dark green.
It really did look about the same as the lander.
When Lin Qi was "young," he had lived in cheap apartments. His family had never owned a lawn, so he had never enjoyed such pleasures.
People from the Upper Class in the Federation sometimes talked about the things they had been expected to do as children, such as trimming the lawn or cleaning the swimming pool.
When they reminisced about those childhood experiences, they often evoked a strange sort of empathy from the lower and middle classes.
But what they did not understand was that