Conner, dressed only in oversized shorts, sat on the sofa with a cup of sweet orange slush in his hands, topped with extra jam and lemon juice.
The Federation was a highly integrated nation. When many people couldn't tell whether someone was a Federation citizen, there was one method that worked particularly well.
Give them a dessert sweet enough to cause a headache, scoop on a spoonful of equally sweet jam, and finally drizzle a layer of lemon juice over it before having them eat it.
Anyone who made a face that said, "What the hell is this piece of shit?" wasn't from the Federation.
Because Federation citizens would tell you that this stuff was just right...
Many people wondered why Federation citizens ate things so sweet yet had never experienced a large-scale diabetes epidemic. Was it a matter of their constitution, or perhaps advanced medical care? If you knew that they had to start taking pills similar to blood-sugar and urea inhibitors from nearly the end of adolescence, it probably wouldn't seem so strange.
The capitalists created a twisted kind of "happiness," then sold that "happiness" to ordinary people, while also selling them the antidote as a necessity of life.
Someone once called the Federation's "sugar industry" the world's largest seller of banned drugs. Sugar was no less harmful to humanity than those banned substances.
In the end, that man died in an accidental electrocution. Interestingly, his family received hundreds of thousands in insurance money and quickly signed their names, agreeing with the investigation's conclusion.
Some said he had never bought insurance at all. A Federation man in his prime always believed misfortune would never come for him. This had been a murder.
The sugar merchants had murdered him, then used a huge "insurance payout" to seal his family's