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workforce of Faya.
    Someone claps in the crowd. Slowly, someone else joins in, and then someone else. Dictatorship is like a disease. It doesn’t hit you in the face. It spreads slowly until it grows bigger than you think it ever could.
    Finally, we hail Prophet Xitler, spreading our arms making a V sign, imitating the Burning Man’s two arms reaching for the sky.
    Prophet Xitler starts his annual speech. It’s the same story we hear every year. The story of Faya, the country that rose out of the ashes of a place that was once called the Amerikaz. He recites how his ancestors, the Xitlers, rebuilt this nation after finding a large wooden effigy of a man set on fire in the Nevada desert, where the remains of Amerikaz’s civilization had been collected in large containers and buried in the sand underneath. The effigy of the man on fire is called the Burning Man. It was more of an x-marks-the-spot sign, as if the few survivors of the last days of the Amerikaz left it for us on purpose. They wanted us to dig and find the containers, which contained everything about their civilization. They wanted us to avoid the mistakes that caused their extinction. They wanted someone to use their experience and rebuild a new Amerikaz after the world had ended. They wanted to warn us of the Bad Kidz who caused the uprisings against the governments of Amerikaz. That’s why we have our ranking system and the Monster Show ritual, so we don’t allow the little Monsters to bring down our nation with their recklessness and irresponsible behavior like in the Amerikaz.
    We call the containers the Arc.
    People in Faya worship the Burning Man and think of it as God. The Monster Show is the killing ritual that cleanses the nation’s sins, like a human sacrifice for the gods.
    “It is an important day for the nation of Faya,” notes Xitler in his gushy voice. “The tenth year since we’ve developed the Monster Show sacrifices for the Burning Man.”
    This is the thirty-fourth year of the Ranking system. The Summit developed the Monster Show only ten years ago, when they found out that all uprising attempts were led by teens with ranks lower than Five. Before that, rankings went all the way down to Four, Three, Two, and One. All old Ones, Twos, Threes, and Fours are called Nones now. Nones are not treated as Monsters. They are considered Fives until they die, but we don’t have many more of them left. The youngest None is twenty-six. I don’t have friend that old.
    “The Ranking system has made us a great nation that the world looks up to,” rants Xitler. “The growth in economy, quality of living, and our place in the world is at its zenith and it’s all  thanks to you, Burning Man!”
    Xitler thanks all teens.
    The crowd is going wilder and wilder.
    “When we first invented the iAm, no one understood its purpose,” Xitler says. “The world wondered and questioned our sanity. They questioned how we could possibly benefit from tracking every teenager’s behavior, everyday life, health, food, thoughts, and mood swings.” Xitler makes a grumpy face, stressing on the ‘mood swings’ phrase. Everyone knows that teens’ mood swings are the worst. “It seemed like an irrational idea; a waste of energy and money in a nation that rose up from the ashes after the Great Disease.”
    No one knows why it’s called the Great Disease. It’s just another word for the apocalypse.
    “I am proud to announce,” says Prophet Xitler, “that the percentage of Monsters—”
    Suddenly, the crowd starts protesting in a low and scary tone. “Boooooo!”
    I am surprised Ariadna and Timmy are booing as well. I wonder how Eva feels about this.
    Prophet Xitler gestures for the crowd to calm down. “The percentage of Monsters this year is estimated to be only ten percent of our teens. The first year we started the Ranking system, the Monsters were about sixty-five percent.” He pauses as his eyes scan us slowly. “We plan to have no Monsters in Faya in