"Totally."  If you have a way to cut orbital alloy and deal with the resulting swarm of Specials.

"Yeah have you read, like, 1984." What is a Special?

"Yeah, back when I was an ugly."  Member of Special Circumstances, the city's solution to outside threats.

"How long ago was that?" That doesn't tell me if I have a way to deal with them or not.

"Four, maybe five years ago?  That I read it; I turned pretty about a year ago."  If you don't know, you should assume you can't yet.

"Is 'pretty' the name of a number or an age or something in this dialect?" That's not very informative and I'm getting pretty tired of having two conversations at once neither of which is telling me what's going on usefully.

"Sixteen, by default..." My friends can get hoverboards and wilderness supplies in a few hours.  Can you ride one?  I do not think things will go well for you if you try to leave this room knowing as much as you seem to.

"By default?" I don't need your friends to get anything. Have you not noticed the thing where I appear stuff from nothing. Can you possibly be at all specific ever about how anything you are predicting will happen?

"Sometimes there are delays." I thought I was briefly passing out???  You have a bunch of stuff hidden with sneak tech or what?

"- You know," it occurs to him while Cam is composing his next response, "if you felt like reading to the group for a while, that would be super bubbly.  All this stuff is totally head-spinning."

"From the manifesto or did we wanna do 1984?"

"Whichever."

"Behold." He appears a paperback 1984. "It was a bright cold day in April..." He's actually going to get a voice print cooked up and then make the computer take over by the time he gets to page 3. Now what?

He spends a fair while gaze-typing.

• My friends are out pulling a trick.  They left their interface rings here so the city can't track them.
• We think there's just a basic software warden checking that someone's talking enough that it doesn't think the rings have been abandoned, but the interface is always listening for people talking about anything tricky.
• I'm too trouble-making to have an interface ring; my girlfriend and I used to have cuffs instead but we managed to get them off and escape into the wild.  It took starving ourselves and sticking our (heat-gloved) hands in fire long enough to expand the metal enough to slip them off.  They turned out to have had a time-delayed tracker in my tooth and got us anyway.  Now I have the collar.  Nothing available to city pretties can cut or break it.
• They might have made her into a Special.  They're way faster and stronger than pretties or uglies, and have access to way better/scarier tech.  They almost certainly get their brains messed with.
• Pretties also get their brains messed with.  Pretty much everyone in the cities gets turned into one at or around 16; it makes us vapid and docile.  There's a cure; I took an experimental version; it ate a lot of my brain.  It has stopped doing that.

And:

• What, are you saying you're a walking hole in the wall???
• Do the wings work and if so how fast are they?

I expect I can cut your necklace if and when that's desirable. I don't recognize all the technology you're talking about. Is there a non-experimental cure? Would it still work on you? I have powers something like being a hole in the wall*, yes. I can do about fifty miles an hour once I get going but can't carry you, I'd make some kind of shuttle if I were bringing you anywhere.

* This is translating successfully as "Star Trek replicator".

There's a safe cure and some of the tricks my friends are doing involve trying to help pass it out.  I don't know if it would work on me but I also think re-pretty-heading me didn't really.  Shuttle as in hovercar, helicopter, spacecraft, or what?

The kind I'd go with can also do space travel. Does the cure have, say, a name? If it did not work on you would it be harmful?

It would be pretty bubbly to go to space.  Bet the Specials can't get us there.  I don't know a specific name for it; there's some chance it harms me.  But I think my brain may have been messed up enough that when they tried to give me the lesions again there, it didn't have the intended effect.  I've had my neurons replaced but I have to re-make the connections between them, is my understanding.

Sounds bad! I don't think I can locate 'the cure' without any kind of name for it. Maybe if you tell me who developed it? If you want to try this at all.

A Maddy and maybe an Az?  I don't know their last name.  Parents to a David.

Cam tries for 'the cure as developed by Maddy et al'.

Nothing.

Nothing doing, alas. Could you possibly explain as though I am not from the universe, since I'm not, what is going on with... everything here... more.

Happily.  You have - here he searches around the other keyboard menus, doesn't find whatever he was looking for - 1984, so things might have been the same at least up through the Rusty period.  Did you have a Rusty Crash?

We do not call any period by that name.