"At least in my Earth's history, it was the main thing they used to fuel pretty much all their stuff, for a while.  And so the oil bug killed almost everyone in the world."

"...I see."

"The survivors wanted to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.  So - I don't know which came first.  But what they tell us is that people like pretty people, and they hoped no one would want to fight as long as everyone was, so everyone gets an operation when they turn 16 to make them look like this."  He gestures to himself.  "But that's when they put lesions in our brains.  It could have been a pretense all along or they could have started adding it for security later.  I don't know."

"...that sounds very strange to me but I suppose perhaps it does not if you are used to it."

"They lean pretty hard on the propaganda.  When all the adults you see look like this and living glamorously and having whatever material luxuries they want, and all the kids around you are calling each other 'uglies' and giving themselves nicknames based on their least-flattering features, and a thousand other things like that - yeah.  It doesn't sound strange to most people."

"I expect at home most people could imagine something that they'd like to improve about their appearance but it is not encouraged to focus on this in oneself or others unless one is, say, starring in films. I don't think... not being sufficiently beautiful... features as a relevant consideration in any major conflict... and in minor ones I'd expect being prettier to as often exacerbate as alleviate the situation."

Zane nods again.  "It's propaganda," he shrugs.  "However much it is or isn't grounded in truth, the story's been sufficient to keep society in this shape for a few centuries, now."

Kyeo nods.

"It sounds like your universe is more - real."

"...is that a thing that varies between universes?"

"What I mean is, it sounds like your society is constructed so that most people do things that matter."

"Everyone can do work that matters," agrees Kyeo. "This is perhaps not as true on other planets, but it is true on Ibyabek."

"What are other planets like?"

"I haven't been to any, you understand, but they use money - do you have that -"

"Not in modern times, no."

"Well, it distorts the importance of most things, and in particular inflates 'owning money' to great importance even if one does no work for it, and so the people who understand that their work is important and the people whose work is in fact important are I think mostly unrelated."

"I was doing some reading on that not too long before I died."

"Oh?"

"The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx; do you have that?"

"I've heard of it but we didn't read the original text in my philosophy classes."

A half smile.  "It wasn't exactly in our curriculum either."

"No? Just generally available as enrichment?"

"Something like that.  Where was I... a couple of doctors found out about the lesions - most of them don't know about it; nanos do it and there are a lot of nanos involved in the process anyway - and decided to leave their city and try and work out a cure."

"in... some other city?"

"No, in the wilderness.  They called it The Smoke.  It picked up a lot of runaway uglies."