I lived in a world. I didn’t know why, so one day I set out to find Cheetos.

First of all, there was the matter of procuring a map of the town. I pulled out a rectangular apparatus with more computational power than NASA had access to when they landed a man on the moon out of my pocket and tapped a few buttons, and voilà! Geographical positioning system. But alas, map is no substitute for terrain, no matter how tightly you squeeze yourself to fit inside of it. Some method of transportation was in order. Back to the dark silicon tablet. This time, I called upon the powers of a different icon—one that allows me to inscribe the name of a location and, in exchange for coin, summon a carriage to take you there.

“99 Cents Only Stores”, I write. Note how the papyrus lacks a stylus—letters, numbers, and punctuation marks appear on the glass screen, and writing is merely a matter of my pressing upon them.

I wait. I have never had to wait more than ten minutes for a carriage. This time, as most times, I need only wait three. As it arrives, I swing open the front door of my house, and for a moment, the boundaries of the living room become slightly more ill-defined than they were a second ago. It kisses the outside world in a vain attempt to unite with it as is the nature of all kisses. How improper. I must rein in my living room’s wanton desires at once! I close the door and lock it.

I, of course, remembered to bring my coin. Although some of it consists of literal coins, most of it is contained in yet another rectangle. On it is written my name, four groups of four numbers each which collectively are unlike any other four groups of four numbers on any other rectangle, the month and the year the rectangle loses its power, and, for good measure, the mark of the middlemen who oversaw the rectangle’s making—Visa, in this case. I open the carriage door and get inside.

It takes a bit of time to get from my house to the store. Without even considering that driving onto the sidewalk and phasing through houses and buildings would be illegal, you still have other people on the road trying to get somewhere. Most people try to stay in line and not bump against other people’s cars—it’s considered the courteous thing to do. Every now and then, other people try to get ahead and cut in line, and that comes at the expense of others. This makes people mad, as it obstructs them from getting where they want to be. Other times, people have faster, more expensive cars, and they drive past everyone on the freeway as though other cars were stationary blocks to be maneuvered. Generally, people follow the traffic conventions set up by the state—red means stop, green means go, arrow means this way, Y means forking paths, 30 miles per hour means 30 miles per hour… Of course, some people may defy these rules, and sooner or later they face the brunt of buildings or other people’s cars, and the rebels learn what happens when they live by different rules, and the road stops. But the state always intervenes and the road starts back up again. Everybody knows from the moment they get in the car that at some point they are going to get out of the car. After all, they are the ones operating it, and so they know the telos of the car ride.

That is, unless they’re kidnapped and wake up in a moving car on a road they’ve never seen. Then they’re in a car they never asked to be in. They don’t know where they’re going, so they just go where everyone else is going—maybe they know something. The trouble is, everybody else on that road is in the exact same predicament. Most of them don’t know how a car works, and they couldn’t tell you who made the roads either, or where they might lead. In all honesty, most of them don’t care. There’s only so much you can learn at the wheel of a car anyhow. Sometimes they tailgate or drive side-by-side, but they never get in each others’ cars. If they drive close enough, they can get a glimpse of the inside of each others’ cars. But even they can’t look at their own for long—they have to keep an eye on the road. They follow the traffic rules for the entire car ride, unless of course they think they have somewhere to be, as if they know what it is… Wait, the car’s turning, what’s happening? Oh, we’ve arrived. As I open the door, I thank the Uber driver and wish her a good day.

I enter the store. I know this because a wave of conditioned air crashes over me. It’s not a big store as far as stores go. The aisles are linear, so I need only look from the outside of an aisle to know everything inside of it. Saves a lot of time. Convenient.

I go inside the chips aisle and get myself a medium-sized bag of Cheetos Puffs. I take it to the cash register. Chocolates and candies are placed about the area of the conveyor belt in a last ditch effort by the store to lead me into temptation and milk my custom for all that it’s worth. I don’t say much to the cashier—what is there to talk about, after all? Is that rude of me? Oh, well. I pay for my Cheetos with my trusty rectangle, stuff the receipt in my pocket, and summon another carriage back to my living room.

I lived in a world. I didn’t know why, so I ate some Cheetos.