I dream that a tiger cub wanders into my living room. It’s night and I’m the only one still up. He’s afraid at first, but soon he’s in my lap purring. He’s even getting along with my cat.

The next day we try to find out where the cub came from. We call the vet clinic and they say he ran away after one of the doctors, a guy named Maycon, committed suicide. Incredibly, we are allowed to keep the cub until they find a proper home for him.

We bring both pets, cat and tiger, on a trip with us. We visit a futuristic facility where they are creating VR videogames.

I’m told to sit at a machine in the middle of a giant room, there’s a gaming chair elevated from the ground and surrounded by screens. Below there’s a desk with multiple computers, the woman sitting behind the desk is the director of the project. My family is looking up with interest. The tiger cub and my cat are wandering around the room.

My body is scanned so my avatar will look realistic. I find myself sitting inside a futuristic car, a race is about to start but I can’t drive! “What do I do?” I yell, panicking. “Floor the pedal!” I hear my dad yelling back. The program changes to a horse race and I don’t fare any better.

The director is disgusted at my incompetence. When it’s my brother’s turn she asks him what kind of games he likes. I wish she had asked me as well. As my brother plays (as Ranma  ½ , and dismayed about turning into a girl) the director looks me over and says, “some people just lack intelligence”.

I grab her by the lab coat and hiss,

Not everyone is the same. I may not be good at videogames, but I have emotional intelligence.

When it’s time to go home we board a super fast train, it’s bright red and looks so modern. Again, my cat and the tiger cub are wandering up and down the train corridors.

We don’t have tickets, the other passengers are carrying their tickets on their wrists, like some sort of smart watch. The conductor comes over to scan the watches, my dad tells her we need to buy ours. She says, you can do that, or you can try your luck at our slot machine.

All the passengers without a ticket get in line, one by one they pull the lever of the slot machine, but nobody wins. When it’s my turn I pull the lever and the machine blinks and whistles! I’m excited for a moment thinking I won a ticket. The conductor is impressed too, because apparently nobody had won anything in years.

The machine spits out a receipt. I read it, it’s a coupon for a pizza place from the town we’ve just left. It says I’ve won a lemongrass pizza. I don’t even know what that is, I’ll just have to give the coupon to someone else because it’s useless to me.