An animatronic Abraham Lincoln greeting young visitors at the Martian Mausoleum of Democracy

An essay following the class trip:

“Today we went to the museum to learn about how the government used to work hundreds of years ago. A guy with a funny old style beard showed us around, I can’t remember his name but he smelt of formaldehyde. They had lots of glass cases with decaying skeletons fighting over musty ballot boxes. Back then they had things called elections, it was all very inefficient and there was lots of squabbling and bribery. There are still some people on Earth who want to revive this antiquated system, but of course that’s never going to happen here now that we have the Doge.”