I have mixed feelings about this story, but mostly negative ones.
Using words like "grinding", "paper", "rents' (which I thought for most of the story were parents), "humes" bothered me. It's like the author is saying, "Oh no, this is a made up world. See? They have different words for stuff." What it really does is to make it annoying to listen to. I think I remember reading a TV tropes article about this, but I can't recall. In any event, I hate it when authors do that.
On the other hand, the ending surprised me. Pleasantly. I liked hearing The New World Order According to Hammersmith, and I liked that Sebastian knuckled under. I would have like it even more to see him rebel a little, but acting the way he did was perfectly in character with the whinny, sniveling little wimp we were introduced to in the story. When characters act out of character it means the author messed up in building the character, so here that was well done.
The heavy-handed message of the whole story irked me a little too. I mean, it's a nice moral and all, I just wasn't in the mood to hear a story with a moral. I wanted to be entertained, and mostly I wasn't.