Innocence
When they looked up from the tall and pale cyan grasses of the creche's playfields, and saw the brief flare of a orbital fighter as it was embraced in fire by the friction of re-entry, they would giggle and point. It was the unbridled wonder of children. Even those with slow-drip neural programming regimens that shaped their impressionable young minds, much in the same way that an autohammer shaped red-hot pieces of steel fresh from the furnace. They named those distant sleek death-bringers the "angels from heaven".
First draft: 140606
Published: 230210