Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

I don’t kill children,” she said. “Not even when it’s the right thing to do.

Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out.

Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.