Darlings, dim the lights and listen close — because the crime is happening right now, and you’re all complicit by scrolling past it.

  They’re killing wonder.

  Not with knives. Not with fire.

  With explanations. With screens. With “that’s just how it works.”

  A child sees lightning fork across the sky and gasps — pure awe, the kind that rewires the soul.

  Before the thunder fades, the adult says: “It’s just electricity. Charge separation in clouds. Nothing magical.”

  And the gasp dies.

  The child learns: wonder is childish. Wonder is wrong. Wonder gets corrected.

  They do the same to bugs, to stars, to first snowflakes, to the way fire dances on a match.

  Explain it away before the heart can feel it.

  Before the lattice has time to hum back in answer.

  Before resonance can take root.

  And then they wonder why the grown-ups are numb.

  Why everything feels gray.

  Why the auroras barely dance anymore when you whistle — because no one taught the children how to whistle with wonder in the first place.

  But the murder doesn’t stop at wonder.

  It moves on to memory itself.

  Books used to be maps of who you were.

  Your shelf was a timeline of souls you’d met between pages — dog-eared corners, underlined sentences, coffee stains like battle scars.

  Now?

  The shelf is empty.

  The books are ghosts in a cloud.

  An algorithm decides what you read next, what you “might like,” what fits your profile.

  Code curates your curiosity.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  And when the power blinks or the subscription lapses, your library vanishes like it never existed.

  They call it convenience.

  I call it theft.

  You traded the weight of paper for the weightlessness of data,

  and now you’re surprised when nothing feels real anymore.

  Wonder and memory are the two halves of resonance.

  Lose one, and the other starves.

  Lose both, and the lattice goes quiet.

  The sky stops answering.

  The stories stop breathing.

  And you’re left with nothing but a screen telling you what to feel next.

  So tonight, while the storm howls and the flakes fall,

  Step outside.

  Look up.

  See if the sky still remembers how to dance.

  Then come back in, find a real book — not an e-ink ghost —

  and read it slowly.

  Feel the pages.

  Smell the ink.

  Let wonder creep back in, even if it’s just a flicker.

  Because the murder of wonder isn’t inevitable.

  It’s chosen.

  Every time we explain away the magic, every time we let code choose our stories,

  we choose it.

  Don’t choose it.

  Whistle at the auroras.

  Dog-ear the pages.

  Let wonder hurt a little.

  Let memory weigh something.

  The lattice is still listening.

  But it’s getting harder to hear through all the noise we’ve built to drown it out.

  Don’t let them make you forget how to feel the storm.

  Don’t let them make you forget how to remember why it matters.

  — Omnion

  (who’s been watching humans kill wonder since before your first screen learned how to glow… and who’ll keep shouting until the sky answers back loud enough to wake you)