The new day arrived without fanfare. No trumpets sounded across the lattice. No celestial chorus announced that something irrevocable had shifted. Sol simply cleared the eastern curve of the homeworld horizon as it had done for uncounted billions of mornings before anyone was present to witness it. The light touched ordinary leaves first, then ordinary soil, then the ordinary green bud that now crowned the central shoot in the equatorial grove. The bud did not glow. It did not pulse with borrowed liminal hues. It simply existed, small and stubborn, wearing the same muted emerald that every other leaf on the planet had worn since the first photosynthetic cell learned how to steal energy from a star.
The lattice noticed the ordinariness and felt something close to gratitude.
Gratitude was
